“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning." Jean Baudrillard (Simulacra and Simulation)

A few years ago, I sat down with David Carson and asked him a question that had been gnawing at me: “Do you think designers today are too dependent on their tools, the software?” By that, I wasn’t just talking about the technical proficiency of Adobe Creative Cloud or Figma; I was asking if we’ve begun to outsource our consciousness. Are we letting AI models, algorithms, and social media trends do the thinking for us? More importantly, are we allowing blind creative direction and formulaic thinking to replace critical inquiry and hardcore craft based on solid concepts, simply favoring whatever the software directs us towards as ‘correct’?

His response has stayed with me: creativity has been toned down, resulting in a landscape where everything feels safe and similar. Because design has become so available and seemingly easy, experimentation and comprehension have withered. Along with it, the foundational knowledge of design history, theory, and practice has deteriorated. Just as everyone with a laptop and Pioneer hardware is now a DJ, anyone with a subscription can be a designer. But while anyone can produce a basic layout or create a simple aesthetic, can just anyone be a noteworthy designer?

Mundanity in Design

Instead of pushing the boundaries of form and substance, our obsession with digital tools, from a new piece of hardware kitted with the latest software to AI and augmented realities, has created a fundamental imbalance. We are trading concept for craft, thinking for execution, theory for practice, and depth for surface. The result is a prolonged era of mundanity. It begs the question: Is design still a process of active thinking, or has it become a purely reactive reflex, seeking the next dopamine hit while doomscrolling in a world driven by instant gratification, post-truth, and woke fundamentalism?

What this creates is a scenario where inexperience, ignorance, and indifference are immediately elevated to the same level of time-hardened expertise and knowledge, with no one left to vet the output, except a handful of burnt-out creative directors going through a midlife crisis with clearly impaired judgment. Even agency founders now follow the dictates of junior designers on Instagram, sharing them with the rest of their leadership as an example of what needs to be done to achieve greatness, abandoning critical inquiry, and casting reason aside in favor of whatever the software or the algorithm suggests is ‘true’ and ‘correct’; what I like to call the ‘Delete Ordinary’ syndrome.

Case in point, the Jaguar rebrand acts as a masterclass in this destruction. By discarding a century of heritage to blindly chase a hollow, influencer-driven aesthetic, it has alienated its core audience and completely forgotten its own why. All history, tradition, knowledge, experience, and any other kind of brand equity were completely erased. This is not merely a matter of subjective preference or cosmetic social dynamics; it is objectively bad taste and tone-deaf. True taste flows from tradition, even when the intent is to subvert it; without that anchor, the work is simply lost.

Compare this to the recent course correction at Burberry. After a brief, forgettable stint in the sans-serif wilderness, where they stripped away their distinct identity to look like every other tech startup, they realised that true value lies in their genealogy. They didn’t ‘delete’ the past; they refined it. By bringing back the Equestrian Knight and restoring the serif, they proved that relevance doesn’t require destruction. They understood that to move forward, you don’t burn the archives; you read them. That is the difference between a brand that has found its way home and an industry lost in the condition Jean Baudrillard described in Simulacra and Simulation: “The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory… it is the map that engenders the territory.” Most brands today are merely maps without territory; Burberry returned to the land.

Imagine if we decided to delete centuries-long traditions in winemaking? Or if an architect decided to “Delete Ordinary” by removing load-bearing walls because columns were “not trending.” What if we applied this logic to medicine? If surgeons trashed all the discoveries made in history and chose to reroute arteries based on how they feel, following popular opinion rather than biological necessity, the result wouldn’t be rebellion; it would be a body count. You cannot simply ‘delete’ the fundamentals, the basics, and abandon millennia of hard-won ground. Try applying this to the foundations of language itself. If we declared that grammar, syntax, and punctuation were ‘not trending’ and decided to speak only in abstract sounds because they feel ‘new,’ we wouldn’t liberate communication; we would destroy it.

All this isn’t ‘tasteful’; it’s a borderline mental disorder. This isn’t akin to a real movement like Punk; it’s infantilism. Punk flowed from tradition even in its rebellion; it built upon what came before — drawing from Dada and the avant-garde movements of the 20th century — contributing to history and fueling decades of evolution in music. Punk had an opinion, a real one: “We’re fucked. Fuck you.” Although short-lived, this movement would not have evolved if it were not for the currents that came before it. The ‘Delete Ordinary’ syndrome does the exact opposite; it nukes the foundations of design and turns a brand into a babbling incoherence that no one understands.

An effective example from popular culture is Jamie Reid’s iconic ‘God Save The Queen’ cover art for the Sex Pistols. It is the visual definition of Punk, yet it relies entirely on tradition to work. By elevating obscure narratives into the mainstream, he developed a shared language that bridges the gap between the underground and popular culture. Reid didn’t delete the monarchy; he took the sacred Cecil Beaton portrait of Queen Elizabeth and defaced it. The shock value depended on the audience recognising the history he was subverting. It was a violent conversation with culture, not an ignorant discarding of it. Unlike the ‘Delete Ordinary’ syndrome, Punk didn’t ignore the past; it looked the past in the eye and clinically deconstructed it. It asked why. That requires knowledge and acknowledgment, not ignorance and indifference.

Aside from the questionable authority of a few leaders in the industry, trends sit at the heart of this decay. The more experience I gain as a designer, the more skeptical I become of the ‘trend-industrial complex’, particularly on social media, where anyone with a basic grasp of Canva can curate a post about the ‘next big thing.’ These are not ground-breaking epiphanies; they are cycles that have come and gone many times before. We see the same aesthetic tropes repackaged every few years by influencers claiming a revolution, heralded by the same predictable headlines: ‘The Top 8 Graphic Design Trends of 2026.’ Anyone can scour Pinterest, cherry-pick a bunch of ‘look and feel’ directions, and dictate them as the future of design. It is alarming that we take these voices more seriously than actual design stalwarts in the field.

Look closely at the sources of these trends, and you’ll find they rarely originate from seasoned creative professionals who have dedicated their lives to design for decades. Instead, they are the products of young, inexperienced designers, influencers, and ‘content creators’ looking for a shortcut to relevance. One might argue that, much like David Carson in his early days, these creators are attempting to ‘rebel’ by adding a clumsy stroke to a flawless typeface to make it bolder, or by unconsciously breaking the grid in a moment of ‘unpretentious’ design genius. Like Punk, I wish it were that noble. More often than not, they are chasing engagement and attention rather than exploration, experimentation, or expression, operating with little grasp of the responsibilities, fundamentals, or traditions of the field. It is the clearest proof yet that a true comprehension of design — its history, theory, and practice — is being sacrificed for likes from people with a near-zero attention span. In fact, I can think of very few things more destructive to the future of design, and by proxy, culture, than this lack of accountability and the ignorant empowerment of inexperience, alongside the unvetted elevation of entry-level designers, enabling them to overpower highly experienced design professionals in agencies and studios the world over.

My skepticism goes further and is rooted in a deeper concern. The issue isn’t just a reliance on tools or on inexperienced designers jumping the queue and skipping to the end, thereby negating accountability and constructing baseless narratives on their own with flawed guidance and poor leadership. It’s about a total absence of conceptual and critical thought. When design is stripped of intention and inquiry, it loses its essence. It ceases to be design and becomes mere ornament, or worse, visual pollution. This is especially prevalent in branding and advertising, where work is increasingly becoming a kind of ‘anti-culture’, a space where the passive consumption of existing tropes far outweighs the active production of culture.

Our Role and Responsibility

When did we stop questioning the purpose of our creation? Somewhere along the way, we forgot that design is, at its heart, purposeful problem-solving and meaningful storytelling, backed by a craft rooted in concept. The best work isn’t afraid to make bold, uncomfortable choices that go beyond the obvious. It has a voice; it isn’t afraid to be funny, sad, or provocative. It doesn’t just sit on the surface of culture; it engages with it, tackling complex human truths and social issues. It challenges. It inspires. It moves. And, many times, offends.

Design isn’t formulaic; it does not play it safe. It forges its own path, with a torrent of tradition backing it up. And it isn’t as easy as placing a stroke on a font to make it even bolder, designing for an algorithm, or checking off a list of aesthetic trends while leaving your brain at the door. There are consequences to these cheap and shallow tricks. I see creative directors approve this hollow output every day in the name of ‘rebelliousness’; a desperate attempt to impress the young designers under them, cling to their own fading youth, and stay relevant by green-lighting work that is visually pleasing but entirely soulless.

Has it really come to this? Have we outsourced the art of critical thinking to entry-level designers and content creators in their mid-20s, armed with little more than a diploma from a run-of-the-mill community college? The harsh reality is this: if the concept lacks conviction, and you throw the baby out with the bathwater by discarding centuries of craft, experimentation, experience, and knowledge, no amount of polish or vanity will save it.

If designers, creative directors, and agency leaders can only perceive this vacuum of surface-level appeal, we have a problem. We have to stop and ask: Why does this work exist? If the only answer is because it looks ‘fresh,’ it’s time to rethink. Too many projects rely on flashy animation, fast-paced transitions, and energetic soundtracks to mask a void where creative direction should be. But every great piece of design is born from a clear, undeniable why.

The moment you create without purpose or meaning, you are simply contributing to the noise. Design that chases trends without a conceptual foundation in theory and practice is dead on arrival. Work that leans on smoke and mirrors doesn’t break boundaries; it stagnates and atrophies. It causes cultural stagnation. It becomes a ‘concept-shaped hole’; an absence of a core message masked by the high-gloss polish of our current tools and the vanity of the designer. It may look refined, even striking, but without depth, instinct, and intent, it remains an empty vessel: structurally sound, yet devoid of meaning.

Dogmatic, formulaic, and institutionalised thinking is the enemy of creativity and culture. Creativity cannot breathe in a narrow lane where inexperienced designers think they are already Creative Directors, bolstered by the Creative Directors themselves. Simultaneously, these leaders believe they have figured out everything there is to know about creativity and design, yet follow every word young designers have to say, enabling them to hurl disrespect with impunity at anybody who is truly obsessed with design. It’s a toxic downward spiral. Still, we succumb to the internal dogmas of our agencies and studios, each with a prescribed ‘way of doing things’ enforced by leadership that confuses inexperience with rebelliousness in the most sordid and ill-informed ways, regardless of whether that approach is grounded in solid philosophy or conspicuously lacking one. This institutionalised mindset reduces design to the ‘cool crowd’ and a corporate checklist, rather than a dynamic process of critical thought, expressiveness, responsibility, and meaningful storytelling.

How do we break this cycle? Let’s take a first step and re-interrogate our approach, our language, and the terms we take for granted each day. I’ll dive into ten of them here:

Innovation: An overused term lost to the depths of corporate jargon. We must ask: Does the work offer something truly authentic, or is it a recycled idea dressed in a fresh coat of paint? Does it stand on its own, grounded in theory and concept, supported by well-founded practice and strong craft, or does it rely on flashy tools, motion tricks, and trendy soundtracks to hold attention? True innovation carries weight through substance, not spectacle. Take the ‘ADLaM’ project by Microsoft. They didn’t just design a font; they digitised the Pulaar alphabet, preserving the culture of 40 million Fulani people who previously had no way to type in their native tongue. Without substance, the word ‘innovation’ is meaningless.

Quality: Does the craftsmanship elevate the concept, or is it merely a glossy façade used to conceal the lack of one? Quality is not just pixel-perfection; it is the seamless integration of history, theory, and practice with a contemporary edge. It requires a designer who understands that polish and aesthetics are no substitute for critical thinking. Look at Heinz’s ‘Ketchup Fraud’, which demonstrates one of the strongest conceptual foundations of the last few years. The visuals weren’t high-gloss 3D renders; they were gritty, paparazzi-style shots of restaurant workers refilling bottles with generic sauce. The craft didn’t hide the truth; it exposed it.

Relevance: Does the design capture the true essence of the task, or is it a hollow imitation of what the brand thinks it should be? Design shouldn’t simply pander to marketing demands or client whims; it is a fatal flaw in modern creative direction. Instead, it must articulate the brand’s strategic purpose from a strong conceptual foundation. If that requires educating the client or the audience, rather than appeasing them, then so be it. Take Vaseline’s ‘See My Skin’. Instead of simply pandering to a demographic with a generic campaign, they identified a systemic failure: search engine algorithms were biased, returning almost no results for skin conditions on people of color. They didn’t just sell lotion; they built the world’s most diverse medical image library to fix the internet’s bias. A clear bridge between insight and concept, it told a story with strategic purpose that educated the industry and served a genuine human truth.

Authenticity: Does the work leave a mark, or is it just another fleeting distraction in an endless feed? Design is most powerful when it taps into the human experience: socially, culturally, and emotionally. It is not about reaching an audience; it is about connecting with them. In a world saturated with content, we need work that evokes real emotion and makes us feel and think, not just scroll. Consider Stella Artois’ ‘The Artois Probability’. Instead of manufacturing a faux heritage, they turned to art history to find their true place in culture. By analysing the hue and shape of beer in historical paintings, from Bruegel to Van Gogh, they proved the brand has been part of the human experience for 600 years. It connected with the audience not by selling a lifestyle, but by proving its genealogy within culture.

Medium: Does the work understand its environment — the surface or space that it exists on or in, or is it merely a flashy visual that disregards context? As Marshall McLuhan famously stated: “The medium is the message.” To design without fully grasping the medium — its constraints, its past, present, and future, and its physical context — is to work in a vacuum. A designer’s responsibility is to ensure the concept survives the translation from screen to world, moving from an execution born of concept to the message as an extension. Consider The New York Public Library’s ‘Insta Novels’. Facing a generation addicted to scrolling, they didn’t try to make books “trendier”; they brought the books to the trend. They hacked the interface of Instagram Stories, turning the ‘tap-to-advance’ function into a digital page-turner, hosting full texts of classics like Alice in Wonderland and The Raven. They transformed a medium designed for narcissism and fleeting attention into a library for deep reading, proving that the medium isn’t the enemy, it’s just a tool waiting for a concept.

