Most designers establish recognition and reputation through an evolving “style”. Not so John Morgan studio, which starts every job from “zero”, preferring thoughtfulness, humour and the English design tradition to flights of fashion. As Jonathan Bell discovered when he visited the studio, every John Morgan job stands on its own two design legs.
The staircase leading up to John Morgan’s compact Hackney Studio delivers a timely reminder of the ways things once were. It’s a chunky, purpose-built, concrete-shelled building hosting a number of businesses, from modern design studios to traditional scissors-sharpeners. On each landing, the floor level is marked by an old-hand-painted sign, just a piece of wood with a carefully stencilled sans-serif text. But in the time since these studios were finished and the present day, such mundane examples of ad-hoc yet functionally designed objects seem to have entirely vanished from everyday life.
For Morgan, together with his collaborator of twelve months Michael Evidon, these vanishings are symptomatic of the slow erosion of the importance of design. His is a studio steeped in the tradition of design as a means of enhancing, illuminating, but never overwhelming, the message or the content. Yet Morgan is a designer seemingly operating outside fashion, with a broad and varied client list and little interest in stamping a distinct studio style on his work. Recent work includes designs for poetry workshops, a new prayerbook for the Church of England, exhibition graphics for the Design Museum and several small circulation magazines.
Morgan has often been pigeonholed as something of a modern traditionalist, determined to reclaim design from merely showboating and return it to the forefront of visual culture. It’s a position at odds with the status quo, and one that is sharpened by his biting sense of humour and rare self-awareness. His ironic Vow of Chastity, written back in 2001, was a tongue-in-cheek anti-manifesto, aimed squarely at the students he was then teaching at Central St Martins. The Vow was a kind of Dogme 95 for print, railing against the voguish, image-saturated work that was starting to emerge, and in the process going to extremes, simultaneously satirising all forms of designer excesses, be they form for form’s sake, or hair-shirted isolationism. Nonetheless, Morgan isn’t rejecting these ideas out of hand; his monograph for Mike Figgis, best known for his stripped-back, digital video-led approach to filmmaking and loose affiliation with the cinéma verité of the Dogme School, was a chance to put some of these ideas into practice. Morgan describes the book “as being allowed to design itself,” with notes hand-written directly onto layouts and stills grabbed through Adobe Premiere and outputted on an ink-jet, then scanned for repro.
To better understand Morgan’s position one needs to examine his path through Britain’s systems of education and entertainment. The thirty-two-year-old studied typography at the University of Reading, one the country’s foremost – and most self-confessedly ascetic – design courses. Reading’s typographers – who are allowed on the course straight from school without the dubious benefit of a year-long foundation course – typically go on to work in publishing, hacking away at the unfashionable coal-face of pure type. Following Reading, Morgan undertook a fruitful five-year collaboration with Derek Birdsall at Omnific. The John Morgan Studio was founded in 2000, and along the way he has found time to be a founding member of Workplace Co-operative 115, a new studio building in Kentish Town designed by Dan Monck and Duncan Kramer and intended as a gathering place for like-minded creatives.
Now happily ensconced in Hackney, he believes that his apparent status as a “modern traditionalist” is more accident than design. “It’s not a conscious thing – it’s not that we produce work that is unfashionable, we just aim for a longer shelf life.’ Yet although he emphasises the importance of working ‘without dogma, without fashion – not to impose a style”, his influences betray a very English school of thoughtful design, practitioners who strove to educate and illuminate, working in close collaboration with each other for the common good. What could turn into an unbearably solemn and austere obsession with ‘good work – and “good works” – is tempered by a well-developed sense of humour and self-awareness, and a desire actually to create real things, rather than spin arcane theories (an approach advocated by the late Norman Potter in What is a designer, a text Morgan considers hugely influential).
He is emphatically against the cyclical nature of graphic-design culture – “we believe in starting from zero” – and would be the first to admit that he doesn’t have a “coherent body of work.”
“Why should a prayerbook look like a book by Mike Figgis?” he asks. “This is the only place they’ll be seen together, in a design magazine” The prayerbook was a project started with Birdsall and then taken on by Morgan on his own. A prayerbook has long-standing visual conventions dating back centuries, and their version updates these elements. The clear text is set in black, red and bold type, while the actual object itself is highly produced, with over 900 pages, six coloured ribbons, a thick cover and the perfect weight and feel. “Books are as much about materials and the way they sit in the hand,” he explains, stressing the importance of choosing the right materials and not hurrying a complex process that involved much to-ing and fro-ing with committees and commissions.
