Publisher: Ken Garland and Associates
Publication: 1993, First Edition
Binding: Softcover, saddle-stitch
Pages: 22
Size: 205 x 200
Text: English
Scarce portfolio book.
(Introduction) 'What a funny old decade it's been. In 1982 'dtp' didn't mean anything to anybody; by 1992 it's the first option to be considered if you're producing anything from a modest volume of poetry to a giant mail order catalogue. Not, necessarily, because dtp is seen as the right, the correct, the up-to-date mode of operation, but because it's reckoned to be the most economical. Economical!
Only as recently as 1989 captains of commerce were urging their cohorts to find ever more ingenious ways of disposing of embarrassingly excessive profits. Marketing managers were rallying to the rescue with some truly, deeply, madly lavish annual reports and suchlike, for which graphic designers, photographers and printers were able to charge prices beyond their wildest.
As for corporate identity scams, say no more: no quicker way to spend ten million quid has yet presented itself to the human mind. But now, would you believe, the fat cats who initiated those financial orgies are being abused, even in the financial pages of right-wing newspapers where once they were welcomed as a knights-errant. Their greed and profligacy are now the stuff of legend, and since they decked out their organizations with the trappings of Corp ID in the manner of feudal barons adding yet more ermine to their ceremonial robes, to some extent those who abetted them-designers included are tarred with the same brush.
Perhaps the most lasting monuments to the Overblown Eighties – together with Canary Wharf and similar architectural pomposities – will be the pieces of glitzy, money-no-object graphics of which the fat cats were so proud (indeed, they may last even longer than the architecture, since the clip-on post-modernisms are already coming adrift from their basic ferro-concrete and the buildings may soon revert to the inoffensive monotony of their fore-runners). And now those captains of commerce who survived the autumn '89 Crash are hovering over the shoulders of their in-house Mac operatives and exhorting them to new feats of economy! It is with pleasure and, it must be confessed, a certain amount of unworthy gloating, that I have to record our modest course between the Scylla of glitz and the Charybdis of dtp. We're still afloat - just.
However, I have detected a new hazard even more awful: an unholy fusion of glitz and Mac that is to bring us a multi-layered, electronically juggled graphic confection that can only be described as visual diarrhoea. By the time this Update is printed the Awful Thing may be upon us. We may have foundered beneath it; I promise you we shall never climb aboard it.
I wish to record the devoted commitment of my Associates during this ten year period. They are Colin Bailey, Ian Moore, Paul Cleal and Richard Marston. I owe them a lot more than they ever got paid.' Ken Garland
Clients featured include; Galt Toys, Arts Council (1982), Derbyshire College of Higher Education (1984), Keniston Housing Associating (1985), William Heinemann (1985), Derwent Publications (1986), Science Museum (1986, 88, 91), National Museum of Photography, Film & Television (1988), Nuffield-Chelsea Curriculum Trust (1988-90), Jonathan Cape (1990), National Museum of Science and Industry (1991), Aurum Press (1992).
Condition: Very Good. All titles are used and show shelf ware consistent with age. Light rubbing and tanning to cover. Light tanning to outer edges of interior pages. x2 4” score/crease lines to x2 interior pages.
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