#visual communcation

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The best in visual communication

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Notes: Peter Saville on Design

As a teenager, it was more often than not that a record cover that would introduce me to new visual information. -

Had I gone into a conventional job and the reality of communications design, I might have dropped out of the discipline within months. But in the playground of music – and particularly the alternative playground of an independent record label like Factory – I had the freedom an artist might experience in a medium that I’d learnt the skills and methods of, and provided with a ready made audience courtesy of the music and the record-buying public.

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The issue with communications design is that it is not one of independence, I didn’t appreciate that 30 years ago when I was at art school and I don’t wish to appreciate it now. There are some forms of applied arts, such as fashion, product and furniture design where there is a degree independence for the author. A great fashion designer, a couturier, is expressing themselves through their medium.

Communications design is not an autonomous or independent activity, its a service.

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There are no strategic rules to follow other than sitting down with the client and determining what they want. And in the case of the record cover the client is the ‘significant artiste’, usually the lead.

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My way of designing for New Order worked, as the audience wanted to like it because they liked the music. The propositions that I made year-on-year, informed, inspired and influenced many of that audience in their own lives. But whether my visual material would have made any impression upon them had it been presented in a form unconnected to music is an unknown. I accept the fact that my visual ideas arriving as a picture postcard through the same audience’s letterboxes might only have gathered a fraction of the interest compared to the same ideas wrapped around a New Order record. It’s a captive and devoted audience.

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source: http://www.uponpaper.com/features/deciphered-peter-saville/