New Europe, New Spirit

By Rick Poynor

In central Europe, design is at a crossroads. It is 15 years since the collapse of communism and the arrival of democracy and the free market and a great deal has happened in the design communities of countries such as the Czech Republic, Croatia, Slovenia, Poland and Hungary. Design is at different stages of development, reflecting national economic conditions and the relationship of designers with their own local traditions of design, but certain factors are shared, and it is these opportunities and dilemmas that I want to explore. There is a chance not simply to produce a local imitation of western design, but to develop goals and ways of working which have their basis in the visual histories and cultural concerns of the region. Without clear thinking and careful planning, it is possible that things will go wrong and that design in his part of the world could find itself overtaken and corrupted by the worst aspects of design and advertising – the two are becoming inseparable – in the west.

My own introduction to the region came in 1996. I was invited by the Hungarian design critic Krisztina Somogyi to say a few words to visitors at the opening of an exhibition of new digital typography in Pécs in Hungary. I was losing my voice as a result of a throat infection, making it difficult to say anything at all, and this was not inappropriate, perhaps, because the things I found myself wanting to say were not, I imagined, necessarily the things that my Hungarian hosts hoped to hear.

Krisztina, a tireless champion of new design, had done a terrific job of gathering work by well known American and British designers – people such as the Fuse typeface contributors, The Designers Republic, and Why Not Associates – and everything was beautifully displayed in a long, vaulted gallery. Her aim was to encourage Hungarian designers to embrace new typographic approaches. She was particularly concerned by the poor standard of typography in Hungarian advertising. These western designers were meant to offer examples of new experimental typographic possibilities.

By 1996, though, in western design, events had moved on. These once marginal typographic experiments had proved to be surprisingly successful. Before long, grungy, rule-breaking, legibility-flouting typography was the height of fashion and, for a time, the advertisers loved it. The so-called “new typography” had become the latest style and a backlash had begun. Now that I was there in Pécs, I found it hard to endorse a process that seemed likely to end in the same way. What was the point? Why did Hungary need experimental typography generated by cultural and commercial factors specific to the west? Wouldn’t it be better to explore graphic and typographic possibilities more closely related to local traditions, developments and requirements, rather than just importing styles that had run their course elsewhere?

My encounter with the Hungarian design scene was fascinating and the trip set the tone – as well as highlighting some enduring issues – for later visits to central Europe. Design scenes such as the one in Prague are small and this makes them into real communities. The key people all know each other. They feel a sense of shared purpose and have an almost missionary belief in design’s potential and importance that you tend not to find these days in places where design is so well established that it’s taken for granted. The Czech Typo Design Club, founded in 1996, has just 31 members. In the 1990s, Ales Najbrt of Studio Najbrt achieved a position as leader of a new wave of younger designers, who emerged in the post-communist years, that it would be impossible for any one individual to attain today in London or New York. In terms of its social structure, organisational ambition and commercial development the Prague design scene is similar in size to the design scene in 1960s London. Does that mean that Czech designers, or any designers in this region, are 40 years behind British designers? Not at all. For the past decade or more, they have been rapidly making up for lost time. Many of the significant younger figures in central European design travel overseas and some go abroad to continue their educations. They return home with much wider perspectives.

The region boasts some excellent designers and these are just a few of them: In the Czech Republic: Studio Najbrt, Robert Novák, Tomás Machek and Petr Babák, Klará Kvízová and Petr Krejzek. In Croatia: Dejan Krsic and Rutta DD, and Studio Cavarpayar. In Slovenia: Slavimir Stojanovic. In Hungary: Zsolt Czakó. Progressive central European designers are struggling to find typographic styles and structures that are both clear and contemporary. In 1999, Dr Iva Janáková, curator at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, observed that: “A lot of Czech graphic design resembles a Tower of Babel, unable to communicate as everything is alike and has nothing to say anyway.” Janáková felt that the confusion of signs, which digital technology had made possible, was the result of a lack of awareness of formal rules and knowledge of the history of design, rather than a deliberate desire for innovation.

Yet it’s also clear that the example of the Czech modernist avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s – its history severed and sealed off by the imposition of a repressive communist government in 1948 – has a great deal to teach Czech designers. Even an occasional visitor can see that the Czech design tradition, visible in the city’s magnificent modernist architecture, has the potential to deliver a massive, invigorating charge to contemporary Czech graphic design and typography, if designers can find a meaningful way of reconnecting with its social idealism and its purifying eye without plunging into postmodern pastiche. The Czech design community is in the process of recovering its own history – as can be seen, for instance, in the pages of the design magazine Deleatur co-founded by Janáková and Alan Záruba. Karel Teige has been the subject of considerable scholarship for some years, and in 2003, Janáková curated a superb exhibition in Prague of Czech and American work by Ladislav Sutnar.

