The Scottish Show Essay

Everyone must say this of their own time, but we went to Art School at a great point in history. From Punk to the New Romantics, twangy Glasgow guitars, dressing up in bars, and Maggie Thatcher gave us grants so that we could enjoy our education.

Nico’s, The Griffin and The Halt bar were the centres of debate in design and architecture. We aspired to be in Berlin or Milan, but most of the good guys just drifted to London.

As students we were perplexed by the creative brain drain and frustrated by the idea that staying in Scotland meant fitting in with a professional environment that was, for design, barely existent and for architecture, a very grey place.

So, in a pique of naivety in 1985, some friends and I decided to make our own version of a Sottsass or Mendini design studio. There was little risk, because it was just like being a student for a bit longer. There were no computers to buy, because they hadn’t been invented yet.

We were not entirely on our own. We had heard of Tayburn (I somehow thought they would be in Perth). Westpoint were in Glasgow and designing very polished graphics. Forth Design, Crombie Anderson I think, and a few others whose names we sometimes saw on brochures like City Design, Randak, and Pete Fletcher’s Portfolio were all designers rather than advertising agencies. Pointsize and Blue Peach appeared a little later and of course we discovered McIlroy Coates and Graphic Partners in Edinburgh.

In architecture there was an interesting coterie of designers between McGurn, Logan, Duncan and Opfer (MLDO), Elder and Cannon, and Nick Groves Raines, all of whom were interested in furniture, colour and the rest of Europe.

Late 1980s Glasgow carried a sure sense of something happening. The Garden Festival in ‘88 started a direct focus on the City and provided a platform that helped Glasgow’s award as European City of Culture in 1990. The great thing about City of Culture was that it was not only a year-long festival, but it created a two year run-in. Tramway was converted to a replica of Paris’s Boufe du Nord theatre and in 1988 hosted Peter Brook’s production of the epic Mahabharata.

Before that, in ’86, ‘87 and ‘88, the wonderful Third Eye Centre created the Glasgow Style series of design and fashion events funded by the City Council and they travelled to Paris and Berlin. Apart from Spencer Railton’s hats it also included furniture and lighting design. Incahoots led a line of brilliant pre-digital textiles designers including Jan Nimmo and Joanie Jack (who at the time was designing for Missoni). Timorous Beasties launched straight from their degree shows about the same time.

Roots level enthusiasm from Nigel Cram, Gillian and BJ at BDP and our own Paul Gray generated the 3D events (Design, Debate, Demonstrate). The Phoenix Returns was a similarly type of event at The Ramshorn Church given great momentum by Andy Bow, Ian Alexander, Henry McKeown and Adam Bell. All of this created work and opportunities for experimentation and for showing off. And it created a kind of healthy competition, especially in graphic design for arts events.

By 1990 Nice House had transformed itself from a trader of 1930s and 1950s stuff into a commissioner of new work. It’s Home Produce exhibition at Tramway, in conjunction with Blueprint, was a great success and fitted in effortlessly with the glut of world-class events like T-Zone (in G-Zone), more Peter Brook, Robert Lepage, The Wooster Group and Patricia Brown.

Then two things happened. Recession swept north into Scotland and everything went hangover dark for a while. And digitisation changed the whole way graphic design worked. We used to spend about 10% of our turnover on phototypesetting. In 1988 we had to pay Davidson Van Breugal £300 to typeset a page of text in a circle. We got a MAC and all that stopped. The typesetters went bust and graphic designers quickly learned how to make a half decent job of it, or at least how to make lots of coloured text boxes and graduated tints. Emigré showed us that we could design our own fonts. From that point onwards there was a massive burgeoning of graphic design. In some ways it was de-skilled, but rather than reduce the market, new businesses expanded. ‘Graphic Identity’ became the quick fix of choice for marketing professionals, but clients started to see real value created by communication design.

Another festival was obviously needed! Glasgow missed out on a couple but the Design Festival of 1996 was a boost, and again, a bit like before, it teed up the big one – the whole process of going after and winning Glasgow 1999: UK City of Architecture and Design.

Architecture was doing well  – in the West that meant some really ambitious Housing Associations challenging architects to give more. Reidvale Housing Association was probably the most prominent.

All this time the interior design sector had been lagging way behind and relied on pubs and bars. At one end were the brewers, mostly producing awful brassy anglo-pubs, and at the other some low-budget independents like Ron McCulloch and Colin Barr getting connected with Barcelona and chasing an increasingly sophisticated clientele.

I remember that night in our studio with David Page and Chris Purslow when we named The Lighthouse and agreed to go after the old Herald offices for what was to become Scotland’s new centre for Architecture and Design. And I remember the fights about keeping design high on the agenda (not just because Sir Terence Conran was one of the judges). I also remember the spectacular soundscape that broadcast the noise and clang of ghostly printing presses through the first floor of the derelict Herald building just as the judges climbed the stairs.

And the rest is recent history. If you are reading this you were probably there. The explosion of interest in the ‘Creative Industries’ grew directly out of our success with the ‘Cultural Sector’.

Then came an explosion in growth in digital businesses: web designers working from bedrooms and black economy graphics on an international scale that created a rudely healthy infrastructure and high client expectations. Individuals with skill can now produce fast and complicated work without the need for huge supporting teams. This has allowed short and strategic collaborations, one-off projects and teams and the creation of a solar system of inter-relationships and cross-dependencies that’s probably not existed since before the Industrial Revolution.

Ideas and projects thrive in this kind of economy.

Instead of replacing travel, new easy email was almost matched by EasyJet. In our business cross-border raids became normal, and not just the fat economy of London. All of the ‘Business-English’ economies became easy to work in.

But for one malignant force, creativity and entrepreneurialism are in great shape. That force is ‘risk management’. Risk is the thing that many of the new generation of project managers despise. While any amount of effort can be raised under the banner of mitigation, without risk there is no life, no creativity and no profit.

When we started our business we were a ‘worker’s co-operative’. We made a plan that said we would use our skills to travel and work abroad and that we would combine our disciplines to produce ideas and products that could help create a bigger and more powerful Scottish design community that in turn would benefit our economy and society.

In a way that has happened, but in a fashion that’s much less about manufacturing than could ever have been imagined twenty or thirty years ago. So, when everything in our lives is made somewhere else, will it matter? Or will it only matter when everything in our lives is designed somewhere else?

Ross Hunter