The day after the DM19 conference, we took the tram from Manchester to visit Bury Art Museum and see the ‘New Art School Rules’ exhibition, organised and curated by John Rooney and Malcolm Garrett. But there was more.
What we discovered in Bury was an impressive addition to the DM19 programme. Alongside the New Art School Rules were three other exhibitions that celebrated design creativity. The first profiled the art school buildings built in the early 20th century (I was delighted to see Great Yarmouth School of Art listed) and secondly ‘The North West Art School Record Machine’ which curated an impressive selection of record covers.
But within the display cases a treasure trove of graphic design demanded study and time.
Before the 1990s, the process of creating graphic design artwork is a world away from today’s Adobe software and print quality PDFs. The baseboard and its overlays for print instructions resemble a plan rather than a finished design.
With this exhibition the work of Ian Swift and Malcom Garrett was featured. This is not the work of a laptop, but pens, paper and imagination.
Do you recognise these two graduates?
I was an art student in the late 1980s, so I was familiar with these processes but the techniques were quickly defunct once Apple computers sparked its revolution for the creative industries.
I hope more designers have kept their original artwork. There needs to be more exhibitions which celebrate this process, to fascinate student and professional alike.