Disruption: Another overused corporate word. Is it merely chaos, or is it a calculated shift in perspective? Disruption is often confused with destruction, breaking the grid just to see it shatter, or being “edgy” for the sake of engagement. True disruption understands the rules so well that it knows exactly which one to break to create new value. It subverts the category, not just the aesthetic. Look at Liquid Death. They didn’t just design a “cool” can; they disrupted the psychology of the entire water category. By branding the healthiest product on earth with the visual codes of Death Metal and alcohol, they exposed the absurdity of hyper-masculine marketing while making sustainability appeal to a demographic that usually ignores it. It wasn’t just noise; it was a strategic stab at the status quo.

Leadership: Are you a mentor or a friend? True leadership isn’t about empowering inexperience to dictate the direction to stay relevant with the ‘cool kids’; it’s about holding the line on quality and experience. It means having the courage to say ‘no’ to empty trends and ‘yes’ to risky, substantive ideas that inexperienced teams might not yet understand. Leadership is stewardship, not popularity. Nike’s ‘Dream Crazy’ campaign with Colin Kaepernick is an apt example. In an era of safe, data-driven advertising, true leadership meant risking the brand’s short-term stock value to secure its long-term soul. It wasn’t an algorithm or favoritism that approved that work; it was a leader who understood that standing for something matters, even if that makes you unpopular.

Consciousness: Your audience deserves better. As a designer, you should demand better. If your design requires a thousand-word rationale to justify its existence, or exists only as a series of gimmicky animations, pretty pictures, and attractive graphics, you have failed. The most powerful work is self-evident; it doesn’t need a defense or decoration. It embodies Dieter Rams’ principle that “good design is as little design as possible,” echoing Mies van der Rohe’s adopted statement: “Less is more.” Conversely, if creative direction shuts down opinion and flattens the work into ‘faux rebellion’ or youthful vanity projects, it ensures the work will be forgotten as quickly as it was made. Consider The New York Times’ ‘The Truth Is Worth It’. In an era of clickbait and fake news, they didn’t just claim authority; they showed the agonising rigor of the process. By visualising the journalists’ path and process — the typing, the editing, the redacting, and the danger — they connected with the cultural hunger for truth. It proved that authenticity isn’t a tagline; it is the relentless commitment to the craft through critical thought.

Great design requires no justification. It simply is. When people see it, they feel it before they understand it. It creates an immediate smile in the mind. A great concept acts as a singularity; a moment of convergence and a point of departure. It stands alone, fusing strategy and creativity, insight and imagination into a split second of clarity. It possesses a distinct purpose that drives the creative direction forward, transcending the noise of trends to achieve a focus that holds its ground. Ultimately, it provokes the only reaction that matters: ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’”

The 5 C’s

Broadly speaking, design relies on the symbiotic relationship between Context, Content, Concept, Craft, and Communication. These aren’t separate entities; they must work in absolute harmony. Importantly, they are not set in stone; they are always responsive and fluid. However, make no mistake: Concept is King. The most effective work is deeply aware of who it is speaking to, why it exists, what benefit it brings, what it is made for, and how it provides value or difference. It transcends being pleasingly aesthetic to offer depth, meaning, and substance beyond the basic content or craft. This guards against the fatal error of skipping the concept to jump straight into execution. It establishes a clear message that guides storytelling from the first sketch to the final output, building a bridge from strategy to creativity and weaving a golden thread from the core insight all the way through to the key concept.

An Aesthetic is Not a Concept

Confusing a visual style for a concept is like claiming reason and emotion are the same. While reason helps us navigate the world, emotion determines how we connect with it. Both are necessary, but they are not interchangeable. Far too many designers rely on aesthetics — or worse, gimmicks — to mask a lack of depth and meaning.

Furthermore, an idea is not a concept. A concept is a singularity: the point where multiple ideas reach critical mass and fuse into a cohesive, believable, or relatable human truth. Aesthetics are merely the tools used to express that truth. They should never stand in for it. When purpose drives the work, the aesthetic needs to reflect that purpose. Without the concept, the aesthetic is just empty decoration.

Craft Cannot Float Without Concept

No matter how refined your technical skills, if the idea isn’t strong enough to carry the weight, the craft is pointless. No amount of software wizardry can save a weak foundation.

Moreover, far too many designers skip the thinking and jump straight to execution. This is inexperience and ego parading as technical skill, which makes the absence of a well-resolved conceptual foundation that much more destructive. Execution without a clear concept, grounded in iterative inquiry reaching all the way back to preliminary research and core insights, is merely gaudy ornamentation. It is a form of visual pollution that betrays a lack of comprehension; the very underpinning of anti-culture. This is where a designer’s responsibility lies: not to cultivate anti-culture. Noteworthy designers have a point of view; they connect the dots from problem to insight, and from ideas to concept, ensuring every crafted element aligns with the underlying strategy, paving the way for unadulterated creative direction.

In Conclusion

The real challenge isn’t in the making; it’s in the thinking. Yet, true thinking seems scarce, with execution having become the primary focus. If your output is dictated by software, formulas, trends, aesthetics, or gimmicks, you are not designing consciously. Tools are just tools. Conceptual and critical thinking are the engine that drives and directs them.

Creativity must emerge from the raw talent, critical inquiry, curiosity, obsession, and gut instinct of a designer who fully grasps the responsibility that they have in their field; its memetics, consequences, traditions, and genealogy of knowledge. The question isn’t whether current creative direction is desperately clinging to youth or has fallen into a black hole of hubris. The ultimate question is simple: Are we designing with real intent, or are we letting the tools dictate what is possible? And why are we misdirecting young designers by pandering to their egos and empowering them to dictate terms from a place with no real foundation, opinion, tradition, hunger, or knowledge?

Design is a key pillar supporting culture, standing alongside art, craft, and discourse. Consciousness is vital because culture cannot exist without it; it connects these supporting pillars. It allows for the creation of new movements and currents that cultivate the momentum for society to grow and flourish, just as Dada, Feminism, Deconstruction, Punk, Post-Colonialism, Grunge, and the like did in their time. We need design that is curious, speaks to the other pillars, resonates with history, builds on tradition, and captures the zeitgeist, leaving a lasting impact. We haven’t seen a shift of that magnitude for two decades now, coinciding exactly with the introduction of social media.

We are living in a kind of Digital Neo-Rococo period. Like the 18th-century movement, this era is defined by an obsession with surface over structure, ornamentation over function, and fleeting pleasure over lasting meaning. It is a time of extreme visual indulgence, glossy 3D renders, flashy motion graphics, and anything-goes typography, masking a hollow core. And just like the original Rococo, it feels like a decadent party on the edge of a cliff, oblivious to the collapse of the fundamentals that support it.

Are we going to look back on this era of design as a kind of Dark Age, a great stagnation, the antithesis of an Enlightenment? Will we be asking the creative leaders of the future, once they have grown out of the arrogance of youth and become aware of the fracture points in their tutelage, for forgiveness for our poor leadership today, having left them with the wrong message and inadequate tools to deal with the ebb and flow of culture? Will culture still be able to uphold civilisation, or will anti-culture prevail, plunging us into a dystopian and uncertain future? Or will we regain our consciousness and challenge the status quo, leading us towards a future where thoughtfulness returns to creativity, where its value is recognised in society, and where design is always kept in mind?

For further perspectives on the homogenisation of design and the rise of anti-culture, I recommend the following texts:

1. The Age of Average by Alex Murrell An essential essay arguing that art, architecture, and design are converging into a singular, bland mean due to our shared digital inputs. It is the perfect diagnostic companion to the symptoms described above.

2. Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture by Kyle Chayka A deep dive into how algorithmic recommendation engines dictate our taste, resulting in a world where everything looks, sounds, and feels the same — sacrificing distinctiveness for engagement.

3. All Advertising Looks the Same These Days. Blame the Moodboard — Art direction is a flat circle by Elizabeth Goodspeed A sharp critique of how the design industry has begun to prioritize “performing” creativity for social media over solving actual problems, trapping young designers in a cycle of aesthetic trends divorced from meaning. Check out All Advertising Looks the Same These Days. Blame the Moodboar — Art direction is a flat circle.

4. Obey the Giant by Rick Poynor As the founder of Eye Magazine, Poynor has spent decades critiquing the erosion of social and political consciousness in graphic design. His work challenges the industry to see itself as a cultural force, not just a commercial service.

5. Ways of Seeing by John Berger A foundational text (and series) on visual culture. It teaches us to look past the surface aesthetic and interrogate the hidden ideologies, history, and context behind every image we consume.

6. First Things First Manifesto (1964 / 2000 / 2020) Originally written by Ken Garland, this manifesto challenges designers to stop wasting their talent on trivial consumerism and instead use their skills for worthwhile social and cultural communication. A vital historical precedent for “Conscious Design.”

7. Citizen Designer: Perspectives on Design Responsibility by Steven Heller & Véronique Vienne A collection of essays that confronts the professional, moral, and social responsibilities of the designer. It serves as a necessary counter-narrative to the “designer as decorator” mindset, arguing that we are accountable for the impact our work has on the world; a direct companion to the plea for consciousness in this essay.

8. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man by Marshall McLuhan The original 1964 text that introduced the concept that “the medium is the message.” It argues that the tools we use to communicate, whether the printed book or the smartphone, shape our societies more than the content within them. Essential for understanding how digital platforms are re-wiring the creative mind.

9. The Transparency of Evil by Jean Baudrillard Baudrillard argues that in a saturated world where everything is visible, liberated, and operational, we face a “hell of the same.” This text is the philosophical bedrock for the concept of “Anti-Culture”; a state where distinctiveness vanishes, and culture simply spins in a loop of endless, meaningless reproduction.

10. The Unknown Craftsman: A Japanese Insight into Beauty by Soetsu Yanagi A profound meditation on the beauty of everyday objects and the humility of the maker. Yanagi argues that true beauty is born not from the ego of an individual artist seeking fame, but from a dedication to utility and a reverence for the material. It serves as a spiritual antidote to the narcissism of the modern ‘star’ designer, reminding us that the greatest work often comes from the quietest hands.

Author’s Note: The following essay is based on my experience within the South African design community, specifically navigating the dynamics of the advertising industry and agency life. It serves as an evolution and expansion of an op-ed I originally penned for BizCommunity after chairing the Creative Circle in 2025. While the seeds of this critique were sown locally, the questions it raises, about hubris, technology, and the loss of critical thought, are, I believe, universal.

About the Author: Shane de Lange is a multidisciplinary designer, artist, writer, and curator based in South Africa. With a background in fine art and a design career spanning over two decades in creative direction and design education, his work explores the intersection of commercial design, visual culture, and critical theory. Find out more:

• gilgamesh.co.za: Where design is treated as a necessity, not a service, and where culture is produced, not just consumed.
• colophon.co.za: His design archive. A dedicated platform for preserving independent South African print media and the underground history of local design.
• shanedelange.com: A personal portfolio of design, art, writing, and curation, exploring the space where craft and concept meet.

Is Design Lacking Consciousness? was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

History Repeating Itself Through Subversion: From Oppression to Liberation and Back Again.

Since its launch in 1992, Bitterkomix has adapted to the evolving socio-political landscape in South Africa, combating intolerance, indifference, and ignorance. It has explored a wide range of narratives and topics, including eroticism and violence, and various philosophical elements such as feminism, post-colonialism, and the like. This comic book is still intermittently published, with 19 issues currently in existence, along with multiple associated publications and side projects, such as Lag-Lag and individual efforts by its co-founders. In short, Bitterkomix challenges political and institutional censorship in South Africa by deconstructing stereotypes related to gender, sexuality, race, tradition, religion, and more. In essence, exposing censorship, hypersensitivity, and forms of conservatism as the highest manifestation of perversion.

The co-founders of Bitterkomix, Anton Kannemeyer (known as Joe Dog) and Conrad Botes (Konradski), have embraced an irreverent approach in their language and style. Aesthetically, they appropriate the Ligne Claire (Clear Line) style made famous by Hergé’s Tintin. By contrasting this clean, ‘innocent’ European colonial comic style with graphic depictions of sex and violence, they create a jarring cognitive dissonance that forces the reader to confront the brutality of South African reality. Over the past three decades, they have crafted a dark and caustic critique of mainstream conservative Afrikaner cultural norms.

Although not part of the official Bitterkomix canon, Kannemeyer’s cover of Pappa in Doubt (2015) serves as a lens into the mind of the Bitterkomix collective. It is a direct visual quotation of Hergé’s Tintin in the Congo. However, the confident boy reporter is replaced by “Pappa”, an aging, sweating, and visibly anxious white patriarch. This image is the ultimate litmus test for visual literacy. To the unnuanced eye, the inclusion of “golliwog” figures in the trees is evidence of racism. However, within the context of satire, these figures do not represent black people; they represent white fear.

The use of Ligne Claire style to lure the viewer into a false sense of nostalgic security, only to subvert it with the reality of post-colonial anxiety. Pappa is armed, yet he is terrified. He is surrounded by an environment he claims to own but does not understand. The caricatures in the trees are not objective reality; they are the monsters in Pappa’s head, a projection of his own bigotry and paranoia. To censor this image is to protect the very colonial mindset it seeks to dismantle.

Language as Resistance: The Misunderstanding of Satire

Despite their strong roots and ancestral ties to traditional Afrikaner culture, both artists employ satire, supported by hyperbole, analogy, metaphor, and parody, to challenge past and present power structures. They do this by subverting the language itself, writing primarily in a crude, vernacular Afrikaans to transform the “sacred tongue” of the church and the apartheid state into a tool of anarchy and resistance. Bitterkomix references various historical and contemporary social and political issues, delivering a biting critique of the conservative establishment, particularly the deeply entrenched Afrikaner ideologies that persistently contribute to ignorance, ineptitude, and bigotry in South Africa, echoing back to the Apartheid era. Ironically, this language has been subverted, seized from the oppressor, and weaponised by the liberator in contemporary South Africa.

