Graphic Journey Blog: June 2015

Back in 1967, I was working for an American design consultancy that had set up shop in London.

This book was produced while I was there. Roger Harris, who had just joined us, designed it.

It was about the contemporary interior design of the period, and Roger produced the whole book on a classic Swiss grid system of verticals and horizontals, except, that is, for the cover, where he introduced a curve to reflect the very curvy furniture that populated the book and a more general change in the air for graphics.

A very curvaceous Sophia Loren in The Millionairess 1960, directed by Anthony Asquith

In fact, the ’60s and early ’70s were all about the reintroduction of the curve in graphics, furniture, architecture, textiles, shop fronts, typography, wallpaper, restaurants, lighting, magazines and film stars (yes, even they were more curvy back then), and there was even a revolving restaurant at the very top of the Post Office Tower below (now called the BT Tower), at which I was taken to lunch.

Many of the concrete brutalist buildings constructed during the 1960s were often softened by the occasional curve. This one, a multi-storey car park in Gateshead, was made famous in the crime film Get Carter but, like so many of these inhuman structures, has now been demolished, along with the many hastily built high-rise flats that alienated so many of the people that had to live in them.

The car park in Gateshead made famous in the crime film Get Carter.

Below the Barbican Centre opened in 1982 designed by Chamberlin Powell and Bon.

Shopfront for the Chelsea Drug Store on Kings Road 1970.

The Kineta Holiday home designed by Alexandros Tombazis 1968

Former bank of London or Lloyds Bank. By Clorindo Testa, Buenos Aires 1960's. Picture from buenosairesphotographer.com

The Queen Elizabeth Hall's curved doors at the Southbank Centre arts complex opened in 1967

Oliver Mourgue's chairs used in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey 1968

Joe Colombo's Universal chair 1965.

The TWA Terminal JFK designed by Eero Saarinen 1962

Arco lamp designed by Achilli and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni for Flos 1962.

Eero Saarinen seated in his Tulip arm chair 1956 and to the right his classic Womb chair 1947/8

The Dress Circle restaurant at Harrods 1968.

Margaret Calvert and Jock Kinneir’s now much-celebrated British road signs, conceived in the late ’50s and introduced nationwide in 1965, have lovely curved corners.

Biba packaging logo designed by Antony Little (1966)

Graphic for the Time & Place night club design by Bentley Farrell Burnett 1969

The influence of art deco and art nouveau filtering from the US was beginning to corrupt the hold that the hard-edged clinical modernist principles had on British graphics, perhaps with the added influence that the increasing use of LSD was having in changing visual perception at the time into a kaleidoscopic wonder world of possibilities. Whatever it was, the curve was finding its way into fabrics, wallpapers, shop fronts and restaurants. Let’s take a look.

Design magazine cover by Bentley Farrell Burnett 1970

Rubber Soul abum by The Beatles 1965 with hand lettering by Charles Front

Mary Quant in Honey magazine in 1965

1960's Wallpaper

Chaise Longue designed by Geoffrey Harcourt 1970.

Fabrics designed by Barbara Brown 1965 (top) and 1967.

The first Pirelli Calendar designed by Derek Birdsall 1968.

Massimo Vignelli’s perpetual calendar designed in 1980

Derek Birdsall designed this first Pirelli calendar in 1968, which seemed to sync with Massimo Vignelli’s later perpetual calendar designed in 1980 and still in use in many studios and homes today, including mine. But wind back to 1959 and Willy Fleckhaus, art director of the legendary magazine Twen,often used curved borders to contain photographs and illustrations. A little later, Harri Peccinotti echoed Twen’s look on the very first Nova cover.