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Fdecades ago SheffieldIan Anderson started one of the UK’s leading design firms by mistake. “The name Designers Republic was a joke, because we were not designers,” he recalls. “In the beginning, everything we did was in black and white because we didn’t know how to paint.”
With co-founder Nick Phillips, The Designers Republic (TDR) became synonymous with music, creating record covers, packaging, logos and campaigns for everyone from. Aphex Twin at Autechre, Interior to Nine Inch nails. He’s worked on horror video games, such as Wipeout and Grand Theft Auto, collaborated with behemoths like Coca-Cola and Adidas, and his work is on display at MoMA and the V&A. There are collectors who are so desperate for their work that Anderson cites one person who repossessed his house twice to continue producing.
To commemorate the event, Anderson – who is now 65 years old, who runs the company alone – has been selling the goods of the original pieces of TDR (stickers, papers etc.), as well as launching a new line of products. Having saved the first five copies of everything, he has collected some interesting things. “Storage is a problem,” he says, showing me around his Sheffield studio, which is stocked with documents, posters, paper, books and artwork. “It’s like I have a museum that no one goes to – not even me. Yet there are people who will appreciate some of those things and display them on their wall. This seems like the right thing to do, in honor of the work.”
Although TDR had a naive, inexperienced beginning – Anderson was in groups and was managing one called Person to Person, while Phillips was a student of sculpture who also played the piano in the music group World of Twist – their experiments that they taught in the formation of local groups soon saw them in demand. Their ambition, says Anderson, was simply to be a northern version of Gilbert and George. “We went to buy Nehru suits made by the same tailor who made ABC’s gold suits,” he recalls.
Their debut in 1986 coincided with the birth of a new label in Sheffield called Fon. He created covers for them, the first being Chakk’s 10 Days in Elevator, which was inspired by illustrator William Klein’s cover of his book New York 1954-55 and used woodblock typography to “obviously imitate the onomatopoeia” of the word Chakk. It was the first in a series of letter cover designs that used black and white stripes on the veins, so that all Fon labels could be easily identified on the shelf. Inspired by Russian constructivism, modern art, Japanese letters and pop art, TDR created pioneering works in groups such as Pop Will Eat Itself (for whom he created the band’s logo that was lost on Pepsi) and Age of Chance, as Peter Saville’s production of Factory records in Manchester was limited.
Anderson saw TDR’s brightly colored, curved sleeves as an antidote to what he called “heaven knows we’re scumbags now” — referring to Smith and the groups he led. “Just to have fun,” he said. “A lot of people who loved the Smiths were lucky enough to be miserable. They were white middle class students who could afford to moan. The children of the Council estate didn’t want anyone to say they were miserable. They were people who went to clubs and worked to get out of that life. I liked that ‘let’s have it’ attitude. Our world was very different. We were dancing to electronic music. “
TDR coined the term SoYo – short for South Yorkshire, while the company’s tagline is: North of Nowhere. “We set up SoYo not as a regional gym, like we do in Soho,” says Anderson, who moved from Bracknell New Town in Berkshire to study philosophy at Sheffield University. “We had the idea of us against the world.” So when Sheffield’s new record label started in 1989 – Warp – TDR created the label’s logo and iconic purple label, and became the primary driving force for the first 10 years. Hip, efficient, and well-known, with killer hands to boot – from the minimal LFO shots to the psychedelic explosion of Nightmares on Wax’s A Word of Science, which became more and more like the album’s iconography. – it put them on the global map as a powerhouse.
Their work was such an instant hit that they no longer had to give it to potential customers, and Anderson began to feel proud. Anderson says: “We weren’t interested in what the customer wanted. “We weren’t people who went out to play golf with them.” Being in Sheffield meant they were more open to continuing the work. “No one was jumping on a train to come and see us,” says Anderson. “For many of them, the idea of going to the North West was a headache.”
In the mid-1990s, TDR experimented with postmodernism and comedy, playing with themes of capitalism and consumerism, even setting up a fake organization called Pho-Ku. They made posters with slogans like “Jobs. The latest editions of this have also sold out, and the originals are selling in the thousands.
Anderson says that his approach was influenced by his studies in philosophy. “A lot of what we do is asking questions,” he says. “When I make a record cover, I don’t want it to look like a record cover. If I’m making a company logo, then it’s better if it looks like a record cover. When Aphex Twin used his songs in an advertisement for the Orange telephone company, an accompanying remix CD was released in 1997 with a folded image from TDR, in which the shapeless hands simply read: “Image of children chasing an ice cream truck from Orange ™ TV advertising Messaging.”
By the time TDR had established themselves in Sheffield – they had produced flyers and posters for several local nights and clubs such as Gatecrasher, NY Sushi, and Warp’s Blech – big names were knocking on their door. By the 2000s, he worked with many large companies and organizations. So, when this anti-conformist company started producing Coca-Cola and Pringles, were they criticized? “Yeah, it was all like, ‘You’re sold,'” Anderson says. “People said, ‘We thought you all were the ones who started the terrorist attacks.’ But from our point of view, this gave us a lot of opportunities and everyone has to go somewhere. We rejected many things.”
By the end of the 2000s, TDR was a growing company with about 20 employees, including several designers, after Anderson took an additional role. He found himself working during a period of declining advertising revenue after the financial crisis, and in 2009 he voluntarily resigned. “When I took a back seat to TDR growing beyond me, it died,” Anderson said at the time. “His success was undermined by his love of business.”
It returned as a smaller project, Anderson alone, and continued to create new projects. Autechre’s 2010 album Oversteps remains one of Anderson’s favorite projects, while Aphex Twin’s upcoming comeback album, Syro (2014), saw TDR used to create a conceptual design where the album cover loomed large as a grand receipt for every penny spent on the 138 recording and audio equipment. that.
In many ways, Anderson has come full circle, and is back to writing for fun artists – recent projects include the electronic outfit Fluke, experimental hip-hop group Clipping, and long-time collaborators with Warp mainstays Seefeel. Meanwhile, TDR’s reputation continued, with popular social media accounts digging and celebrating the work for a younger audience. “I went to Covid questioning whether I was a designer, a celebrity or not,” says Anderson. “Then I came out and suddenly I was known as the Goat, the OG, as a political leader.”
Despite the explosion of the 40-year anniversary, Anderson says he’s more concerned about what’s to come. He said: “When I get to celebrate the past with all our new followers, I don’t know if I’ve ever struggled with it. It’s like having a really nice house full of stuff, but you like to sit in your shed and think of new things.”