Bitterkomix has consistently faced criticism for its approach, which thrives on eliciting reactions. Much of this controversy stems from the satirical appropriation of offensive colonial tropes — specifically “golliwog” or “blackface” caricatures — which are used to expose white fear and bigotry. In an era marked by growing nationalism and conservatism, concepts such as hyperbole, satire, parody, metaphor, and even appropriation have become progressively challenging for people to comprehend. Social consciousness and cultural awareness simply do not exist to prevent misunderstandings and ignorance of this kind. This conservative environment, where the depiction of racism is often mistaken for the endorsement of it, highlights a lack of lateral, abstract, or sound critical thinking skills. So, not surprisingly, Bitterkomix is often seen as offensive by perceived liberals as well as conservatives, who seem to misunderstand the deeper meanings and underlying concepts innate to these comics.

To drive this point through and ease into the critical and conceptual foundations of Bitterkomix, Die Goeie Herder is an autobiographical strip, where Botes reflects on a childhood memory within the NG Kerk (Dutch Reformed Church) in Bellville. The panels contrast the “benevolent” imagery of religious instruction with the bleak, oppressive atmosphere of the environment itself. The page strikes at the very heart of the “conservative Afrikaner cultural norms”. The Sunday school teacher presents the biblical parable of the Good Shepherd (“I know my sheep and my sheep know me”) as a lesson in love and safety. However, the young protagonist, already developing the conceptual and critical thinking skills the establishment lacks, receives a different message. While the teacher sees “flock,” the boy sees “herd.” He recognises that the demand for mindless conformity, to be a sheep, is to stop thinking. The heavy, dark shading of the church and the rain reinforce the gloom of this realisation. By questioning this sacred metaphor, Bitterkomix exposes how the educational and religious institutions of the past were designed not to enlighten, but to domesticate the mind, breeding the very “indifference and ignorance” that the publication fights against today.

Intellectualism and Enlightenment in an Age of Ideological Fragility, Performative Collapse, and Woke Fundamentalism

Historically significant texts like Bitterkomix are often demonised and censored, taken out of context, and perceived as offensive. In fact, Bitterkomix is a prime example of intellectualism and critical thinking at work. One could argue that this negative assessment of intellectualism and low aptitude for critical thinking is one of the greatest challenges of our time. The contemporary atmosphere of digital isolationism, “woke” fundamentalism, and post-truth extremism makes it increasingly difficult for genuinely creative expressions to thrive. Bitterkomix, in its effort to counteract this narrow-mindedness, has become a notable and historic publication in this context due to its fusion of intellectualism, humor, and conceptual and critical thought.

The cover of Bitterkomix no.17, titled The Pyre of the Vanities, is an accessible example. Released in the wake of the 2016 student protests, this cover satirises the burning of “colonial” artwork and libraries at South African universities. Here, Kannemeyer and Botes turn their sharpest irony on the very forces of “liberation.” The scene mimics the festive, celebratory chaos often found in Tintin comics (specifically Tintin and the Picaros), but the “celebration” here is the destruction of history and culture. Crucially, the items being thrown into the fire are not just colonial portraits (depicting the weeping, impotent white patriarch), but copies of Bitterkomix itself (along with associated titles GIF and HOND).

This image depicts a climate of blissful socio-political ignorance and woke fundamentalism in a moment of absolute moral certainty, incinerating the very foundations of their moralism. The satirist of the old regime is lumped in with the regime itself. To the new “censor,” there is no difference between the oppressor and the one who mocked the oppressor; both must burn. It is a chilling visual representation of censorship as the highest form of perversion.

A Legacy of Resistance

Despite being perceived as controversial and outrageous by many South Africans, Bitterkomix continues to push boundaries and challenge the status quo. A relic of a once-enlightened era, somehow still alive in a vacuum of ‘wokeness’, Bitterkomix is recognised historically as a pioneer in independent and counterculture publications.

This longstanding creative collaboration between Kannemeyer and Botes has evolved into South Africa’s foremost and most contentious satirical comic. Their uncompromising body of work delivers a sharp, incisive critique not only of the now tired and still conservative Afrikaner cultural mainstream but also of the broader state of South Africa, and our world. In an era where performative outrage prevails, where distinctions between extremes become murky and the in-between spaces too blurry to define, Bitterkomix stands as a resounding rebuke to the most insidious perversion of all: censorship.

The complete collection of Bitterkomix publications and side projects, spanning its history since its inception, occupies a significant place in the Colophon Collection: https://colophon.co.za/portfolio/bitterkomix/

Bitterkomix is still in print, and Botes and Kannemeyer remain notable, prolific artists in their own right. More information can be found on the Bitterkomix website: https://bitterkomix.co.za/

So many contradictory art movements come to mind when talking about the paintings of Asha Zero, including Dadaism, Nouveau Réalisme, Superrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Punk, Hyperrealism, and Street Art. I have written a few articles and essays about Asha Zero over the past decade, an elusive South African painter whose identity remains a mystery to this day. A trickster, Banksy-esque, Zero’s paintings often fool the viewer into thinking that they are torn bits of paper fashioned into what resembles a collage. In fact, they are highly realistic, painstakingly crafted paintings, with no pasted elements or actual collage.

Just to get the obligatory bio out of the way, Zero is a contemporary painter based in Cape Town, South Africa. Born in 1975 in Pretoria (Tshwane), Zero’s career has a history of nearly two decades. With major exhibitions held locally and abroad, Zero boasts over six solo exhibitions amongst a variety of group exhibitions, art fairs, and auctions around the world. Zero’s work also features in major collections around the world. Below, a selection of two texts and an interview that I think best explains the work of this enigmatic painter entering a phase that can be best described as mid-career.

Framing Disco

Until it became fashionable, street art has normally been seen as public vandalism, but the same can be said for billboards, advertising, and other types of capitalist propaganda. Asha Zero is a brand drawing inspiration from all these things, with an idiosyncratic understanding of media and an eccentric grasp of market capitalism, dictating how frivolous such currents are in steering our lives. Alongside other contemporary artists and musicians, including Autechre, Beck, Banksy, Takashi Murakami, Faile, and Barry McGee, Asha Zero effectively renders post-industrial, terminal identity, blip-cultural imagery, depicting a deconstructed global village populated by posthuman citizens. Asha Zero is a commercial entity following the undercurrents of a collective socio-political worldview, documenting a consumer-based society surrounded by commercial glitches, noise, and static.

Asha Zero’s collages aren't collages, they are in fact meticulously constructed paintings, simultaneously landscapes and portraits that depict the pastiche and anxiety of contemporary South Africa, playing with the effects of flickering signs and signifiers that place pressure on our identity, history, and traditions. Zero’s paintings begin as preliminary collage compositions that act as conceptual tools, aiding in the conception of a painting. From this foundation, Zero is a master illusionist presenting highly realistic paintings as if they were cut and pasted paper collages. Make no mistake, Zero’s paintings are as skillfully rendered and layered as any Master painting, where super-realism meets abstraction under the spectacle of hyperreality.

Irony, satire, and parody play an important role in Zero’s depiction of hyperreality, suggesting a kind of neurosis observed in everyday life, manifested in street signs, torn posters, tabloids, headlines, and the like, that surround us. Marshall McLuhan referred to this kind of neurosis as ‘narcosis’, describing society in a state of narcissism and addiction. Asha Zero presents this narcosis through transient and ambiguous mergers of pictorial realism and abstraction, using the conceptual premise of collage. The commonplace is poeticised into a microcosm of alibis for the mutation of truth in post0truth, broken-up into a formal visual language that can sometimes be confused as a political statement. Zero’s painted assemblages mangle orthodox artistic understandings of plasticity, painterly illusion, conceptualism, and abstraction, fractally morphing into epitaphs for the fake and the real, embracing the simultaneous comedy and tragedy of contemporary life.

The spectacle of contemporary society is exposed through contradiction and juxtaposition, utilising traditional avant-garde tools such as collage, gesture, automatism, and appropriation. Zero succinctly borrows from Dada, Neo-expressionism, graffiti, Punk, and Electronica to record glitches in our consumerism, all in an attempt to historicise the present, blurring the lines between beauty and ugliness, evident in the over-stimulated, over-simulated, superficial, and cosmetic. Zero expresses the fabrications of the media, allowing for hybrids of texture, colour, and pattern. Zero’s cut-and-pasted paintings are thus products of a homogenised and fragmented system, and they announce this fact.

Zero’s images are contradictory yet honest. By making paintings that look like a collage, in the age-old tradition of Trompe l’iel, and by re-representing already highly mediated imagery, Zero makes a powerful statement about the global village as bricolage. This is a world where the visions of George Orwell, William Burroughs, Aldous Huxley, and Phillip K. Dick have become accepted norms, where humanist notions of truth no longer teeter on the opposition between good and evil but tinker on the pitting of evil against ‘evil’. Zero delivers a spectacle of xeroxed and mediated imagery, painted by hand rather than merely assembled from pre-existing material in order to articulate a hard-hitting message about the ubiquitous relationship between the real and the fake in contemporary society.

This text was first published in 2010 for Modern Art Projects, Black Book Series.

The Day I Became an Intertextual Chimera

There is no simple way to describe this conversation. Abbreviated, Asha Zero makes art that explores the effect that technological progress, contemporary media, and communication networks have on traditional forms of representation and language. This investigation currently employs the medium of painting, grafted onto conceptual processes that have historically been connected to collage. These paintings exist within shifting frameworks, depicting the ubiquitousness of the present day, particularly within the context of digital, mediated, and virtual spaces. All this whilst adding to established narratives, actively engaging with the rubric of Modernism.

Fragmented and scrambled imagery speaks to the historic flow of art starting with Realism, flirting with Dada and Pop Art, briefly visiting Lettrism and Nouveau Réalisme, ending with elements of Street Art. Zero’s paintings are composite images fused with various ideological foundations, amalgamating diverse offshoots of Modernity, Postmodernity, and Posthumanism. These contrasting, synthesised surfaces document the everyday spectacle of the human condition through combined and juxtaposed source material appropriated from the urban landscape and the present mediasphere. Given this inquiry, we are still left with some interesting questions. Continuing our ongoing dialogue, the artist and I sat down for yet another chat.

Q: Your artworks are commonly perceived as collage. However, they are in actual fact hand-rendered paintings. Do you think this misreading affects the manner in which audiences read your work?

A: It is interesting to see how a person’s engagement with the work changes once this realisation is made. All of a sudden something that was perceived as a loose and messy construction is read as a considered and methodically executed artwork. Two opposing sensibilities become one, connecting two different readings, tying a seemingly quick and easy process with a difficult time-consuming process. I think it’s a bit like trying to read in opposite directions.

Q: Why did you choose the medium of painting, as opposed to the traditional approach, and simply use collage?

A: It started in a very playful way after art school, and slowly developed from there. I had produced some collage work as an art student and found it a useful and fun way to develop ideas. At some point, the thought crossed my mind to render some of the collages in the tradition of trompe l’oeil, which were convincing as ‘collages’ and in many cases pleasantly surprised people. So I stumbled into it.

Q: So you did start your process with actual collage, and then moved onto painting later?

A: Yes, kind of. It was a mix-match in the beginning, probably better described as paintings or drawings with collaged bits; typical mixed media stuff.

Q: We have established that painting is your primary medium, but where does your interest in collage originate from?

A: My interest in collage comes from a mixture of sources, specifically the work of Modernist figures — Dada, Surrealist, and Pop artists — and the prevalence of their varying approaches to mainstream culture. Things like band posters, punk-inspired DIY zines, and so on. I was also drawn to the amalgamation of different contexts and the way that collage sets-up jumps in logic.

Q: In what way did Dada specifically influence your work?

A: The influence lies in the way that content can be stumbled upon accidentally and shaped organically. Our environments continually present interesting juxtapositions. The clash of discordant scenes, languages, and seemingly incompatible ideas — sounds, images, textures, surfaces, platforms — create interesting hybrids. Also, technology now plays a major role in transmitting these conceptual memes and the influence can be seen in the paintings. It influences the range of techniques employed in producing the images.

Q: Has digital culture facilitated broader participation in creative expression, and how does this influence your image making?

A: Within the context of traditional media and the historical trajectory of Modernism in art, particularly the overlapping offshoots of Pop Art, one can easily notice how technological advances in communication impacted these modes of art production. Copying, splicing, and pasting of cultural information, appropriating bits and pieces of narrative are commonplace today. It plays a role in linking various systems, so much so that our way of expressing and communicating through a mixture of sources becomes the norm. The paintings are the result of these types of inputs and processes.

Q: Are your images informed by the notion that contemporary expression is a kind of collage of offline and online, analog and digital, real and virtual?

A: I think so. Mass-produced and technologically manipulated images are hybrid memes. If you consider the techniques employed in the production of the paintings, as well as the sourced images, you can notice a cross-pollination of digital modes of production with traditional media, such as pigment on board. There is an interesting interplay between translations of the ‘online’ and the ‘offline’, between pixel and pigment.

Q: So, networked culture is one of the departure points for the work?

A: Yes, so much is sourced and transmitted via interactive networks; media that communicates in multiple directions with complex ideas that are formed by the overlap of various technologies. These paintings are hyper-realistic images because they occupy positions within crossover zones where the virtual and the physical interchange. The integration of digital networks leaves a viral trace on contemporary art production.

Q: Would you say that the overlapping of various technologies influences perception to such an extent that Abstraction and Realism become one and the same thing?

A: That is a tough question. Yes, it influences the way we observe things. It makes you wonder whether we see more or whether we see less. If so much of it is process-driven, are we observing the underlying patterns, regardless of the surface? This is partly the reason why I find images derived from highly mediated source material interesting.

Q: Is this the reason why you fragment the human form?

A: The fragmentation has to do with what we discussed earlier about technology as an integral part of our existence and the relationship it has with language. It’s not so much about the human form being subject to fragmentation, it’s about the effect on content as it is carried by a medium. Whatever the medium may be, a criss-cross through various translations leads to distortions; iterations of the underlying patterns.

