20.10.08
Remembering John Gorham

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There have several instances recently where an almost forgotten name of British graphic design, John Gorham, has cropped up. Alan Parker highlighted his work in D&AD’s recent 45 years exhibition, and we discovered, whilst writing about designer monographs, that a planned book on his work lies half-done, waiting for a publisher.

Gorham was admired by a generation of designers working in the seventies and early eighties, but because his work was defiantly anti-computer and definitely pre-internet, there’s virtually nothing to be found on him in cyberspace. I’d even forgotten that I had written about him back in the late nineties. So I’ve dug out my notes for that piece and asked around for images, and there follows a partial redressing of the balance.

It was difficult in the nineties to find out about Gorham. Now it’s virtually impossible. You can’t walk into a bookshop and flick through his life history. His name doesn’t appear in Design Week or Campaign. Eye have never run a feature. Creative Review once ran an article, but decades ago. Ask a bunch of twenty something designers about him, and most will frown and shake their heads. Tap ‘John Gorham designer’ into Google Images and you don’t get one single piece of his work. Not one.

Even your writer, who happily stuffs his office and spare room with design books of every size and shape, had to delve a bit before meeting him in 1999, before his untimely death. But it doesn’t take long to find out that the annuals throughout the seventies and eighties are peppered with examples of his work, sometimes as designer, sometimes typographer, sometimes illustrator, often all three. Idly picking up a mid-seventies annual this week, his name seemed to be all over numerous, consecutive pages of editorial work.

It’s only when you dig a little deeper that you discover that, not only did he produce an enormous array of work over a forty year period, but his influence on and collaborations with some of the more stellar (and better publicised) names of the business were far-reaching and highly influential.

Look up that early seventies Windsor & Newton packaging work that Michael Peters and Partners produced (which arguably influenced every range of packaging that followed) and there, in the small print is the name ‘John Gorham, Design Consultant’. One might associate the seventies and eighties work for the typesetter Face with one of its founding partners, John McConnell, but dig again and there is often a collaboration with Gorham.

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Or this fantastic collaboration with Peter Blake. The Gill Family? Just great.

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A commission from McConnell’s then assistant, David Stuart, to design a pub sign for The Cricketers in 1979 led to a request for a repeat performance from the Partners eight years later as part of a series they were designing for Wood & Wood.

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And then there are pieces such as his Red Monarch poster, designed with Howard Brown, that simply stand as one of those paradigm shifts that occasionally arrive and grab graphic design by the metaphorical short and curlies.

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Freelance from 1967 onwards, Gorham always preferred to stay a bit of a loner. He never wanted the comfort zone of a big company or partnership, although he could probably have established himself as the equal of that first wave of British design companies (Pentagram, Michael Peters, Minale Tattersfield). He relied on friendships and referral to supply him with a stream of eminent names from film, design and advertising past and present as clients. He did may projects with Alan Parker over the years, establishing a relationship so strong that Parker allegedly warned Paul Weiland off from using him, saying ‘go and find your own designer’.

Hugh Hudson, Frank Lowe, Peter Mayle, Tim Delaney. Aimless name-dropping? No, just Gorham’s client list. Gorham happily span yarns to me about his one-time clients such as the legendary ‘BJ’, Robert Brownjohn, who said to Gorham once ‘I don’t like your big nose, I don’t like the way you dress, there’s absolutely nothing I like about you but it doesn’t mean we can’t work together’. He talked of that time as ‘innocent’. ‘It was like meeting friends from school, you virtually knew everybody because it was so small’.

During his 10 year stint teaching a day a week at the RCA he influenced another generation who were to make their mark in the eighties (such as the late Nick Wurr and Keren House, both founder principals of The Partners). A certain R. Seymour gained his first yellow pencil for these music books whilst working as Gorham’s assistant in 1977, before turning to product design.

