Fletcher Week Part 2

Look! That's us lot at the Design Museum. I'm taking the picture of course.

Would ramble on foolishly about how great Fletcher was, but we all know that by now so I'm going to cop out and let the pictures do most of the talking. Anyway, it's pretty much been covered here, here and here.

What I will say, briefly, is:

a) We all thought the show was bloody brilliant

b) Fletcher Forbes and Gill looked dead cool in the 60s

c) That Graphis 119 cover shows why it's good to collect stuff

d) Most of his stuff still looks good today

e) I didn't appreciate him fully when he was alive

f) He didn't 'alf do alot of stuff

These points are amongst the reasons why this is probably the best graphic design exhibition you will see.

Comments

[jon]

Hey,

I like the pictures!! nice angle..

I think I understand why this is the best graphic design.

Cheers

[davidthedesigner]

It's the design disease I know http://noisydecentgraphics.typepad.com/design/2006/12/the_disease_of_.html , but I keep going back to your first picture and seeing the

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sign in Gill Sans Condensed and it upsets me. Shouldn't a design museum know better than to do that?

[Richard]

I know what you mean David, it is something that would usually make me shudder. I've always presumed that they were going for that Bauhaus look:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Bauhaus.JPG

Which in Dessau at least, I think, looks kind of beautiful.

[davidthedesigner]

I've never had any doubt that they were referencing the Bauhaus 'look' - and it's been described as 'housed in a former 1940's banana warehouse, which was altered beyond recognition in the conversion to resemble a building in the International Modernist style of the 1930s'.

But the first principle of the Bauhaus was that 'form follows function', which is precisely why the Dessau sign looks spot-on and why the Thames-side one looks crap.

[Richard]

Now come off the fence David. Do you like it or not?

[davidthedesigner]

All you have to do is ask yourself:- if Alan Fletcher were to have designed the external signage for the Design Museum would he have chosen to do it vertically in Gill Sans Condensed? No, he damn well wouldn't - he would have done something a 1,000 times better.

Maybe even something as good as the 1,000-letter façade (he said modestly, plugging his own blog).

[Richard]

I think he'd have knocked up one of those collages!

(Only joking).

[Lebowski]

Sorry, very late to this one, but I think there's a lot of examples within the Design Museum of poor design, or at the very least missed opportunities. For example, they should have the most interesting tickets of any museum in London, but they're just bog standard ones like you get elsewhere. Plus the typeface as you've mentioned above.

As an aside, I think it's always a good discipline to ask, "What Would Alan (Fletcher) Do?". In fact, that might make quite a good t-shirt.