New Modes of Production and Australian Graphic Design Culture

'The Bulletin' columnist David McNicoll in 1983 identified that histories of 'The Australian Women’s Weekly' neglected art director Tom Hughes’s improved format and studio manager Bob Cleland’s pioneering use of colour photography. Thirty-five years later this relationship of designer, photographer, printer and product remains unexamined. Moreover, of considerable neglect, is the graphic designer’s role in transforming an inveterate Australian newspaper trade into a mass communication industry. This research is a ‘narrative inquiry’ that interweaves first-hand experiences with biographical, visual and contextual data into three chronologies. The endeavour is to transform this diverse and scattered data into narratives describing the events and encounters with Australian colour technologies. At the first narrative’s core is the inception of Australian process engraving, photolithography and commercial art. The second revolves around Australian full-service advertising agencies and its relationship with commercial art and graphic design. The last reflects on the late-century apogee of Australian graphic design culture, its professionalisation and its interaction with digital technologies. Data for this study was gathered from sixteen interviews with photographers, designers, printing professionals and a journalist. Primary sources include diaries, letters, company and union records, contemporaneous newspaper and journal articles, observations of original magazines, newspapers and ephemera. Emerging from the interviews are themes of lost skills, knowledge and practices, and new systems and models. In 1992 historian Richard Hollis self-consciously argued that graphic design is not just visual communication, it is visual communication seen by graphic designers to be graphic design. Graphic design history is a baffling subject, it perpetuates printing history, while Hollis’s amorphous definition leaves it unhinged. To alleviate this roadblock Elizabeth Eisenstein’s 1979 methodology for the examination of sixteenth-century printing culture is embraced. Her approach concentrates on new occupational groups employing new workshop techniques and equipment to supply new markets. Her directive was to examine the force, effect and consequence of human invention. This research examines the force and effect of colour technologies on Australian printing and graphic design industries and the Australian graphic design culture that was its consequence.

Grantor dc:publisher

UNSW, Sydney

Year dc:date

2019

Author dc:creator

• Martin, John Henry

• Australian graphic design culture
• Production modes

Statement dc:rights

• open access
• CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
• free_to_read

Licence

• https://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_abf2
• https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/au/

Language dc:language

EN

Identifier

https://doi.org/10.26190/unsworks/3701

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:unsworks.library.unsw.edu.au:1959.4/61963