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Mary Lewis apparently talks of one of Gorham’s meticulously hand rendered comps for a beer can design as one of the reasons she became a packaging designer. Aziz Cami held his work in such high esteem he awarded Gorham the D&AD president’s award, in 1993. (That’s three D&AD ex-presidents in two paragraphs, in case you’re counting).

Gorham’s style was all about the idea first, the idea, after that, the idea. Whilst some of his solutions now seem a little whimsical and retro, as London’s army of would-be Müller-Brockmanns play with tightly leaded Helvetica or juggle Bauhaus-inspired geometry, Gorham was from the in-between era. An era fuelled by the vernacular experiments of Pushpin in New York and retro typography that created a new language of illustrative type and illustration. For a decade or so it was everywhere and everything to graphic design.

Because of his unwillingness to stick to any one style he kept re-inventing himself, appropriating any graphic language he saw fit to carry his idea through. With the benefit of hindsight several of his designs stand as graphic year zeros from which all that follows must be judged. His Lion bar design, when it arrived on the chocolate counters of the mid-seventies represented a huge breakthrough for packaging. I remember buying one, aged thirteen, thinking, ‘how can this cost the same as a Mars bar when it looks so much more expensive?’

His design for a Marcel Proust slipcase and book covers, painstakingly researched from old bookplates, kicked off a whole host of letterspaced Baskerville caps imitations that continued for at least a decade. His poster for the English Riviera unfortunately encouraged a whole generation of designers to pretend that they actually were 1930’s poster artists.

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In part his unwillingness to ‘stick to a style’ makes historical analysis more difficult - some of these approaches were more or less successful than others (or more or less ripped off), in varying degrees. I can’t actually assess this riviera poster any more because a legion of 80s copyists, in my eyes at least, rendered the original toothless. But there’s nothing new there.

Over the years many have mentioned Gorham’s lack of formal training (true), that he taught himself graphics mainly from books (true) and that he eventually put the books away to stop them influencing him (also true). He was described as ‘the quintessentially English’ designer and as ‘the graphic John Betjeman’, more likely to be influenced by a drawing on an old coffee tin than any passing trend or fad. Boil many graphic designers down to their true core and you will discover the rump of asymmetric modernism, happy to range left and specify Akzidenz until the cows come home but this was anathema to Gorham - ‘if someone asked me to create a poster with irrational, typographic eccentricity like that, I don’t think that I could do it’ he told me. His theory didn’t emanate from inter-war design doctrines, it was more likely to be influenced by a sign in a launderette or a green felt pin-board; the ordinary detritus of everyday life.

When he and I met, there was no hiding his distrust of modern graphics, its reliance on the computer and any inference that his way of working might be from another time.

‘I hate the idea of being old-fashioned, or new-fashioned’ he said, before asking ‘am I correct, that people now don’t solve graphic problems any more?’ in a slightly exasperated voice. In something of a sideswipe at the machines he produced a self promotional poster in the nineties which simply used a photo of the back of an envelope and a pencil. Under the envelope he wrote ‘my only gizmo’, under the pencil ‘and its mouse’. Much acclaimed by his contemporaries (Hegarty phoned, Fletcher wrote), the poster failed in its primary task, which was to get some work. He identifies this as the point when he stopped trying, then aged sixty-four.

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At one point there was a sense with the ‘forgotten’ seventies heroes that their work would never be re-assessed, that graphic design’s turn back to modernism has been so marked that British whimsy has been wiped away. But the decorative revival seen recently in illustration has led to illustrator Alan Aldridge's re-assessment (and accompanying exhibition at the Design Museum), so perhaps a revival of Gorham’s approach could soon be upon us.

You get the feeling that his work needs to be collected somewhere, somehow, soon before a significant name of British graphic design simply fades away.

Beryl McAlhone (co-author of ‘Smile in the mind’) and James Beveridge (ex of The Partners) have been researching a book on Gorham’s work but are thus far unable to find a publisher. Please email info[at]johnsonbanks[dot]co[dot]uk if you want to help.

The above piece is based on a conversation between Michael Johnson and John Gorham in 1999.

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