The graphic designer who decried consumerism with a call-to-arms manifesto has won a lifetime achievement award. He talks about his career highs – and why so much modern design is ‘utterly mindless’
In November 1963, dressed in an afghan sheepskin waistcoat and exuding his characteristic theatrical verve, Ken Garland stormed to the front of a meeting of the Society of Industrial Artists with a fiery message for his colleagues. He was sick of graphic designers wasting their talents on selling cat food, toothpaste, cigarettes and slimming powder. This visual incontinence had reached “a saturation point” he declared, adding that “the high-pitched scream of consumer selling is no more than sheer noise”. Designers, he implored, had a duty to devote their energies to more worthwhile ends.
His impromptu speech was met with rapturous applause and later published as the First Things First manifesto, a call to arms that would cement Garland as the moral conscience of graphic design for decades to come. “We are proposing a reversal of priorities,” stated the manifesto, which had 22 signatories. “We hope that our society will tire of gimmick merchants, status salesmen and hidden persuaders.” The few short paragraphs, published in the Guardian at the time, took on a life of their own, becoming a touchstone for successive generations of designers.
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