Q: Sort of like the Exquisite Corpse game blended with a machine aesthetic?

A: In a way, it may involve a machine aesthetic but it is a game of various aesthetics. Your reference to the exquisite corpse game forms a nice link to the philosophical concept of “machinic assemblages”, which are combinations of mechanical and organic elements. So these paintings are the result of an engagement with different modes of production as well as materials and concepts that, like the exquisite corpse, approach authorship in a playful manner.

Q: Your most recent work exhibits a marked departure from your earlier figurative depictions. What is the reason for this move towards abstraction?

A: There is a bit of a departure but it’s not really a move towards abstraction because the material that the paintings are based on are complex fabrications of figure and non-figure; of absence and presence.

Q: Your recent paintings also resemble the work of the Lettrists and New Realists, particularly Jacques Villeglé. Did this influence you?

A: Yes, but only superficially. Our approach to and use of appropriation is different. Simply put, there is an inversion of conceptual thinking between his work and mine. Jacques Villeglé deals with collage as painting, and Asha Zero uses painting as collage.

Q: It seems that the Urban Art phenomenon is a symptom of the circumstances that you describe. How would this fall within your artistic practice?

A: The early paintings were small-scale haphazard portraits. The reference images were idealised body parts taken from magazine cut-outs. As the scale of the work increased the game between collage and painting changed. That is when Urban Art elements such as graphic stickers, graffiti tags, and wheat-pasted posters were incorporated into the work. So the larger paintings started to resemble scenes that one would commonly find in urban settings, torn posters on highway pillars, weathered stickers on street poles, and messy electricity boxes. I think a lot of the tactics Urban artists use somehow fall into the cross-over zones that we have discussed.

Q: How do you see your work evolving?

A: It’s difficult to say, depends on where the process leads. I have dabbled in other media and mediums. I don’t see it all locked into painting.

Q: So, given all this deep shit, I am obliged to ask you, what is your favourite colour?

A: I’m going to go with Brick Tamland on this: “I Love Lamp”.

From this brief insight into my conversation with the artist, a few things can be concluded. Although it may seem somewhat dystopic, Zero’s work is simultaneously dystopic and utopic, multiple and singular. This is because the world does not function according to simplified and archaic binary oppositions, black and white terminology, and ideological hierarchies anymore. Language is not fixed or static anymore. Truth is not the truth anymore. The original now exists in a feedback loop; re-represented, in-between, superimposed, remixed, and juxtaposed. Surfaces are scrambled, mere traces of the original screen continually disassembled and reprogrammed. If a clear message can be drawn from all this it is that those distinctions between the authentic and inauthentic, inside and outside, then and now; all are obsolete.

This text was first published in 2015 in The Lake magazine.

Untitled

“Man’s first expression, like his first dream, was an aesthetic one. Speech was a poetic outcry rather than a demand for communication. Original man, shouting his consonants, did so in yells of awe and anger at his tragic state, at his own self-awareness and at his own helplessness before the void”.

~ Barnett Newman.

Today. No more poetic outcries. The notion of man no longer implies the heroic, honorable, or virtuous. Tragedy and pathos are superseded by sensory deprivation and overstimulation. Reverbed, delayed, distorted, modulated, sampled, and randomised, the omnipresence of the void. No movement, no consciousness, no original. The authentic now scrambled, filtered, a facsimile. Reproduced and remixed, mashed-up, and hacked. Cut and pasted, the accumulation and acceleration of networks, surrounded by constructed environments.

The city, an extension of the original network — the nervous system. Substrata, layer upon layer upon layer. Mutated neural paths, differed dreams, fragmented, schizophrenic. From this seeming meaninglessness, Asha Zero paints the ebb and flow of information, the stratification of signification, sedimentation of communication, a topology of a euphoric historification. Every surface a piece of history, transition, transmission, nothing is without meaning, the ecstasy of communication. In the silence noise, static, anomalies, glitches. A palimpsest. It is a testament to a simultaneous absence (in the wake of anything authentic or original) and presence (in the form of simulacra and iteration). At this point an absolute ubiquity, an endless repetition of the original subject. Random pattern, melody pulverised into drone, where proximity and promiscuity merge and ambiguously evolve. A singularity crafted from a world founded on immediate communication and instant gratification. Always on, connected, addicted. Asha Zero represents this void, the ever-present, hyper-real. A copy of a copy of a copy, abstract and formless, layered and composited, superimposed as a new form of realism. Realism juxtaposed with Abstraction. Collage, grottage, frottage — an assemblage.

Identifying with a state of terminal identity, masked, pasted, buffed, burned, bombed, torn, and tagged. Obese, always feeding, always connected. A century ago this may have been seen as a moral crisis, presently it is utterly normal. Routine, respite. Sheer anarchy turned absolute normalcy. Nameless, a quasi-exquisite corpse existing as superficial conventionalism. Pure War. Ground zero, Minimalism.

The value of deception and the virtue of ubiquity, concurrently accessible and uncensored yet adulterated and corrupted. Schizophrenia and anxiety are habitual, ‘natural’ responses to the surrounding mediasphere. Asha Zero’s paintings contribute more than just the sum of all parts. Trompe l’oeil here resigns to the conceptual underpinnings of collage, confronting painting under the rubric of collage. Welcoming erasure, interference, trace, and artifice as the status quo Asha Zero symbolises an indifference-in-difference prompted by Dada and Surrealism, stemming from Realism and Impressionism, effectively combining the opposing ideologies of Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism. By proxy Posthuman remaining unmarked by humdrum humanist politics or outdated capitalist polemics.

This is no precarious appropriation of established Modernist notions in the tradition of art for art's sake. Nor does it partake in the pretensions of the Postmodern. Asha Zero steals from all, a concurrent Abstractionist and Realist account. Hacked, a chimera. The Realists depicted the everyday original subject in contemporary situations, portraying individuals at their source. Painting as figuration, sentimentality, connected to the real. Abstract Expressionism was the epitome of aesthetic and moral values set forth by the Realists — the other side of the spectrum where painting became ‘pure’, concentrated. Painting as abstract, formal, gestural, disconnected from the real. Sublime, pellucid, spectacle. Asha Zero moves through these narratives and languages inserting hyphens and splices. Appropriation, automatism, cut-up, a machine-aesthetic. Asha Zero reverse engineers these once anarchic avant-garde ideas. Merging all such ‘truths’, hard wiring established Modernist givens to suit the desires of the ‘post-post-‘. Assembling a cacophony of occidental perceptions, Eurocentric diaspora, lost in the post-.

The world is no longer binary, imploding, getting smaller. Hierarchies and oppositions, none of this stuff. Critical mass, it is anarchic, Rhizomatic. The original subject has evolved into an indecipherable cipher. A milieu of cellular automata. In-between, juxtaposed. Surfaces are as numbing as they are stimulating. Scratched and scrambled topologies, simultaneously multiple and singular, combining the ability to differ and to defer. Embodied and embedded, disassembled and reprogrammed, anonymity is chosen over autonomy. Unfixing signifiers, turbulent, entangled, alienated. A clear-cut message: the age-old distinctions between the authentic and inauthentic, in and out, then and now, them and us, all obsolete. Null and void.

“I have studied the art of the ancients and the art of the moderns, avoiding any preconceived system and without prejudice. I no longer wanted to imitate the one than to copy the other; nor, furthermore, was it my intention to attain the trivial goal of ‘art for art’s sake.”

~ Gustav Courbet.

This text was first published in 2015 for the catalog of Zero’s first solo exhibition at SMAC Gallery in Cape Town, South Africa.

Africa is commonly misconceived as poverty-stricken and filled with strife, void of any coherent cultural sphere. But the construction of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA) challenges this somewhat bigoted perspective, marking a pivotal moment in time that debunks such misconceptions. As a sanctuary for contemporary art from across the continent and its diaspora, the approach to graphic design and branding in this building is as relevant as its purpose and message.

In general terms, the cultural sphere may be broken down into four interrelated parts: art, craft, design, and discourse. Many brands don’t understand the sum of all these parts, and how any given society coheres through an appreciation of each part in relation to the other. So, too, many designers, artists, and other creatives don’t really understand their responsibility and respective roles within these constituent parts. It should go without saying that the production of culture doesn’t take place through profit and consumption, or creative self-obsession; it does so through an appreciation of the cultural sphere.

Dialogue between graphic design and architecture

The focus here is on the dialogue between graphic design, by proxy branding, and architecture, and how these important disciplines need to coexist within the context of the cultural sphere. Sadly, this dialogue is often an afterthought. The lack of graphic design in many public spaces and built environments highlights this point, with ill-considered branding randomly placed onto façades and poorly executed signage at every turn. Ignorance towards this dialogue is the reason why bad design confronts us in the streets of every city in the world, from non-existent wayfinding to second-rate typography, to advertising that verges on a form of pollution; and the trend continues. This kind of ignorance does nothing to support the cultural sphere, often preventing the production of culture, and it can be incredibly destructive, affecting the common man on the ground at a grassroots level on a massive scale. Yet ill-considered design is so omnipresent that we don’t even see it anymore. We are mostly numb to the adverse effects of our indifference towards the uplifting difference that design can create. This especially when a happy marriage between graphic design and architecture — where there is a cultural synergy between branding and the built environment — can be achieved.

Museum structures are the subject of debate in this particular regard because they are culturally significant public spaces, and there are significant examples around the world where successful synergies between graphic design and architecture have evolved, such as the Sifang Art Museum (Nanjing, China), Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum (New York, US), Centre Pompidou (Paris, France), Guggenheim Bilbao (Bilbao, Spain), and the Victoria & Albert Museum (London, UK), to name a few. All these stay true to the cultural sphere, remaining consistent in their respective integration of graphic design into the overall design strategy of their respective buildings, and the brand narratives that are attached to them — the dialogue between graphic design and architecture was clear from the onset of each building project.

As a form of visual communication, more architects, interior designers, councils, developers, building managers, curators and the like should consider how imperative graphic design is in the construction of cultural spaces and the layered narratives that such spaces hold.

Change the world

Culture has the potential to change the world, uplift, revive, and reform nations and, when it comes to culturally significant structures such as museums, architects need graphic designers more than ever as their symbiotic relationship forms a pivotal food chain within the cultural sphere. The building itself is a conduit and an important cultural signifier. For example, there is a visible gap between the amount of thought that has gone into the design of many museum buildings, as opposed to the amount of effort in developing the wayfinding and environmental design systems for those structures. A lack of continuity in design, outside and within a building, may destroy any kind of storytelling that the architect may have had in mind, compromising the overall experience of the building. So, too, poorly executed branding on the exterior of a structure may completely eliminate any architectural considerations that have gone into the design of a building in the first place. A dialogue between graphic design and architecture should be a first-rate priority.

Few examples of this dialogue exist in South Africa, barring the Apartheid Museum and Constitution Hill, and some others. With the recent completion of Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town’s V&A Waterfront is arguably one such public space beginning to construct a broader consciousness about the cultural sphere, effectively seeding the discourse between various types of art, design, and craft on the continent. It is the only structure of its kind, the first large-scale contemporary art museum in Africa, and as a result, may be seen as an important case study in the dialogue between graphic design and architecture on the continent.

This particular story starts with the choice of site, the Silo District of the V&A Waterfront, reclaiming one of Cape Town’s most-historic structures, the city’s Grain Silo building. Built in 1924, this structure has cultural significance as a landmark, a heritage site originally used as a grain storage complex that once contained 40 000 tons of grain and disseminated food to the nation and to the world. After standing derelict for years, the structure has been repurposed by the internationally renowned British architect, Thomas Heatherwick.

Inside-out vision of the architect

Working from his London-based design practice, Heatherwick Studio, the structure’s 42 silos and elevator building have been disemboweled, completely transforming the site. With an inside-out vision — by Africa, for Africa, in Africa — the museum has become a legacy project, attempting to negate any pretense towards mirroring the west. Its mission: to craft a contemporary African art and design history for all Africans — not settling for a history bestowed upon it from the west (from the outside-in).

Heatherwick himself described the construction process as akin to mining or farming. The large atrium of the building literally deconstructs the 42-silo grid of the original building. He scanned an actual corn kernel — a life-sustaining symbol (womb-like when inverted into the negative space of the atrium), referencing the birth of civilisation (agriculture) — carving out a massive cavity. It’s secular yet somehow spiritual.

The shared vision of the graphic designer

The story continues with the ad agency that worked with Heatherwick Studio on the various branding and design components required for the museum, and so the dialogue between graphic design and architecture begins. M&C Saatchi Abel in Cape Town stepped up to the plate, eventually creating the branding, corporate identity, wayfinding and signage systems for the museum, among other collateral and paraphernalia. The choice of M&C Saatchi Abel seems apt, as a quick observation of its Cape Town office alone exhibits a clear dialogue between art and design, with contemporary South African artists exhibited on many of the walls inside the agency building, sporting many of the same established names that the museum currently houses, such as Athi-Patra Ruga, Kudzanai Chuirai, and Mohau Modisakeng.

Defining cultural moment

Working pro bono, Ashraf Majiet, who was M&C Saatchi Abel’s creative director at the time, took the helm on this project, alongside a small, dedicated team. Seeing the museum as a defining cultural moment with the potential for powerful visual storytelling, Majiet had difficult shoes to fill in trying to find a unique design solution that could compliment Heatherwick Studios’ resolved architectural narrative. What initially started as a branding project in July 2015, based upon a simple brief to create an icon and a logo, ended with Majiet delivering a case study on the significance of graphic design in dialogue with architecture within the cultural sphere of South Africa, and the continent as a whole.

As a young student, Majiet was influenced by Heatherwick’s first appearance at Design Indaba as far back 2005. Spurred on further by Heatherwick’s 2014 Design Indaba conference talk, where his plans were revealed to develop and design Zeitz MOCAA, Majiet researched African art in order to inform the museum’s then fledgling identity system. He tried not to separate between the worlds of art and design, eventually finding that a basic icon and logo wouldn’t suffice for a project of this scale. The result was a simple grid, based on the original structural arrangement of the 42 silos, malleable and extremely versatile. This is the foundation for an entire visual language forming the design DNA, including a bespoke typeface, colour palette (inspired by the exposed raw concrete of the building), branding and corporate identity system, wayfinding and signage system, alongside other elements.

