London’s RCA looks back at its influence over the last fifty years of graphic design, combining a host of household names to create a picture of a school at the forefront of the discipline.
London’s Royal College of Art can genuinely lay claim to having been at the forefront of many major developments in graphic communication over the last half-century. The School was founded in 1948 and was an almost instant success, producing practitioners such as Alan Fletcher, Ridley Scott, David Gentleman and Len Deighton in its first fifteen years. That period of excellence was celebrated by an exhibition in 1963, and the college now feels that it is high time for an update. Fifty years on, and with the outlets for and remit of graphic design expanding at an exponential rate, the RCA is holding a retrospective to show how well it has maintained that early form, not least through the School’s ability to respond to change within the discipline.
That strength can be seen in much of the work included, from John Pasche’s 1971 lips and tongue logo for the Rolling Stones, commissioned by Mick Jagger whilst Pasche was still a student, to Jonathan Barnbrook’s typographic experiment from 1990 using early font design software. Indeed, part of the joy of this show is sure to be the opportunity to view some of the early student work, purloined from the RCA’s archive, of those alumni who are now leading names in their industry. The role-call of studios and designers represented is certainly impressive in aggregate: Graphic Thought Facility; Why Not Associates; Kerr Noble; Studio Dumbar; Sophie Thomas, Morag Myerscough, A Practice for Everyday Life, Åbäke and Troika. Not least, this exhibition will be a chance to divine chains of influence and approaches to communication design as they have spread out from the RCA and into public life. Alongside the work of these storied individuals will be a range of special exhibits, including posters from the RCA Film Society, stamps commissioned for the Royal Mail and the ever evolving identity of the college’s infamous student magazine, Ark.
Professor Neville Brody, Dean of School of Communication, commented:
“There is a remarkable tradition of graphic design at the RCA. The College, under various illustrious heads of department, has produced many of the leading and most innovative practitioners of the modern era. We take great inspiration from the past both in the way we run the programme today and in our determination to create the dangerous minds of the future. This show will demonstrate how rich the heritage we draw on is.”
The exhibition has been curated by staff and students from the RCA School of Communication and will be accompanied by a publication and a series of events.
GraphicsRCA: Fifty Years
5 November—22 December, 2014
Royal College of Art, London
graphics50.rca.ac.uk