But the whole question of modernism in relation to the present is complicated. In recent years, designers all over the world have felt drawn towards modernism as a fashionable, contemporary-looking typographic style. A spare, sans serif modernist look has become an all-purpose solution, equally acceptable to pop groups and multinational corporations. Sceptical American postmodernist Jeffery Keedy dubs this bloodless style “polyester modernism”. Dejan Krsic, writing in Zagreb, in 2001, in the second Croatian Design Annual, expressed doubts about central European designers’ motivations for returning to modernism’s repertoire of formal devices:

“Is this ‘return to modernism’ of the 1950s-1960s-1970s only the last in a string of postmodernist pastiches, revivals, neo-styles . . . or does it really tell us something about the realities of the current situation? . . . Functionalism deprived of political change and awareness becomes an empty and pointless trend. Today, Modernism is back in vogue, while ideas, idealism and a Utopian way of thinking are not just unpopular, but they are being relegated to the dustbin of history by postmodern cynics.”

This takes us to the heart of the issue. Some of the questions that have once again arisen in recent years, in relation to design’s role in the advanced capitalist economies of the US or Britain, could seem even more pressing in central Europe while, to another way of thinking, they might be seen as completely irrelevant. The complaint, in the wealthy nations, is that communication design has become servile. Its main purpose today is to promote and advertise commercial goods and services and this is what the vast majority of designers end up doing. It is not that advertising and promotion is wrong in itself, say design’s critics, but the amount of time, talent and resources devoted to this kind of design means that other areas of design, vital to a healthy, democratic visual culture, are neglected – for instance, information design, design for charitable organisations, design for education, design for cultural purposes.

In the last 20 years, we have educated young designers to believe that this is the way things are and any sense that designers might once have viewed things differently has faded. One key change is that whereas earlier generations of graphic designers often spoke about their responsibility to society as visual communicators, it is rare to hear practising designers discuss their role in such terms today. “The main questions that must now be addressed to designers themselves are how do you view your role?” writes Krsic. “How do you perceive it? Not what kind of work would you like to do, but what is it that you want to achieve through it?”

I suggested, though, that for central European designers these questions could seem completely irrelevant. Western designers are, after all, in a privileged position. They live in secure, stable, wealthy societies. The need for design is now well established and a broad range of clients has the money to engage their services. National economies experience their ups and downs, but there is plenty of design work to go around. Even radicals make their criticisms from a position of relative security. Critics of capitalist design tend to occupy a position on the political left, but there is no prospect, as things stand, of a dramatic political swing in this direction. Parties of the left, such as Britain’s New Labour government, can often seem hard to distinguish from the parties of the right.

The situation in central Europe could not be more different. For these societies, the period after communism was insecure and unstable. Yugoslavia was ravaged by war. The very capitalism that western discontents deplore offered hope of liberation from decades of restriction under communism. The free market promised freedom in every sense. Any critique based on the idea of a move back towards socialism could strike those who have experienced life under its booted heel as a bad joke.

But the situation is actually more complicated than this. While it may be the official line that capitalism will make everything better, we know that in Russia it has failed dismally to do so. On my visits to central Europe, people have pointed out some of the ways in which life is not as good as it was under communism. There is pocket-lining political corruption, new extremes of inequality between those profiting from post-communist chaos and ordinary people, a less equitable deal for women, and dwindling state support, in a new survival-of-the-fittest culture, for the arts – for instance, being a Polish poster artist, under the communists, was a pretty good life. The negative aspects of rampant commercialism can be seen in Prague’s spoilt historic centre. Those who live there and loved their city as it used to be feel dismay at this sorry spectacle.

Still, designers must deal with the situation as it is. The understandable priority has been to find work and, as a vital part of that process, to make the case for design. Krsic describes how British type designer Jonathan Barnbrook told an audience in Zagreb that he had rejected Nike as a client and would not do work for Coca-Cola. This degree of fastidiousness must have astonished Croatian designers who, in Krsic’s view, would jump at the chance to take on such large commissions from high-paying companies.

In Prague, Ales Najbrt has fared better than most, working for Altron, an energy supplier, and Agropol, an agriculture conglomerate, but Najbrt underlines the problem of finding sophisticated clients – even today. “Under communism,” he told Print last year, “nothing evolved.” Many clients have little sense of how a design programme might be implemented consistently across their businesses, or what they might have to gain commercially from a well co-ordinated visual identity. This is an inevitable problem in any emerging design economy, and designers throughout the region are learning to deal with it.