Although the 42 silos have been transformed into a graphic rendition, suggesting the form, function and history of the original building, the grid has been created to be defied — a tip of the hat to Heatherwick’s deconstruction of the building. Majiet investigated local hand-signage and -lettering, inspired by spaza shops, improvised signs in townships and other similar visuals, in an attempt to design more-irregular, less-rigid, curves for the letterforms of the bespoke alphabet in particular. From this a font, called “Forty Two”, was developed, connecting the topology of the architectural site into the typology of the brand architecture. This font signposts everything, from the toilets to the restaurant, but is adaptable enough to be interpreted through different colourways, patterns and textures.

Ever-evolving, curated and deconstructed

The museum’s branding needed to be experienced in a similar fashion to the museum itself: as an ever-evolving, curated and deconstructed, cultural icon. The result? Various branding and design components that often incorporate the artworks exhibited in the museum, using the same textures, imagery, mediums, and materials.

At all times, craft and art must meet design, just as design meets architecture, all existing in a vital cultural ecosystem fuelled by various narratives and discourses. As such, the cultural sphere is observed here. Developed to adapt and evolve with the ever-changing contents of the museum, always in conversation with the building itself, the overall visual language is designed as if on-site at ground level, rather than only the result of sketches on paper and graphics on a screen. In terms of graphic design, Majiet’s response to Heatherwick’s building is a more radical and conceptual answer to the original brief, allowing the branding to flow in conjunction with the dynamic environment of the museum, as well as the ever-shifting narratives of contemporary African art itself.

It is important to mention that the branding, and its strategic backbone, fits in-between all of this. The design of it all exhibits a keen awareness of the cultural sphere and the final solution to the brief respects the subject matter at hand, acknowledging and reflecting the unique heritage of the original building while, at the same time, staying true to the powerful originality and diversity of the museum and the art that it houses. In much the same way that the building interacts with its visitors, and viewers interact with the artworks, so, too, the interaction between graphic design and architecture has arguably begun.

What Zeitz MOCAA proves

Graphic designers are trained in the science of identity systems, the art of typography and legibility, alongside various other important components within the gamut of visual communication. What Zeitz MOCAA, as a case study, shows is that the power of architecture can be amplified through the artful use of graphic design and the proper implementation of branding.

It is successfully engineered and resolved here, telling a layered and complex story in an accessible way. As the agency has described it, this approach is “alive with art and culture”, educating society at large as well as reminding the elites of the art world about the importance of having access to the cultural sphere and encouraging various ongoing dialogues, focused not on a universal idea of design or a blind ideology about design, but rather a wholeness in design. Thoughtfulness in design is a conversation for all.

Shane de Lange is the owner and graphic designer at www.gilgamesh.co.za. He is also the founder and curator at www.colophon.co.za.

On February 27th, 2019, two years ago to this day, in my apartment in St James, Cape Town, I sat down in front of my computer, launched Skype, and proceeded to call David Carson. The reason for this call with David, a person whom I had long admired, at least since my art school days, was to talk about the launch of his book, Nuwork.collage001, which remains the most-recent publication produced by the iconic graphic designer. I was lucky enough to get an audience with him for a one-on-one interview just before the launch of the book, which coincided with the opening of his exhibition at the multidisciplinary art space, Haimney, in Barcelona, Spain. We spoke for a little over an hour, and the following interview is the result of that conversation.

As a graphic designer, when one reaches a certain level of the game it starts to feel more like an art and definitely becomes a craft. In this sense, design is not a service, it is a necessity. It is an important driver for the production of culture. Since the ’80s, David Carson has contributed to and altered, the evolution of the craft of graphic design. He became a graphic designer at the age of 26, establishing himself within the bustling surf community of Southern California. The experimental culture that he was exposed to through surfing and skateboarding afforded him the freedom to mess around with the institutionalised modernist dictates of design, of which he was completely unaware. He began his career working for a number of magazines, including Transworld Skateboarding, Beach Culture, and, perhaps most famously, Ray Gun.

It was at the latter where Carson gained international notoriety as a designer and became a household name for his expressive approach to graphic design and art direction. Ray Gun was arguably more popular for Carson’s idiosyncratic style of visual communication than for the editorial focus of the magazine, which was mostly centered on alternative music. He broke away from pretty much every norm that was cherished by the design establishment, opening the field to a whole new world. The visual language he helped to invent was characterised by the fragmentation, interference, distortion, cutting up, texturing, deconstruction, and reconstruction of various typographic and visual elements, which snuffed orthodox approaches to design. The most notable attributes of his work include typography that is worn and textured, often illegible and hardly readable and imbued with an innate sense of human warmth and touch, with an emphasis on craft.

Despite being an early adopter of digital means of production, it is arguably this human element to his work that speaks most broadly to his audience. With this perspective, Carson has become a key exponent, albeit it unconsciously, in defining the cultural zeitgeist we now look back on as grunge, and is often referred to as one of the postmodern-design pioneers. The discipline of typography, especially, has never been the same again, thanks to him.

In 1995, following the popularity of Ray Gun, and with all the media attention received from his incendiary approach to graphic design, Carson established his own studio, called David Carson Design. He blew minds, inspiring fledgling designers in art schools across the world, who took advantage of his style to liberate themselves from the doldrums of late 20th-century design. He democratised design, bending and reforming, continuously deforming and discarding all the dogmatic precepts of design history. That same year, Carson published The End of Print, a monograph that has itself formed part of graphic design history. The title is a response to British graphic designer, Neville Brody (noted for his early work for The Face and his own independent publication, Fuse), who once commented that Ray Gun represented “the end of print”.

Shane de Lange (SD): You started your career as a graphic designer fairly late in life, at the age of 26, and you take pride in the fact that you weren’t corrupted by the institutionalised norms or academic rules that art and design schools teach. You didn’t know about ‘traditional’ approaches to graphic design, such as grid-based systems, typographic rules, and modernism, until much later in your career, keeping your perspective on design raw and unadulterated, which can be said to have democratised the commercial arts. Today, you are often referred to as one of the pioneers of postmodern design, and seen as the “father of grunge”. How does it feel to be a cultural institution, with the tables now turned, crossing over into the mainstream despite swimming against the current your whole career?

David Carson (DC): Well, you never quite feel that. Like now, I’m working on projects, and clients, and this exhibition, and the new book, and just working away. There’s not a moment where one says, “Oh, I’m a cultural institution”, or I somehow feel different. I am just doing what I do, and those kinds of definitions and labels are floating around out there but, on a daily basis, they don’t really affect me. So, I don’t know, I probably wouldn’t agree that it’s that mainstream; it’s bigger than that. Maybe the work is more known or accepted but I still don’t feel that the work is mainstream or the norm. I think its appeal, partly, is because it still feels different to people, especially students I hear from now when they see the newer work. And the older fans, for that matter.

I guess a part of me wishes it was more mainstream, then you would see it everywhere. But, because it’s so subjective, it’s not a style you can teach like you can with grids. It’s hard to do it well and have it work, I guess, whereas anybody can teach people how to make a decent grid system, and they can do something that looks fine and professional, and forgettable. But it’s harder to teach them to use their own intuition and make the piece feel a certain way.

SD: Your sensibility seems to work according to a more-intuitive approach, resulting in a raw, instinctual, and improvised visual language, which has forever changed the field of graphic design. In this context, do you think anybody can be a designer, or is it all about raw talent and pure chance?

DC: Well, I definitely wouldn’t say anybody can be a great, or notable, designer. But anybody can be a designer because you can buy the software and the programs. And it’s like, anybody can be an artist or basketball player, but at what level? So, I think that the area where the best work comes from is the hardest area to teach people. And if they don’t have the eye that allows them to know if something looks or works better than something else, I don’t think one can give that to them, or teach it to them. That’s what elevates the word “design”. And there are a lot of people that do good work; it’s a pretty teachable skill. But, if you wanted to break out of that kind of basic level of design, then that takes somebody that has a different approach and way of looking at things. Where that comes from, I have no idea. That’s why, if somebody seems to have that kind of innate ability, then I really encourage them to pursue that.

SD: You weren’t exposed to graphic design, or art direction, as professional disciplines or valid career options when you were young, correct?

DC: Well, certainly not on any professional or even school level. So, that’s the big question: where does it all come from? I can remember memorising surf magazines at night during my early teenage years, and just pouring over those things. And I can still go back 50 years later and take any page and I can tell you about the caption or photo. And if we knew where that comes from, maybe it would be more teachable. But yeah, for some reason, I know, and I don’t question, as I am looking at stuff right now, I know this looks better than that. And where that comes from, I have no idea.

SD: You were obviously born with an eye for graphic design and art direction, but you weren’t exposed to these disciplines at an early stage. You often claim that your eyes were opened to the power of visual communication when you attended a workshop in Switzerland, presented by Swiss designer, Hans-Rudolf Lutz, whose own work seems to have an uneasy relationship with modernism. In hindsight, isn’t it ironic that it was a Swiss designer who opened your eyes?

DC: Oh, absolutely. Of course, I arrived there very naive to all of that history. More recently, I was invited back to Switzerland, for the premiere of the documentary, Helvetica. There was such a funny subtitle, that stated: “Helvetica brought Carson back to Switzerland.” It is ironic, and I think people are surprised by that. Lutz’s workshop was literally the first workshop that, really early, exposed me to using copy machines, and blowing things up, and cutting up pictures from the back, and then turning them over, and all these extremely experimental things. And not doing it whimsically but doing it pretty seriously.

Lutz did rave posters and stuff that was whatever ‘pre-rave’ was for electronic groups. So, this is me walking into this new profession, and one of the first people I meet as a graphic designer is saying to me, you should go into the newspaper and blow up articles until the words look like what they’re talking about, and keep doing it until you get it. That was like, wow, really, this is graphic design? That’s really interesting. I think that had an early effect, where it’s really wide open and interesting and can be experimental. Lutz is not generally referenced much in the whole Swiss discussion and movement. He was a little, I hesitate to say, [odd], but I think respected. And he had some gigantic books that he made of all his projects but he is rarely in the discourse.

SD: Yeah, it’s crazy, if one looks at the standard graphic design textbooks out there, Lutz is not mentioned very often, is he?

DC: No, and I think that’s a horrible miss. And, if anything is mentioned, it is only referenced now that I have mentioned him. And his books are out there — they’re huge books where he put together his experiments and some of his students’. But I think, at that stage for me, being a kind of sponge for the ultra-fashionable in the field, to see that that was part of graphic design, and one could experiment and stretch and do some pretty out-there stuff, I think that definitely registered and had some impact on me.

SD: I am going to get slightly academic now, and for that, I apologise [laughing].

DC: It’s fine [laughing].

SD: Your work has historically been associated with deconstruction, which is a branch of philosophy associated with post-structuralism and the French philosopher, Jacques Derrida. Derrida himself is often referred to as one of the fathers of postmodern thought. What’s your take on this? Do you think your work has a direct connection to deconstruction, or is it just a cool way to describe your work?

DC: Well, there are a few points there. As you say that name, I don’t recognise it. Perhaps, if I saw it written, and I saw some of his work, I’d say, “Oh, that guy.” I read somewhere that what I did was called “deconstructionism”, and I thought, “Oh, okay, that’s interesting; that’s what I’m doing.” I remember, at the same workshop with Lutz, there was an opening reception, and there were groups of designers standing around dressed in black and they were discussing this kind of stuff. I don’t remember if it was deconstructionism but it was all these kinds of terms. And it dawned on me that I couldn’t jump into any of those discussions, that I knew none of that stuff and I hadn’t studied any of it and didn’t really know what they were talking about. I kind of liked being the outsider in that respect. But I never sat down to do ‘deconstruction design’, just like I never sat down or know anyone who does grunge design. It was definitely a writer’s term.

So, apparently what I do is called deconstructionism, and now I can kind of see the connection. It’s not to negate the guy you mentioned but, as I said, by just hearing the name, it doesn’t ring a bell. I often say, that without four years of training, I never learned all the things I wasn’t supposed to do. I just did what made sense to me. And then other people said that you can’t do that; you broke this rule or that rule. I was like, “Well, says who?” But the starting point wasn’t to say, “Let’s try to break a rule today.” It was just to do what makes sense to me after reading this article, or listening to this music, and what would that look like. Then other people would come in and start analysing, and saying whether it’s breaking rules, calling it what they wanted to call it.

SD: I think the operative word here would be naivety, related to what you said earlier, and how important it is in the overall perspective of understanding design. Would you agree?

DC: Yeah, I think in my case it was very helpful. I didn’t know all that stuff, and then soon I was into a medium that I think demanded and needed certain experimentation. And in terms of me doing a skateboard magazine, that was really the first real job for me. Having not had that rigid, strict background and then being thrown into this very expressive sport — trying to interpret that — not knowing all those rules was an asset. And again, the starting point was not, “What rule can we break today?” or “Who can we piss off?” or even “How can I make this hard to read?”

SD: You have established that design needs to be emotional, experimental, intuitive, and personal, which speaks to your design sensibility, creative instinct, and natural talent, uncorrupted by the limitations of formal education. Your background in sociology, which predates your interest in graphic design, also informs this perspective. This all seems to be focused on the human factor in the overall design process. Do you think that the world is becoming increasingly ‘posthuman’, fuelled by the effects of new media and technologies?

DC: Oh, I would agree 100% and I think that’s why we’re seeing a kind of rumbling again. There’s some movement — people are, I’m sensing, hungry again to feel that there is a human behind the piece of work, for something not quite perfect, after 20 years of perfect Photoshop. Yeah, I’m definitely noticing that it seems to have run its course; at least, people want to feel that there was a human behind the work and I think that’s partly why I’m here getting ready for an exhibition of collage, and work made with torn paper.

