Peter Saville talks with Professor David Crow

Peter Saville talks with Professor David Crow

Well, I’m extremely glad that I didn’t miss this one! Not your ordinary set up, with Crow interview style coaxing Saville to launch into speech whilst he tipped back precariously on his chair in a rather slouched position like he was milling it all over with a glass of brandy! However what he did say, was extremely interesting. Half of the ‘lecture’ was about Savilles past and his outlook on graphic design whilst the other half was spent talking about his latest role as creative director for Manchester, working with the City Council.

Saville talked of how he started out with Malcolm Garrett as a young teenager just making record covers! After studying communication design together the two tackled unconventional briefs, ‘sidestepping’ the reality of other design. (I related to this, as I have tended to steer clear of more commercial briefs and explore more expressive areas of work.) The pair went on to design for the music industry as it boomed. Saville and Malcome started to reference high culture in the relatively low culture of the record sleeve, “I aspired to a more visually exclusive world in the everyday”. He talked of the irony that almost nothing is unique, it is always referenced somewhere, this is something that I have struggled with before now, and has stopped me creating certain ideas. Saville told us that you must simply learn from what you look at and create, quoting Da Vinci “he who can spie, can create”.  I have to say that I may take this advice and stop worrying so much about the quest to be completely unique, as I find it very restricting! Perhaps now I can relax a bit more with this kind of advice from the legend that is!

Saville talked of Design as being about problems, saying that the answer to any design is within the problem itself. He has often found that the conundrum, the thing that makes the design impossible to do, is where the unique solution lays. Well I shall remember that one Saville!

He went on to talk about how when the golden age of record cover creation, which had allowed him so much freedom for his own expression, came to an end, he had to face clients! “A communication designers job, is to deliver someone else’s message, not your own.” He encouraged us to work where you don’t entirely loose what your connected with, saying that you have to relate to and care for the subject. “It’s not a great vocational practice to not believe in what your doing, so although it’s working for others, you have to ask, who are those others?” Saville believes that it is never too late to change your direction, as he clearly demonstrates with his new position as creative director for the city.

Saville currently works at the city council a couple of days, every other week, in order to think about Manchester and how to push it forward. “A creative director was needed for the brand that is Manchester!” Saville went on to talk in detail about his explorations of how you can change peoples perceptions of a place, He described it as a communication challenge that was less about packaging and more about fundamental things -what people hear, see and know. He discussed the ‘Supply and demand effect’ of cultural institutions in the city and the migration of talented Manchester Graduates out of the city “The challenge for the creative industry is that you can’t keep ambitious young graduates in a place where there are no jobs for them.”  Saville believes that digital companies may be a way around this as it is the first time he has seen the possibility of having a creative business somewhere that is not linked geographically to its client. “Manchester can be and should be an alternative to London but not as big and not as uncompromising, providing alternative choices of how we live.”  It was a fascinating incite into the current and future position of our city and the role that the cultural and sector may start to play.