Lana Cavar of Studio Cavarpayar in Zagreb (now an MFA student at Yale) notes how it became clear at the end of the 1990s, when the Croatian Designer Association held its first exhibition, that the clients of Croatian designers tended to be non-profit organisations, cultural organisations, smaller companies, theatres, and small magazines and publishers. Only a limited number of designers had managed to win clients in the state and business sectors that might make a substantial impact on the Croatian economy. To help to forge these connections, the association has been working towards the establishment of a design centre. Its primary task, explains Cavar, “would be to establish deeper contacts and cooperation with state structures, potential clients and the society in general, to conceive and realise projects that would help educate people on the advantages and possibilities of investing in design and [to] make the state structures, economy and culture understand and use design as a means of development and practical transformation of their everyday business.”

It’s interesting to hear a young designer, who is producing highly contemporary and even fashionable work, talk about design in these terms. In Britain, it would be unusual for a designer of the same age, working for similar clients, to express such a hope. Britain’s Design Council was founded long ago to take care of these things. Economic prosperity and a flourishing design scene mean that young designers simply don’t have to worry about such fundamental matters. The system will run without them, and design long ago split into two largely separate worlds. Business-minded, wealth-creating design, operating at national and international level, is undertaken by big, unglamorous design consultancies, with many designers on their payrolls. This sector has become so highly professionalised in the last 25 years that there is not much space for small, creatively-driven studios to become involved in these projects, even if they wanted to do so.

In central Europe, though, the stakes are different. Economic growth is a priority and young designers are in the same campaigning position, when it comes to the benefits of design for business and society, as earlier generations of British or American designers. They are almost duty-bound to think more closely about their social role and what they want to achieve than their perhaps sometimes rather complacent colleagues in western design. There is a real danger, too, that if designers don’t rise to meet the challenge, western design conglomerates will grab the major projects. “We expect big brand agencies will come to Prague,” Ales Najbrt told Print, “and we need to be a competitor for them.” They are already arriving. Euro RSCG Prague sits like a gun emplacement on a hill overlooking the city. Its mission statement is given in Czech and English on the front of the building:

“Euro RSCG Prague is the first multi-site integrated agency, covering all communication disciplines, with over 1,000 talents in 14 cities in the New Europe: Belgrade, Bratislava, Bucharest, Budapest, Kiev, Ljubljana, Moscow, Prague, Riga, Sofia, Tallin, Vilnius, Warsaw, Zagreb. Because today marketers need more than good advertising and promotion, Euro RSCG Prague aims to develop Creative Business Ideas [registration mark] that apply to their business strategy in new ways to drive profitable growth.”

I hope that Najbrt and other committed, adventurous designers in Prague, Zagreb, Ljubljana, Warsaw, Budapest, and elsewhere can hold their ground. In the west, design’s position is probably now fixed. It has had its formative years, its infancy and adolescence. It has achieved some kind of maturity and the contemporary visual culture we observe around us is the way it turned out. Central European designers are right to look at the west to see what they might learn, especially about design as a business, but they should do so in a critical spirit. Who says we got it right? Is western design and, for that matter, western society, everything it could be? What works and what does not work? What could be improved? If there are aspects of western design that seem misconceived and mistaken, then why rush to repeat those mistakes? Why duplicate western models in every detail, when they may not be appropriate to local customs, concerns and needs? And why surrender to the cynical, emasculating, postmodern malaise, especially at a time when many in the west are challenging this?

In the 1930s, Prague was one of the most industrially and culturally sophisticated cities in the world. What might be possible if designers were to take the idealistic and, yes, perhaps rather Utopian view that design might be applied, as the modernists once dreamed, in the cause of a more just, equitable, functional, beautiful and better-run society? If designers decline to take responsibility for the quality of the visual environment in which everyone lives and works, then whose task can it possibly be? Where is an enlightened approach to design going to come from, if not from people with an educated knowledge of design?

These New European designers are full of energy. They believe in themselves and know what they want to do. They are obviously having a good time. In a word, they are inspired. The situation is still fluid, with the possibility of great developments as well as wrong turnings, and this is exciting – for onlookers as well as participants. You cannot visit the region without feeling this new spirit and sense of possibility and, in the last few years, most of the designers mentioned here have been written about in American, French, British and Chinese magazines. That’s certainly a sign that their work is arousing interest, although it’s too early to say in what ways influences from central Europe might be felt in the west. The crucial thing is that designers in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Poland, Hungary and their neighbours should believe in the creative and organisational possibilities of this new spirit. It is their visual environment they are shaping, in their own way, for their own populations.

Perhaps the most valuable lesson would be for central European designers to resist the western brand mania that leads to everything looking the same in the shops, streets and media, and assert the human value of local visual traditions. Finding a way to reconcile these concerns with the urgent demands of economic progress, while preserving a sense of national identity, may be the most challenging design task of all.

[This is an edited version of the keynote speech presented at the 48th annual ATypI conference in Prague on 30 September 2004.]