Designer, proselytiser and visual communication critic: an interview with the inimitable Bob Gill

During Bob Gill’s time in London in the 1960s, the BBC invited him on to a children’s TV show where he was to draw along live as an actor read the nursery rhyme Rub-a-dub-dub. The producer said Bob could make some faint outline sketches before filming began but he refused to even read a proffered copy of the story, committed as he was to doing it in real time. As the cameras rolled though, he soon found himself hopelessly behind and by the end the paper was covered in a series of meaningless marks. “They were so angry,” he laughs. “I thought they were going to kill me!” True to form he’s turned this into a great anecdote which he tells with relish, but it says something important about his creative integrity too. Visitors to Bob’s website are greeted with an introductory paragraph of text that lists some of his achievements, interspersed with the words “blah blah blah,” some of which flash distractingly while you’re trying to read. It’s quite a CV – the designer, illustrator, writer, filmmaker and teacher was a founding partner of Pentagram, has the highest accolades from several Art Directors Clubs, created the Broadway phenomenon Beatlemania and has produced more than 20 books. “As a designer and a teacher I am a proselytiser. I am always interested in spreading the word because from my point of view the state of the art is so terrible" Bob Gill And yet both on his homepage and sitting with him in his Manhattan apartment there is a curious tension between his career and people’s interest in it, and what he really wants to talk about. “As a designer and a teacher I am a proselytiser. I am always interested in spreading the word because from my point of view the state of the art is so terrible,” he explains. “It would be fun to try to lift it up a little bit. Nobody wants to be cruel. On the other hand I have been talking about it for a long time and it just doesn’t seem to get any better.” The 84-year-old has been an outspoken critic of visual communication for six decades, in his books, in interviews and in the lectures he still gives around the world. He’s not nostalgic for some heyday of design; in fact he rejects the very idea of one. “I don’t know what people talk about when they talk about a golden age because of a million designers in 1950 or 1960 or 1970, 13 did anything that was worth ten cents. They can call that a golden age but the gold has been tarnished I think.” What has changed of course is technology and the way it’s altered the design process, but Bob is keen to point out he’s no Luddite, gesturing at the huge Mac that sits on one of his two desks. In fact now that the craft side of design has become demystified and democratised, he thinks designers should be able to come into their own. “Now for a designer to make a living, they have to do more than just know how to set some type because the client can do that. So what’s left? Well the most wonderful part is left, which is to discover how you say new things. I often talk about design as idea; I am not interested in design as layout – obviously I have to lay things out in order for them to be read – but it’s very low down on my priorities. I spend the majority of my time having an opinion and trying to invent an image that says that opinion like nobody’s ever said it before. That’s the fun of it.” You can see how this shapes Bob’s work across his projects but one of the best examples was his logo for the tourist guide company Rent a New Yorker. He wanted to convey the idea that their guides were proper locals and realised that it’s the accents that really identify bona fide New Yorkers. So he created a phonetic logo that ran the four words into a modified whole – RentaNooYawka. "I spend the majority of my time having an opinion and trying to invent an image that says that opinion like nobody's ever said it before. That's the fun of it.” Bob Gill The problem now, he believes, is that designers are not willing or able to have opinions. “It’s not in their culture. They’re interested in doing a design, that has a nice typeface and a nice photograph. That’s their standard. They’re very happy and the clients don’t question it so life goes on.” He uses a fictional example to further make his point, tailoring it to me as an Englishman in New York in terms of a brief for a book called Birds of Southampton. “Let’s start from the beginning,” he says, settling into his chair and into his stride. “Someone gets a job and they sit at their computer waiting for lightning to strike. The problem is that every image in their head, every idea in their head, every trick in their head has been put there by The Culture. There’s nothing original.” “The Culture” is the great mass of images and ideas which bombard us every day, and therefore shape the way we think visually. Only by recognising The Culture’s presence and its power, can designers move away from the clichés it promotes. The answer is to really interrogate the brief, to find something interesting to s