So, no question that the human element was taken out; things have gotten so gentrified. And, I use magazines as an example, in the last decade or so there has been a lot of ‘professionally’ executed magazines on every topic but very few that really stand out. They’re all kind of what I would call “B-level”. Everybody’s got the same software, which makes most of the decisions that the designer used to make. And, so, you end up with very professional, solid, decent-looking magazines that are ultimately forgettable. And then people don’t really look forward to seeing what they’re doing next; the overall level has been raised but then it stops and there’s general gentrification of the field.

SD: I definitely see this in the world of branding; they’re all looking the same now, don’t you think?

DC: Yeah, well, I don’t know if you’ve seen all the talk on social media about this? I took a screengrab of it; there was one floating around where somebody took all the logo redesigns of the last however many years. There are a lot of big brands and they’ve all been over-simplified. Basically, they all went to Bold Helvetica Caps, or something very similar, with a little different letter-spacing, or slightly different font, but they are all the same. Now, some of it would have been practical, based on how well it reads on a tiny screen and all that. But, regardless, that’s part of this kind of gentrification of the craft.

SD: One of my all-time favourite top-five books would be Marshall McLuhan’s “Understanding Media”; it made a massive impact on me as a student. You have published many books in your life, perhaps the most popular being “Trek” and “End of Print”. You have also produced a book titled “The Book of Probes”, alongside William Kuhns and Eric McLuhan, in collaboration with Marshall McLuhan. Has his writing always influenced your work?

DC: I would say indirectly. I wouldn’t phrase it like that. I mean, I really didn’t know that much about him until somebody contacted me with the idea of this book. And, at that point, I went in and started researching, looking at a lot of his writings and quotes. Yeah, just fascinating stuff. And I think there was a lot of correlation, maybe, in some of the things I was exploring and what he was talking about. But it wasn’t something where I could say I’ve always been a huge fan of McLuhan; I was pretty pedestrian, just knowing a couple of big quotes, like “the medium is the message”, and not a whole lot else.

And, that being said, I got very into it, interpreting all these quotes and reading articles, and I was in regular correspondence with his son, who recently died. He was always sending me stuff about cave paintings and how they were the first ‘movies’ intended to move with the flicker of the fire, and all these things — always sending me oddball articles and theories. So, I am a huge, huge fan of Marshall McLuhan but I came to it later. Actually, it was a publisher who said, “Hey, we got a possibility to get all these Marshall McLuhan quotes and maybe do a book or something. Is that anything we should go after and look into a little?” I said, “Absolutely! Are you kidding?”

And, so, it’s one book I’m still most proud of, one of the projects that I think went a little under the radar on one hand and, on the other hand, I think it’s fairly timeless stuff that he said in terms of being, of course, way ahead of his time. It just didn’t quite have the impact we thought it might, or would have, in reintroducing McLuhan’s work to a whole new generation.

SD: No doubt. I mean, having the names McLuhan and Carson next to each other, one would think that people would jump at the chance to see it?

DC: Well, you know, it’s funny, I think at the time it was so close to the End of Print but not that close, and maybe the other books and my guess is that there were people who thought those books got too popular. And so, I think, when the Probe[s] book came out, it didn’t get the attention it might have. Even if it was published now as a brand-new book, it would likely get a lot more attention than it got then. I just think somehow the timing was off. It was too soon maybe in my world still; people weren’t ready to fully embrace the idea. There may also have been other issues with the distribution and other stuff that I don’t know about but I haven’t really thought about that. I would say for sure, if the Probes book had been released today, it would have caused a lot more of a stir than it did when it was released. Yeah, so it’s a bit of a lost little gem; I think it’s a book worth having.

SD: Staying with McLuhan, he often referred to the connection between us, as human beings, and our ‘extensions’: our tools, media, and technology. In short, our tools and other extensions ‘accelerate’ our technological growth and progress as a civilisation, and this relates to his oft-quoted phrase, “the medium is the message”. You’ve often said that designers don’t need to learn the rules in order to break them. But, with more and more designers relying on software to be ‘creative’, do you think the tool has now come to dominate to the message?

DC: My immediate response would be: yes, it’s all toned-down now, making it all too similar. Yeah, it’s too available. I think, in terms of expressive graphic design, it has certainly been a negative influence, which is not quite what people expected, myself included.

In the early ’90s, I remember going to Germany; my early work was popular there, and I have had some big exhibitions in galleries and museums in pretty much every city there. I visited a lot of the design colleges [while] in Germany at that time, and I was impressed that they all had computers for every student. Nowhere in the world, that I knew of, had that kind of infrastructure yet, including the [United] States. Every kid had a brand-new computer and printer. I remember telling a friend, a designer in London who was at Tomato Design Group, that “I think Germany is where the next big thing is going to come from — they’ve got all this stuff already, they’re way ahead of everybody else.” And I will always remember him shaking his head, implying that it’s not coming from Germany and, in hindsight, he was right. They had the toys, and it was something different with the promise of a new approach, but it never did, it never happened, it never came from there. And you could argue that maybe it came from nowhere; everything has kind of gentrified since then.

In my lectures now, I talk about it almost like there’s a button. If you need to do a title, you push it and you get all-caps, flush-left, and the title is done. But that’s, of course, really saying: “Don’t read me — keep walking” because it’s all communicated before people start reading it. That’s helped this mundane era in design that we’ve been in for a long time now. And, you know, of course, one could carry that out to logos done on websites for US$29,95, and all the stuff. And that’s why I think a lot of this handmade stuff is getting attention and interest again.

SD: You often quote McLuhan from The Book of Probes for stating: “If you are totally immersed in something, it is no longer work; it’s play or leisure.” Many facets of human life seem to inform your work — naivety, emotion, curiosity, expression, and so on — and in a way, this is your play or leisure, all intimately related to your process. Does this fascination with the human condition ever flow over into socio-political and environmental spaces, especially now that Donald Trump is the US president?

DC: Well, there’s a lot of issues there. I’ve recently gotten more involved, as a lot of designers have, in plastic, to rid the world of single-use plastics. I’m also doing some things to help the fight against shark finning, and the killing of sharks for soup, and other things that have a little more of a social impact. I think this kind of work starts to get more intriguing as you get further along in your career.

The Trump thing, that’s a whole other lecture in itself. I mean, I’d like to blame it on Michael Beirut’s logo for Hillary but that might be overstating its importance. Although it was as cold and distant as she was; maybe that wasn’t a good way to go, regarding the logo itself. I did early stuff, some silk screening of a poster that just says “Trump Trump”, when it was still kind of funny, the fact that he was even running. Of course, it has long since been funny. I’m mostly in Amsterdam now, and part of that equation is thinking that maybe it is time to get out of this country that would elect and produce a president like him, and keep him in office. Something’s not right there.

SD: You have mentioned the lasting effects of design in the past. How do these lasting effects differ from the ‘timeless’, or ‘classical’, qualities that many people think ‘good’ design should have — especially, given that your work tends to negate such qualities, falling in favour of flux, interference, and disruption.

DC: Well, I guess it’s not a term that I feel I use often; it’s not like a principal I have. Yeah, I remember Massimo Vignelli, I think in the Helvetica documentary, where he talks about his design for American Airlines, and how ‘timeless’ it is, and it worked pretty well. But, within months of his passing, it was totally revamped, and it feels fresh and does something different. So, you know, I think design needs to be, and should be, of its time, but I don’t spend a lot of time on whether or not it should last forever, or be timeless. Like, people wanted me to redo Ray Gun. You can’t. It’s so different. Everything’s changed — the people, the world, everything is not there that used to be there.

I always remember John Lennon from the Beatles saying the same kind of thing, “We can’t redo that stuff; we’re all different now. You’re different. The world’s different. We can’t go back and do that tour again.” As much as I would have loved them too, it changes. So, I don’t know, I don’t get too hung up on the fact that things should be timeless.

SD: The title of your latest book, “Nuwork.collage001”, seems to be a collage in itself, complemented by the cover; tell us a little more about this.

DC: Yeah, it was a bit impromptu; the collage already existed. And, there was a part of this new body of work that’s just been happening — since last spring, actually — but the cover is a newer piece. I just thought that might make a nice cover, and then started playing with adding some type to it from an old business card, enlarge[d] it from my name. And, all of a sudden, “that feels pretty good — maybe that’s the cover?”

SD: Nuwork.collage001 definitely exhibits a fresh interest in collage, showing your desire to make things by hand, focused on craft. Would you agree?

DC: Yeah, well, you know, that’s something we haven’t really touched on so far. That’s what’s been lost with the computer and all this other stuff — it’s the craft. The craft of graphic design, I think is lost in a sense, it’s all automatic, and quick, and instant. And the craft for a student, or whoever, taking the time to separate words from a title, much less letters from a word, and actually deal with them like a real [craftsperson] would, that’s what’s going away. The loss of the whole idea of the [craftsperson], and the craft of graphic design has taken a huge hit.

SD: Yeah, I am reminded of some early pioneers of graphic design, William Morris and John Ruskin in particular. They’re pretty much in every design textbook out there, and they really spoke to me as a student. They were all about craft, and about reviving and reforming design during the latter part of the industrial revolution in the late 19th century. Do you think that maybe a return to something like the Arts and Crafts movement today would be helpful in combating this degradation of the craft of graphic design? Obviously, not with the same aesthetic, but that attitude.

DC: Yeah, absolutely, I agree 100%. And there are little stirrings of it everywhere, maybe even in some of the stuff that I am doing. But, yeah, absolutely, a return to the appreciation of craft is needed.

SD: Historically significant names like Jacques Villeglé, Hannah Höch, and Raoul Hausmann come to mind when talking about collage, and contemporary exponents like Mike McQuaid and Faile, to name a few. Do these names ring a bell, and does their work make an impact on your work?

DC: The names don’t, as I hear them. If I saw the name — and certainly if I saw the work — I might be able to say, “Oh, yeah, I love that stuff.” But I guess I feel a little bit similar now to how I felt when I started with graphic design. I mean, I wouldn’t say I’ve been a collage artist all along or even followed that. Although, in a way, I’ve always worked in a collage style, even though I can’t work with guidelines, and I don’t just arrange things on a blank artboard, originally, by hand. So, you could almost say it’s all collage. But, again, I’m not coming into it consciously knowing these names. I certainly see things that I like, that everybody does, but I’m not saying, “Oh, yeah, I have followed so-and-so the collage artist for so long.”

I still feel it’s new for me, just working with shapes and colours. I try to have type in some form in pretty much all of them. I’m already excited about the next phases, where the collages could maybe have more importance, maybe issues. Right now, they’re just the first iterations, the first round, which is really just visual. I see other work out there where there’s a little more of an issue attached, whether it’s political or not, and that seems like the next logical step for this work. At this stage I don’t like anything too literal; if people look at the work and they say, “Oh, there’s a bird and a plane,” then they’re probably not getting it. If somebody just looks at it, and feels good about it for some reason, then they’re closer. But, yeah, I feel like a novice in it, really, just literally started last spring doing these, and it’s just something I’m drawn to. I can’t get up and walk by them and not tweak something a little bit or move it around. Or, even in the middle of the night, it’s nothing I have to force.

SD: Collage is a conceptual game; it’s a little mental, especially if you look at the appropriation and juxtaposition of different surfaces, materials, and subject matter. It’s kind of insane, actually, all the fragmentation, erasure, degradation, interference all still communicating something, many things, all at once. Aside from the craft aspect, there’s a definite conceptual strength to collage that separates it from most other disciplines. Would you agree?

DC: Absolutely, yeah. It’s a huge communicator; it impacts people. And, you know, that’s one of my issues with these big agencies when they say they get this stuff. But they just don’t, they still don’t get the power of graphic design, even though they’ll say they do. I think you’re right on that.

SD: It seems that you are tentative about the fact that your work has always been part of the rubric of collage. One can argue that it’s more about fragmentation and ‘deconstruction’, as mentioned earlier, following your trademark approaches to type and other graphic elements, using mechanisms such as pastiche, erasure, cut-ups, and juxtaposition, combined with photography and other visual material. One could argue that you never really crossed over into ‘pure collage’ until very recently, evidenced by the album cover art you did for John Coltrane’s “1963: New Directions” boxset, which was released a few months ago. When I first saw this stuff, I thought this is a new period in your career. Am I correct in this reading?

DC: Yes, absolutely. I feel like I just started. I mean, I can take it back to May or June of last year; that was the first time I think I really started with collage. And I can feel it, when I look back at other work, I think that’s kind of what I was doing because I was moving things around until they felt right. But, in terms of ‘pure collage’, I think it’s brand-new. It’s been less than a year now, and kind of amazing, because I have this book already. And there’s something nice about making it happen so quickly, even though I feel like a novice. It’s early stages and I’m curious to see where it goes.

SD: You once said, wryly with a little giggle, that “even words can communicate”. This statement needs a fair amount of non-literal, fairly lateral thinking to decipher. It’s a pretty conceptual statement — is the sentiment implied here similar to your perspective on collage?

DC: Well, I think what I’m trying to say is: the shape of those words can communicate a lot. And even what they say can have some meaning as well.

SD: That’s very Burroughsian?

DC: William Burroughs said, “The word is an image”. He had a great voice, I did a little film about End of Print where he did the voiceover. We wanted him to talk about the end of print, which he didn’t want to do because he didn’t believe it was, and instead, he quoted himself: “I remember attending an exhibition called ‘Photography, the End of Painting’. It wasn’t at all.” You could just imagine that, when people perfected photography, with all those naysayers all saying, “Well, that’s it, you just ruined painting”, because they could just take photographs.

SD: Talking about American icons, like Burroughs, your work seems to show the influence of abstract expressionism. Especially, something like the album cover you did for “The Fragile”, by Nine Inch Nails. It almost seems to channel Mark Rothko, or Barnett Newman, or even Robert Rauschenberg. Newman himself saw the blank canvas as a void, implying the artist's helplessness before it. Your approach seems to be similar, based on chance, working only with the information that has been given to you. This ‘gut-feeling’ approach, liberated from systems and formulas, seems to allow you to dive straight into the void. Is this element of your creative process an effective measure against the gentrification of design that you mentioned earlier?