Lest one think that Morgan is concerned only with ancient liturgies and handsome bindings, consider some of the recent work to come out of his studio. Voices of White City, started in 2004, is a large-scale public artwork at the BBC’s new White City building (designed by Allies and Morrison). Morgan has replaced existing granite pavers with a darker-hued stone, using the small 90mm square blocks to form letters than run 98 metres along the length of the space. The inspiration is not pixels but embroidery, like that of a tapestry sampler, with the size and spacing of the courtyard determining the precise amount of text needed (the brief to Andrew Motion was for a series of words with just fourteen characters per line). An apparently abstracted panel in the centre actually contains Motion’s entire poem distilled into binary code.
Another BBC project will create a line of text running along a giant hoarding enveloping one of the corporation’s newest building projects. Instead of painting the hoarding, or scaling up a print item to fit the space, Morgan will use 10,000 circular stickers – in red, green and blue and pre-printed with a varieties of community-generated texts and poems – arranged on a grid, which will then be turned into dot matrix text by the simple act of peeling off the relevant stickers. These letters will disappear still further as passers-by remove yet more stickers (which will end up scattered across West London), eventually leaving the hoarding empty, an ultra-low-cost solution for the site. Other recent work includes exhibition graphics for the Design Museum’s permanent collection, Designing Modern Life, which utilities off-the-shelf shelving components as a way of generating a grid. There’s also the layout of a new book, Experiments in Architecture, which takes a decidedly low-fi approach to architectural publishing, eschewing the coffee table aesthetic in favour of a polemical paperback that includes contributions from Cedric Price and Bruce McLean.
The sticker project in particular, with its emphasis on impermanence and uncontrolled dissemination goes some way to dispelling the image of Morgan as an ideologue wedded to tried and tested means of delivery. His stated aim to “minimise the arbitrary” and make strategies and ideas “bullet-proof”, owes much to Derek Birdsall’s desire to fuse typography’s innate invisibility and subjugation to the text with the more elaborate means of delivery highlighted by the movement. That said, Morgan is dismissive of “people [who] are seduced by these European heroes,” preferring the quiet tradition of progress typified by the Arts and Crafts movement, “an English modernism” which aspired to influence the whole of society, from Charles Ashbee, W.R.Lethaby and William Morris, through Eric Gill to Lewis Mumford and Anthony Froshaug and more.
Morgan’s critique of the systems within which the designer has to operate is informed by his personal outlook, gentle nibbling rather than actually biting at the hand that feeds. In part, this is due to his rejection of irony – “no knowing winks (with hooded eyes)” – as a cultural device. His spell teaching at St Martins seemed to end in frustration, but you feel the students are far poorer for the absence of his challenging briefs with their obtuse questionnaires (“what is the difference between honesty and sincerity in your work?”, read one, quoting Norman Potter), provocations that underscore his belief that the “tightest brief really produces the best work.” Taken to extremes this resulted in the Vow of Chastity (“Formats must not be ‘A’ sizes. Paper must be chlorine free. It must be off-white.”) and you sense that Morgan really does holds certain of its tenets to heart (“no thoughtless application of style.”)
Above all, Morgan’s studio produces work that demonstrates a rare combination of intelligence and humour, both somewhat missing, especially in combination, from the contemporary design scene. Writing has proved an integral part of process, with frequent contributions to Typography Papers and Dot Dot Dot. His descriptions of briefs and projects, movements and provocations, all have a deft economy of word, something that has clearly come from years of assessing and really understanding texts, and having the desire to produce work that genuinely complements them. Morgan’s series of quasi-imaginary conversations with “The Artist,” “The Publisher” and even “The Taxi Driver” (first published in Dot Dot Dot) are droll set-pieces that encapsulate the frustrations, misunderstandings and sleight of hand that characterise contemporary design production (“So John, I want it to look contemporary,” says The Publisher. “By definition, if I’m doing it today it’ll be contemporary,” says Morgan’s thinly-fictionalised alter-ego. “Yes, yes. I don’t want it to be boring. Use plastic or something.”)
The issue of class is also raised, albeit circumspectly, by Morgan, who gently questions graphic design’s continuing subservient role, kowtowing to the double-barrelled captains of art and industry who continue to hold the keys to the commissioning process. At the same time, he acknowledges that “most design is produced by non-graphic designers,” implying that the industry, such as it is, faces an ongoing battle for recognition. Exhortations to cheap and vulgar novelty are clearly not Morgan’s style, implying perhaps that the world will have to change before he does. The refusal to adopt a “house style” is oxymoronical in a world entranced by branding, yet it is consistent with Morgan’s desire to “capture the spirit of the content – the only way to produce fresh work.” Morgan likes to work as closely as possible with an artist or author, arguing that “you want to make sure you know the content [of a book] better than the client,” and believes fervently that “it’s impossible to produce good work with bad content.” In a world where design is increasingly becoming the content itself, creating a cyclical feedback loop that degrades still further with each revolution, designers like John Morgan provide a welcome – and necessary – counterpoint.