Inspirations #4: The Designers Republic
Ian Anderson started his famed design career when he created the cover art for Person to Person’s ‘High Time’ single in 1984. This then lead to him founding ‘The Designers Republic’ with Nick Phillips in 1986. The studios designs and slogan ‘Work, Buy, Consume, Die’ and ‘Design Will Eat Itself’, and many genre defining record designs inspired generations of creatives. In the 23 years of the studio, it managed to work on projects in the games industry, the television and film industries. TDR’s early work was made using traditional techniques, but had the look of digital before the technology was available to produce such images. In that sense, they were way ahead of their time. My first exposure to TDR was when I played the Playstation game Wipeout (1995) mixing images from Japanese anime and futuristic corporate logos, this games aesthetics still hold up and continue to inspire designers today.
Unfortunately due to many factors, the Design Republic shut down in 2009. In the words of Ian Anderson:
“When I took a back seat to allow TDR to grow beyond me, it died; its creative spark was crushed . . . the more I took myself out of the equation to see if it could do better without me, the more obvious it became that Ian Anderson and The Designers Republic were inseparable.”
Here are some of my favorite works by Ian and The Designers Republic:
jacobvanloon
dededos
dailybridgerton
baratheonpilled