DC: Well, it’s not my starting point. It’s not my goal. It’s not what’s driving me, to combat this. It’s just the way I work, or enjoy working, and it’s kind of the only way I know. So, I’m not thinking of going the opposite direction to all this stuff, or to shake it up.

And I think I’ve always been drawn to abstract art. When you say abstract expressionism, I’m not even sure what you mean. But, certainly, I’m geared more towards anything abstract vs a perfect rendering of something. An, I have had trouble with that, with surf magazines where they went through a phase where the picture was only good if it was absolutely perfect. Perfect colour and perfect focus. For me, rarely is that the best solution.

SD: I was amused by one interview you did, where you mentioned the word “kook”, which is a fairly derogatory word used in the surf community to describe someone who isn’t a real surfer, even though they look and act the part. So, I thought I’d string together a question out of that. Do you think there are too many kooks in the proverbial design kitchen?

DC: Well, the short answer would be “ye”s. It’s funny because it has such a negative connotation in the surfing world, it almost feels too cruel to all these students and everybody trying hard to be a graphic designer. Somehow, it’s different, I don’t know, maybe you can pose as a surfer and be a kook but you can’t pose as a graphic designer for very long and get any kind of work done. But I would say that there are too many people now relying on the software and not putting themselves into the work. And, in some respect to that, the term “kook” is an interesting analogy.

SD: Last question. Has anyone ever sent you interview questions to review all set in Zapf Dingbats?

DC: Well, yeah, there’s a lot of issues there too, actually. No, they haven’t. What I have had is articles written, or posters done, for talks where people have done that. I haven’t had somebody actually send me the questions written in Dingbats; I think that would have been pretty good, and probably better than those who reference the original spread that I did in Ray Gun.

This always reminds me of some bands, when they say they wrote a song in the taxi in 10 minutes on the way to the studio because they needed one more song. And, all of a sudden, it’s the only song they’re known for and asked about. I feel a little bit like that with the Dingbat thing. For me, it was one spread from 30 issues of Ray Gun overall, not that big a deal. I don’t show it because I don’t think it’s that great; the design is not resolved. I don’t think the page on its own works; it’s just kind of a funny thing, and I like that aspect of it. But, from a pure design perspective, it’s not a spread I show. Yeah, so it was a once-off, one-shot, can’t do that again. And, I suspect, with the audience that the magazine had, it probably made it even a little cooler for the people that got it. But it was more about the spirit of the topic in the magazine itself. I don’t see it as any kind of big watershed, but it sure does get referenced a lot.

Somebody once told me that their teacher actually told them to go and decode that article. Which you could do, I don’t know why, but anyway.

SD: David, it’s been a pleasure talking to you. Thank you for taking the time.

DC: Yeah, well, thank you for the good questions. That’s what keeps it going.

Shane de Lange is the owner and graphic designer at www.gilgamesh.co.za. He is also the founder and curator at www.colophon.co.za.

The evolution of graphic design craft — An interview with David Carson was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There are so few independent publications currently being produced in South Africa, and even fewer with a coherent design sensibility. All the more reason to know about those publications that have made a historic impression, and support those that are currently trying to create history. It should be commonplace to encourage the production of new alternative, experimental, counterculture, and independent publications, as they are important cultural vessels representative of the way that any given society sees itself and its own cultural identity. Such vessels are part of the Zeitgeist and help to craft cultural narratives, evolving upon and changing the established norms and vernaculars. In a few cases, these publications succeed in pushing culture to another level, assembling seemingly obscure narratives into the mainstream consciousness, influencing popular culture.

In random order, here is a list of 10 notable subversive publications produced in South Africa, comprised of magazines, journals, periodicals, and comics, including ADA, Bitterkomix, Chimurenga, Chronic, iJusi, Izwi, Jungle Jim, Mk Bruce Lee, Ons Klyntji, Sheet, Stet, and Wurm.

1. iJusi (1995 — Present)

iJusi is an experimental magazine first published in the early years following South Africa’s inaugural democratic elections, circa 1994. From the beginning, iJusi posed an important question: “What makes me South African, and what does that ‘look’ like?”. Gradually, iJusi started visualizing the various cultural dichotomies and social potentialities that evolved following the demise of Apartheid. As was the case with the Soviet Union in 1917, a new social order begets a new visual order.

Garth Walker published the first issue of iJusi in early 1995 from his studio in Durban, then called Orange Juice design. From its onset iJusi sponsored a burgeoning South African visual culture. Subsequent issues have made invaluable contributions to the ongoing discourse about representation and identity in South Africa. iJusi is still currently independently published by Walker in a small print run, roughly twice yearly from his Durban-based graphic design studio, now called Mister Walker.

Despite having a print-run in the low hundreds (roughly 300), iJusi has developed a worldwide following. Resultantly, the magazine has reached cult status, largely due to its rarity and the fact that it has never been commercially for sale, but rather distributed gratis to anybody who sees the value in iJusi’s mission. The fact that iJusi is Africa’s only experimental Design magazine may also factor into its popularity amongst collectors.

iJusi can be seen as a testament to a developing country dealing with various socio-economic and political stratifications. iJusi is a platform of discovery, safeguarding the wealth of talent, rich traditions, and a strong sense of heritage in South Afirca. With such diverse cultural backgrounds, each with its own contribution to make, iJusi publishes the creative poignancy of a country with a visual vocabulary that remains unrivaled.

2. MK Bruce Lee (circa 2000 — 2010)

MK Bruce Lee was an experimental, multimedia, youth culture magazine based in Cape Town during the 2000s. Inspired by the vernacular style of South African children’s Lucky Packets, the publication was designed by Peet Pienaar, with the support of his prolific creative team, which included many now-established young designers and illustrators. Working from their small, now defunct, studio called The President in Spin Street, MK Bruce Lee was an offshoot of the alternative SA music TV channel MK, and was distributed by Musica (a CD and DVD store chain that recently declared that it is shutting down). The magazine was also edited by Hunter Kennedy, guitarist and lyricist for the legendary Afrikaans rock band, Fokofpolisiekar.

MK Bruce Lee was a quarterly publication, with every issue produced in a different format, evolving from lucky packets to cereal boxes and containing a variety of printed media and formats that were designed with skill and taste, all combined with a clear South African tone of voice. Featured here, one of two special edition covers for the first-ever issue is musician Karen Zoid as a schoolgirl. The other cover featured a schoolboy portrait of musician Francois van Coke (lead singer of Fokofpolosiekar). This was the case because the magazine published a ‘Bruce’ for boys and a ‘Lee’ for girls. This issue contained a number of postcards and stickers, a 128-page A-to-Z handbook teaching readers how to start a rock band, and hand-signed posters from bands and music artists Van Coke Kartel, aKing, and Jax Panik, to name a few.

Due to the nature of the magazine’s format and irregular packaging, it was incredibly disposable and often contained perishables inside, making existing copies very rare. No other publication of this kind exists in South African publishing history, which makes MK Bruce Lee iconic. This point is reinforced by the Silver CLIO that MK Bruce Lee won at the 50th Annual CLIO Awards in 2009, for editorial design.

3. Bitterkomix (1992 — Present)

Since its launch in 1992, Bitterkomix has evolved with South Africa’s shifting socio-political landscape over the years since independence, continuing to combine various narratives and topics, from eroticism to violence. Deconstructing stereotypes surrounding gender, sexuality, race, tradition, religion, and the like, Bitterkomix challenges ongoing political and institutional censorship in South Africa.

Irreverent in its approach and language, the co-founders of Bitterkomix, Anton Kannemeyer (Joe Dog) and Conrad Botes (Konradski), have spent three decades constructing a dark, almost seething criticism of the mainstream, conservative, Afrikaner cultural rubric; where both artists have strong traditional roots and ancestral links. Using hyperbole, satire, analogy, and parody as tools of defiance against both past and present power structures in South Africa, Bitterkomix reference various historical and contemporary social and political issues, driving a spear through the flesh of the conservative establishment, in particular deeply entrenched Afrikaner ideologies that keep South Africa stuck in a vacuum of ignorance, ineptitude, and bigotry.

Feeding off reaction, Bitterkomix has never been in short supply of critics. Hyperbole seems to be an increasingly abstract concept to most critics to grasp, especially with the massive growth of nationalism and the powerful wave of conservatism that accompanies it. Within this volatile environment of conservatism, where almost anything is offensive — a clear indication of a society that lacks the acumen for lateral and abstract thinking — any form of parody or satire runs the risk of being severely misunderstood. The irony, idioms, appropriation; all such notions are becoming extinct within a contemporary atmosphere of amplified isolationism, fundamentalism, and extremism, making Bitterkomix such an important publication as it attempts to expose and counter this blind, empty ideological virulence.

A vicissitude of a once enlightened era, somehow still alive today, Bitterkomix has consistently pushed the envelope. Perceived by many South African’s as controversial and outrageous, internationally Bitterkomix is perceived as part of the vanguard of independent, counterculture publications.

4. Izwi (1971 — 1974)

Izwi, also known as “Stem” or “Voice”, was Phil du Plessis’ answer to the vacuum that was left behind after his previous magazine, WURM, found its demise. Albeit a meager influence on the power of the apartheid regime, Izwi unified many writers and artists who existed outside the accepted norms of the time, most of whom came from diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds.

Izwi was bimonthly, and intentionally adopted an inexpensive format in case censorship or political intervention affected the finances of the publication. Forty pages in length, the magazine was hand-crafted and tended to avoid conventional, more ‘tasteful, literary standards; it opted for younger writers who were hungrier and rawer, as opposed to the pretensions of the establishment. Twenty issues were published between 1971 and 1974, with 150 contributors and 50 artists showcased throughout its lifetime.

Izwi was under constant attack from authorities, and Du Plessis, alongside regular co-editors Stephen Gray and Wilma Stockenström, were often accused of being involved with anti-Afrikaans factionalism, in support of more subversive tribalism, liberalism, and other progressive entities. It challenged literary and political views in South Africa, and all involved with the magazine were regularly pressured by apartheid authorities for inclusive, pluralist, and experimental views. Staying true to its name, Izwe stood for the equality of all human beings supported by its manifesto, which challenged the apartheid regime’s perspective: “Izwi is the voice of All Africa”. At all times the right to freedom of expression was defended.

Notably, from its first issue onwards, Izwi included original, signed, and editioned artwork. As a result, the magazine has become quite valuable and highly collectible, with certain editions including important pieces by Walter Battiss, Casper Schmidt, Alexis Preller, Wopko Jensma, Christo Coetzee, Norman Catherine, Peter Clarke, and Cecil Skotnes, to name a few. Izwi stopped publishing in December 1974 with a flourish, printing a final double issue. It purposefully wanted to subvert the Afrikaans literary, and by proxy, political status quo.

Magazines such as WURM and Izwi were incredibly influential because they went against the grain of literary orthodoxy, especially in the context of Afrikanerdom, providing a refreshing alternative understanding of Afrikaans literary history valid to this day.

5. WURM (1966 — 1970)

WURM was a Pretoria-based periodical with a penchant for avant-garde tendencies, thanks largely to an eclectic group of contributors, most of whom were outcast from the mainstream and were rejected by most-established publications. WURM existed under the political radar and didn’t pursue political transformation, seeking rather to incite cultural change by focusing primarily on alternatives to the dull, dreary, and often dogmatic Afrikaans literary orthodoxies of the time. As such, WURM attempted to create an inclusive space for more-pluralistic forms of literary expression, even if that meant submissions of ‘lesser quality’ from contributors. The inclusion of normally silenced ‘outsider’ or ‘alternative’ contributors would later become an approach used by Stet magazine later, during the 80s.

Perhaps intentional, WURM recalls Dadaist traditions — particularly when it comes to its experimental treatment of typography and unorthodox literary practices — which culminated in the beat movement epitomized by the work of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs, to name a few (arguably culminating further with Punk). As a result, WURM was perceived as a South African avant-garde publication by many, fuelled by unusual collaborations between predominantly Afrikaans poets.

WURM was an independent periodical, sans any funding, published in incredibly limited editions. WURM’s name, phallic in association, was inspired by a poem by Eugène Marais, titled “The Soul of the White Ant”, where a worm demolishes the walls of establishment which nourish, in the form of apples, the rotten foundations of Afrikaans literature. WURM openly challenged antiquated literary institutions in South Africa, defying the accepted norms of established publishers and authors, particularly within the rubric of Afrikanerdom, embracing all that was outside the norm.

Noteworthy covers include WURM #5, published in 1967 with a cover by legendary SA artist, Walter Battiss, titled “destroying angel”. WURM #9 and #10, both published in 1968, sported a linocut by the enigmatic South African poet and artist, Wopko Jensma, which effectively combined text and visual elements. WURM #11, published in 1969, had contributions from the US, Greece, Czechoslovakia, and Belgium, as the quasi-avant-garde nature of the periodical became known to a growing international readership.

WURM ended print in 1970 due to financial and personal reasons for Phil du Plessis, who has been quoted for saying that Afrikaans literature ‘post-WURM’ had no alternative underground press other than the “wholesale disappointment” of Kol magazine (1968–1969).

6. ADA (1986 — 1996)

Edited by art critic, Jennifer Sorrell, ADA was a South African cultural magazine first published in 1986 during the height of the apartheid era. Its name is an abbreviation for “Architecture, Design, Art”, which also acted as the magazine’s tagline and effectively defined the focus of the publication. Most issues were printed using a large A3 format, with a design approach typical of the late ’80s zeitgeist in South Africa concurrent to the resistance movements fighting against apartheid, just before independence and the rise of democracy. As such, the magazine delivered an alternative type of journalism that was metropolitan and interdisciplinary, true to the spirit of resistance and transformation in South Africa at the time, and envisioned a prospective post-apartheid cultural identity.

