When young graphic design company Kerr|Noble was nominated by design bible Creative Review for an editorial design award, founding partner Frith Kerr says she and business partner Amelia Noble thought: ‘We’d better do some editorial design!’ The pair were working on their first book, but realised it wouldn’t be ready in time for the Creative Review exhibition. Instead, the two designers decided to produce a magazine. They quickly pulled together a team of writers, filmmakers and photographers, hauled them all off to Highgate Cemetery for some creative inspiration, and then left each to their own devices.
‘We decided we wanted to do something location-based – there wasn’t a brief beyond that,’ Kerr recalls. ‘So, one of the writers wrote a brilliant ghost story. Another one wrote about death and dying. One of the photographers was a fashion photographer, and she went and did a shoot which was based around dark, wooded, overgrown areas.’
‘We didn’t have a huge agenda about what we wanted to say about Highgate Cemetary,’ explains Kerr. ‘In a way, we are curating the people and letting them do their thing.’
Kerr and Noble then pulled all the material together into what was to become an award-winning publication, Lost But Not Forgotten. Creative Review named the duo Young Editorial Designers to Watch in 2002, and most recently, the magazine also won the £10,000 Arts Foundation Award in the Graphic Design Category, to further develop the project.
Since establishing their company just one month after graduating from the Royal College of Art in 1997, Kerr and Noble have enjoyed the kind of success most career-aspiring people only dream about achieving at such an early stage. On top of the recognition from Creative Review, 2002 also saw Kerr|Noble listed as one of the top ten graphic design companies in the UK by the Independent on Sunday.
The company’s collaborations with artists, filmmakers, fashion designers, architects and writers is indicative of a move away from the traditional notion of graphic designers as creators of logos and corporate identities, and a move towards a more curatorial and producing role. These elements, as well as the company’s diverse client base, ensures Kerr and Noble are at the forefront of a new generation of graphic designers.
The pair have designed exhibition graphics and publicity material for the Architecture Foundation and the Design Museum, while current projects include the title sequence for a documentary film, the design of Rick Poyner’s book No more rules – Graphic Design and Postmodernism, an identity and publicity for the Tate Modern exhibition User Mode: Emotion and Interaction in Art & Design and an exhibition entitled My Favourite Dress for Zandra Rhodes’ Fashion and Textile Museum.
Kerr admits that although she considers the company was lucky from the outset – landing a job for the Victoria & Albert Museum – life wasn’t all roses.
The V&A job was pivotal for the newly-established company, she explains, not only because both herself and Noble were interested in working for arts and cultural clients, but because the project allowed the designers to use their research approach. One year later, a similar job came up for the Natural History Museum, in which the pair researched, wrote and designed an entire website for the museum’s celebration of an eclipse, entitled 400:4:1.
‘We were very lucky from the beginning [that] we’ve had really interesting jobs,’ says Kerr. ‘But we were still struggling to make a living. We both taught and supported ourselves in other ways.’
The ‘sea change’, Kerr says, came with the Design Council’s international touring exhibition of British design, Great Expectations. Kerr|Noble worked with exhibition designers Casson Mann to create the sculptural signage for the event, which has toured to New York, Montreal, Ottawa, Shanghai and Tokyo, and is currently in Australia.
‘There aren’t too many events in graphic design which are this international!’ Kerr enthuses. ‘So for us that has been a brilliant profile-builder. My feeling is, good work begets good work,’ she continues, adding that after the pair won this enormous job, suddenly more work started flowing in.
The Great Expectations exhibition design centres around a massive table, bedecked with all the exhibits, and surrounded by large, sculptural knives, forks and plates, to create a ‘feast of design’ which Kerr likens to a kind of ‘sculptural Mad Hatters Tea Party’.
Like the Lost But Not Forgotten project, the Design Council exhibition is an example of the way in which Kerr and Noble prefer to work. ‘We really enjoy collaborating with other people,’ Kerr explains. ‘This was a really lovely opportunity to work with an exhibition designer and think about how signage can be something other than graphics.’
So, considering their projects to date, have the pair researching, writing and curating, do Kerr and Noble consider themselves to be graphic designers? Or perhaps, producers and editors?
It’s something Kerr has obviously thought about. At a recent seminar held in Melbourne designed to complement Great Expectations, she spoke about the changing role of the graphic designer, discussing the potential of the role to become an editor or producer.
‘We were educated in a culture where people would say, “Well… actually, I’m a conceptualist,” or “I’m an image-maker”,’ Kerr responds. ‘And we thought, well no, let’s be honest. Let’s say we are graphic designers, but let’s educate people to what graphic design can actually mean. We call ourselves graphic designers, but we like to stretch the imagination.’
This, Kerr believes, is the future for graphic design.
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