Design for Life
Thomas Manss is a graphic designer specialising in corporate identity, and
this book exemplifies his philosophy and practice. It's sumptuously,
satisfyingly designed, a small but hefty tome, in suede-cloth bound
hardcover wraps, deep blue in colour with silver embossed lettering and
logo on front and spine. Inside is a richly illustrated survey of Manss's
work, punctuated by brief article-style essays and interviews mapping out
his career, some of the major projects and one or two of the minor ones,
and offering insights into the process of design construction and
implementation.
The book's title signals its ideological intentions immediately. Thomas
Manss is a German graphic designer who trained in Würzburg and worked with
Erik Spiekermann in Berlin. He moved to London in 1989 to work with Alan
Fletcher at Pentagram. Within a few years, he opened his own office in
London, returned to Berlin as a visiting professor at the Fachhochschule
Potsdam, and opened a new office there.
Situated in two cities, Thomas Manss & Company ostensibly combines the
German qualities of ordnung -- order, neatness, tidiness -- with the
English qualities associated with eccentricity. Mark Adams of Vitsoe
offers some explanation in his article: "We need a teutonic sense of
ordnung whilst longing for a splash of English eccentricity. And naturally
we want to deal with only the most professional suppliers but we want to
have some fun in the process." Manss himself sustains this stereotypical
division: "First I will support the prejudice that Germans don't have a
sense of humour," he tells Jim Davies. Funny, that. When I was getting
chaotically, disorderedly drunk with hilarious Germans during the Euro 96
football tournament, it must have just been my English eccentricity.
Manss has worked on some serious contracts, many of which are lavishly
illustrated here. The project for Bowers & Wilkins loudspeakers (a product
close to my heart), for example, seems to have been inspired by a remark to
the effect that B&W would like to be seen as "the Aston Martin of
loudspeaker design." Manss's designs for this project involved
photographing the speakers as if they were classic cars, using the style of
automobile photography to represent the technological and 'masculine'
hardware side of the product. The technique worked, and has doubtless been
imitated by every other hi-fi manufacturer since.
We get some insight here into the methods by which ideas emerge and are
then put into practice, and how the designer tries to both respond to the
client's needs and come up with something that, in effect, transforms the
client's position in relation to perceived markets (which are shadowy,
abstract things in this book). The discussion of the corporate identity of
Laserbureau, who themselves service the design industry, offers a nice
illustration of some of the circularities involved. Laserbureau's projects
change "every four weeks," we are told, "so a static logo would have been a
problem." Manss comes up with what is surely the most striking image in the
book, a dazzling polychromatic poster made up of words describing the
company's portfolio, a technicolour dream-poster -- an advertisement for an
advertiser.
This illustrates the flexibility that Manss's German and English contexts
provide him with. The images in this book vary between the formally pure
icons, reminiscent of Bauhaus style and familiar from Ikea and other
furniture designers, to the almost psychedelic, Day-Glo iconography of
designs like Laserbureau and the Hotel Arts Barcelona. The most visually
striking work centres on logo design, and we are given numerous examples,
in the middle of the book, of logos printed in plain monochrome, for
companies such as Axentum, First Source and Tim Wood Furniture.
Consequently, the book (and presumably the full range of portfolios
produced by Thomas Manss & Company) oscillates rather wildly between the
austere and the excessive, the black and white and the multicoloured, the
simple and the complex.
While there is some attention here to how designs are produced, there's
little comment on how they work. What is evident throughout is the extent
to which the world we inhabit is a product of design, and carries the
fingerprints of the designers everywhere, were we (the market) capable of
seeing them. Corporate identity, as represented here, constructs a bizarre
society of disembodied signifiers, in which the logo is burdened with a
heavy weight of responsibility. It needs to convey an image and a substance
beyond the image, a sense of how the image and the identity combine. Think
of record sleeves -- Peter Saville's designs for Factory, or Bau-Da Design
Lab's work for Marilyn Manson, or Hipgnosis's work for Pink Floyd and
others. The image is intrinsically linked to the product in complex and
subtle ways, constructing not just a corporate identity but an identity for
a corpus of work as well, and there's no real discussion here of how these
links and constructions are established and exploited.
Likewise, the ways in which corporate identities work to influence or even
construct markets. There's no analysis here of how a change in corporate
image constitutes a change in corporate identity (in fact the slippage
between image and identity grows more noticeable as the book progresses)
and then a change in market perception. Given the evidently crucial
importance of graphic design in the manufacture of business identity in the
logo-centric world, and the ways in which the values of the business world
have colonised those areas of social life once wholly separate from the
business world (perhaps in politics, education, health?), some analysis of
these effects is called for. This book doesn't offer that. Instead, it's a
beautifully produced advertisement for the product it is marketing -- the
company that produced it.
— 5 June 2002