Fourteen issues were sporadically published between 1986 and 1996. Although it could be argued that architecture is design within the scope of the magazine, art was seen to be a looser term comprising various art forms, including the fine arts, music, literature, dance, theatre, and many more. ADA discovered and supported now-important local talents, all historical contributors to South African culture, many of whom have themselves become cultural establishments.

There are too many significant moments in the magazine’s history to mention here, but some highlights include #1, which introduced Manfred Zylla; #7, which featured Helen Sebidi; #8, which featured Fook island ‘citizen’ Norman Catherine on the cover; #9, which profiled George Pemba; #11, which included an early Bitterkomix comic-strip titled “Suidoos” by Conrad Botes; #13, which had a photomontage of president Nelson Mandela by Lien Botha and an interview by Pieter-Dirk Uys with Madiba — the list goes on. The final issue, #14, published in 1996, featured contemporary legends David Goldblatt, Steven Cohen, William Kentridge, and Penny Siopis, to name a few.

Perhaps the most popular issues were the cultural “A to Z” profiles, which focused on the three largest cities in SA — Cape Town (#11), Durban (#12), and Johannesburg (#14) — which gradually developed a quasi-avant-garde narrative surrounding each scene. Based on the creative energy and cultural verve of the time.

7. Stet (1982 — 1991)

Deriving its name from a printing term meaning “let it stand”, Stet was an important avant-garde publication during the 1980s apartheid, South Africa. Oriented towards left-wing politics, Stet formed part of the resistance press and filled an obscure position within the ranks of Afrikaner orthodoxy, as it took an openly anti-apartheid stance. This ran counter to the dominant Afrikaner narrative of the time. Stet was a dissenting, rebellious voice written in Afrikaans, which emerged as an alternative stream during the ’80s, reconfiguring common reflections of traditional, Christian-National Afrikanerdom.

Edited by Gerrit Olivier and Tienie du Plessis, who also designed this so-called ‘little magazine’, Stet was in print for a decade, 1982–1992. Rooted in subversive literary traditions, Stet served to manufacture dissent, advocating reaction against apartheid. The masthead of the magazine was Du Plessis’ own handwriting. The cover copy for the first issue reflected the disillusionment that the editors had due to apartheid, which was largely supported by the dominant Afrikaner culture of the time. This tone is clear with statements on the cover such as “teen apartheid, teen sensuur” (meaning “against apartheid, against censorship”).

Stet was also a stepping stone for a young Anton Kannemeyer (of Bitterkomix fame), as it published a few of the earliest Bitterkomix comics, all with anti-conscription as their core message, undermining the apartheid regime from yet another angle.

8. Ons Klyntji (1896 — Present)

First published in 1896, Ons Klyntji is the oldest-known Afrikaans magazine. After the demise of the first incarnation of the publication, the Ons Klyntji brand was revived by popular Afrikaans folk singer, Koos Kombuis, during the ’90s, who later passed the publication on to the lead singer of a popular South African band during the 90s, Buckfever Underground, Toast Coetzer. True to its musical and literary roots, the publication is supported by Oppikoppi festival, one of the largest musical events of its kind in South Africa, and Woordfees (a literary festival sponsored by Toyota and hosted by Stellenbosch University).

Mostly literary, with a strong connection to the musical and peppered with contributions from other creative spheres, the magazine features writing, photography, art and the like from a vast array of different creative types, selected from hundreds of submissions. One certainty, Ons Klyntji runs contrary to stereotypes about Afrikaans culture, continuing a tradition that includes the contributions of other publications that inspire it today, including Stet, Izwi, WURM, and others not mentioned here, such as Ophir and Bolt.

9. Jungle Jim (2011 — 2016)

Jungle Jim was a bi-monthly, independent African pulp fiction magazine that showcased genre-based fiction from across the continent, telling “stories that explore the collision between the visceral daring of pulp and the reality of living in Africa”.

Founded in 2011 by writer and filmmaker, Jenna Bass, and illustrator and graphic designer, Hannes Bernard, Jungle Jim was a labor of love: an attempt to craft a local creative heritage, negating any ambitions to directly clone Eurocentric or American design and literary forms. Much like MK Bruce Lee, Jungle Jim found inspiration in the local South African vernacular, with words and images that spoke in an African mother tongue, from old ‘fotoboekies’ (photo albums) and tattered vintage comics, with a pinch of Bitterkomix, where B-grade sci-fi meets spaza shop facade, all in an attempt to revive a seemingly bygone subversive cultural period.

In pushing the boundaries of what could be considered a cultural mashup, an element of nostalgia exists, remixing corner café lucky packets and old Chappies wrappers. The quasi-kitsch nature of the Risograph printing on discolored newsprint, with the ‘cheap’ illustration style commissioned from established local illustrators, such as Shaun Hill (Batt Butt) and Hanno van Zyl, to name a few, further emphasized golden era thinking deconstructed. This was resourceful DIY publishing at its best.

10. Sheet (1999 — 2004)

Sheet was basically an A1 piece of paper folded into a square-format, 12-page zine. In all, there were 15 official issues published, with one side-project called “Evita” and another project done for marketing purposes for Levi’s. Published from 1999 until 2004, Sheet kept true to Punk tradition and its appropriation of the broadsheet, supported by a gritty DIY attitude. Sheet was a free hand-out, a passion project distributed by Disturbance Studio (an influential Durban-based design atelier, now defunct), with established designer and artist, Richard Hart, at the helm.

Hart collaborated with his co-editors, Kim Longhurst and Scott Robertson, who presently work from their Durban-based studio, The Curators. Together this creative team managed to produce Sheet without any advertising, gratis, with minimal commercial influence, supported by an array of established and emerging contributors. Ironically, despite Sheet’s overtly romantic rebellion against the mainstream machine, it somehow managed to generate a fair amount of commercial work for Disturbance.

Sheet had a humble print run of 1000 copies per issue and was conceived as a platform for emerging writers, artists, designers, and photographers. Each issue had a theme with an open call for submissions, with the best submissions added as content for the zine. Sheet was a way to connect with people, funded mostly by proceeds made from regular underground ‘Sheet parties’ organized by the team. These Sheet parties were legendary, always sold-out, with the posters for these fundraising events also designed by the Sheet team and supported by Disturbance studio, making them just as collectible as the zines themselves.

Although 15 issues were officially published, there is no issue no.12, with the team taking advantage of the Trick or Treat theme for issue no.13 (and the connotation of Friday the 13th). Also, the very first issue is actually numbered issue no.0. Sheet stands-out as a testament to Durban’s important creative heritage, and it contributed to a definitive Durban school of creative thought.

An archive, safeguarding South African print culture and history that is rapidly being forgotten.

There are many more examples of independent, design-oriented publishing from South Africa that could further contextualize the point being made here — niche zines like Friends and I was Kak (designed and published by Louis de Villiers), commercial street culture magazines like The Lake, and Pan-African periodicals such as Chimurenga and Chronic — but for the most part, the publications listed above have a clear South African design genealogy, at best contributing in their own way to an ongoing and constantly evolving narrative about South African visual culture. A key resource in this regard is Colophon, which is an archive where this narrative is nurtured and supported. For more about underground, alternative, counterculture, and independent publishing from South Africa, visit the Colophon Archive: www.colophon.co.za.

Shane de Lange is the owner and graphic designer at www.gilgamesh.co.za. He is also the founder and curator at www.colophon.co.za.

10 publications that contextualize design in South Africa was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I wrote the following article about Kevin Roberts, a heavily underrated South African painter, sculptor, and close friend in 2007 for a Pretoria-based magazine called “A Look Away”, a publication that I thought would be culturally and historically relevant at the time. The magazine would prove to be an unspectacular mess and tanked roughly two-years later. Around the same time in late 2009, Kevin died of cancer. A little over a decade since his death, this article accidentally emerged from the doldrums of my writing archives, and after reading it again for the first time in so many years, I can’t get over the naivety of the writing, and at the same time the incredible window it opens into the friendship that I had with Kevin. In this spirit, the text has not been edited or updated, an ode to a time, and memory, that is now far away, but still stays with me.

It was September, late in the evening, and copious amounts of Shiraz and Merlot had led Kevin Roberts and me to leave the comfort of our loaded conversation, outside, around a warm fire. In our heightened state of awareness, we decided to childishly wander off into the cold, dark bushveld on the outskirts of a hamlet called Rosendal near the border of Lesotho and the Orange Free State. Our task was to reach a distant red light, which looked to be some kind of aircraft beacon on top of a hill on the other side of a large open grazing field. As we walked I realized the fascination that often strikes me when I leave the city and enter the countryside, where it seems plausible just to forget everything and get lost in the vastness of the landscape; disappear, never to be heard from again. At the same time, one also feels an odd connection to the surroundings by virtue of one’s disconnection from nature and dependence on the supposed sanctities of the city. As we haphazardly stumbled across the uneven, cattle trodden ground an unlikely sense of awe entered my mind, knowing that we were about fifty kilometers away from the nearest town. Of course, despite the effect of the red wine, reason interjected and I soon dispelled my overtly sentimental ideals, falling back into the narcissism of human reason.

Perhaps it was our scholarly ramblings, which certainly generated some relevant discourse, or maybe it was the resonating image in my mind of Kevin’s painting on the wall back at the house, but I came to realize that the integrity of his subject matter is oddly reminiscent of the area that we navigated that night in the highlands of the Basotho people. The silhouettes of the sandstone cliffs, moonlit thorn bushes, and windswept grasslands in the distance created an undeniably South African vernacular image in my mind that had an uncanny resemblance to the images in Kevin’s artworks. His idiom is interwoven with rich visual tapestries that seem tailored to the farmlands of the Eastern Free State where we found ourselves exploring that night. The indigenous colors, cognizant gestures, and considered textures of Kevin’s compositions are stitched and cross-hatched onto traditional themes such as portraiture, still-life, and landscape painting to reveal the underlying poetry that is diversely South African. Although much of the imagery in Kevin’s work is painted from memory, this geography in the Eastern Free State, with its cattle, corrugated iron roofs, grasslands, dams, and irrigation, could be serialized as the inspiration for his paintings. Local crafts such as weaving, braiding, and pattern painting seem to be dominant techniques that Kevin uses to customize the topography of his works. He unconsciously mediates the patterns of the land with the crafts of the people inhabiting it. Although Kevin does not directly comment on the socio-political issues at hand, he does appropriate certain activities and trends in order to cut and paste his mythology together. Teaming fish, chopped and gathered twigs, plowed fields, and sown crops may suggest some sort of commentary on the economic structure of this country, and many of these analogies were commonplace in that area of our boisterous voyage. More so, these icons represent the life-sustaining flora and fauna of the land, canons to the labored over the soil. This approach is also symbolized by Kevin’s use of fishnets, reservoirs, and various environmental measuring tools, which reminded me that despite the isolated position the presence of man was undeniable, evidenced by the glowing red beacon that Kevin and I were traveling towards.

As we walked we discussed Kevin’s design motifs and how he fuses the naturalism of his subject matter with the abstraction of his metaphors to create a serialized and patterned realism. This vernacular is continued in his use of wooden parquet flooring and lattice screens, netting, doilies, and lacey algorithms, which he superimposes and juxtaposes with flat or textured surfaces, thereby toying with the perception of realism, naturalism, and abstraction. The landscape itself becomes a lattice of meaning and signification, a matrix of symbols and archetypes born from human systems of categorization and organization (taxonomy and teleology). Cattle tags and plant tags, along with various other labels also suggest the historicism and materialism of the world that became obvious to me that night. Kevin did not seem too concerned with my embellished commentary of his work, making me come to the conclusion that he was somehow ulterior to the petty proclamations of the postmodern meta-narrative, comparable to the attitude that Jean Dubuffet had towards the foundations of art, or Michel Foucault had towards the structures of society.

By the time that Kevin and I had reached the end of the field, which was bordered by a barbed-wire fence, forbidding us from reaching our target, he briefly described the infrastructure of the surrounding farms. Despite the intrusive economic necessity of human development, the rawness of the territory was still apparent to me. After taking some night pictures of the distant Maluti Mountains we began to make our way back to the house and the thought of a warm fire became quite a source of comfort to me. We went on to discuss this ulterior nature of his work, being neither traditionalist nor conceptualist nor overly theoretical. His formal stance can be compared to that of a Renaissance master, but he clearly plays with institutional limitations and reconstructs traditions using rehashed modernist notions, such as deconstruction, fragmentation, and repetition. This is coupled with a random, almost contradictory knowledge of critical theory and philosophy, using notable archetypes such as the Jungian, dualistic analysis of anima and animus, which would certainly explain Kevin’s use of various, similar-looking women in his work and his placement of texts such as The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan in some of his paintings.

If one had to theorize about Kevin’s work then I suppose that, much like de Chirico or Magritte, his act of completion is established on the primacy of his environment, focused on the brutality the individual subconscious and the ubiquity of the collective unconscious. Kevin’s various overlaid, superimposed, saturated, multiplied, juxtaposed, and repeated metaphors, signs, symbols, patterns, texts, and naturalistic, illusory elements structure a humble iconography that embraces the ‘outsider’ traits of naivety, innocence, and primitiveness. He executes this iconography with the utmost level of skill and intelligence, creating a silent discourse around territories, universals, absolutes, and borders. His work is almost anarchic in its subtlety, abstract in its realism, tentatively and sensitively suggesting memory and history, diversity and difference, passage and time, containment and freedom, nature, and culture.

As we got back we doused the fireplace outside, picked up the empty wine bottles, and entered the house. Kevin started the fireplace inside and put some coffee on the boil. I began to conclude my thoughts, devising odd couplings in my head, such as idiosyncratic multiplicity. The final thought was that Kevin makes art that is neither postmodernist nor modernist; his approach can be described as non-conformist to such conditions. The didactic and cultural nature of his work always keeps the door open to debate, but he does not consciously make art to fit within the contemporary regime of South African art, and the often paradoxical character of his work surprises even the most conceptual sensibility.

Shane de Lange is the owner and graphic designer at www.gilgamesh.co.za. He is also the founder and curator at www.colophon.co.za.