In 1991, the partners of Graphic Thought Facility won a pound;10,000 prize in a game show associated with the U. K. National Lottery. They had just graduated from the Royal College of Art, and their income from design was virtually nonexistent. Unable to afford studio rent, they were living and working above a pub and surviving on a Thatcher-era combination of social security and enterprise allowance (the British equivalents of welfare and small-business grants). In light of their exiguous finances, the win presented a conundrum. It seemed too much to fritter, but too little to invest. So, rather than taking an around-the-world trip or making the down payment on a mortgage, they blew it all on an extravagant self-promotion. The outcome was a poster that shows Andrew Stevens and Paul Neale, two of the current GTF partners, and their then-colleague Nigel Robinson. Each was silhouetted with a different stamping foil, a synthetic material that mimics different textures: Neale in wood-grain paneling, Stevens in iridescent pixels, and Robinson in a royal blue wallpaper of illustrations. The most distinctive element of the portrait is Neale's long hair, tresses that the design curator Claire Catterall remembers him "trailing in his soup as he talked intently about his work." In one important respect, the poster is atypical. The GTF partners are not designers in the cult-of-personality mold and have not used their own images in promotions—even if Neale's locks were especially picturesque during the early'90s. But in another sense, the poster sums up GTF's defining quality: The process—resulting here in a stunning, richly tactile creation—is the star of the piece.
展开▼
