The third International Design Indaba was awash with promotional bumf and misplaced sincerity, writes Simon Waden
It is a sign of our speeded-up and hyper- connected times that the new authenticity has arrived in South Africa a mere year or two after it arrived in North America and the United Kingdom. We’re no longer five years out of sync with such developments.
At the third International Design Indaba, the local design industry’s semi- annual beanfest, there was post-ironic passion and enthusiasm to spare. Fortunately the event’s many sponsors assailed delegates with huge quantities of promotional bumf that was easily fashioned into rain gear. Most of it was glossy enough to ward off a monsoon, not to mention a little misplaced sincerity.
The bright young things of the design world, you see, are still wearing risible t-shirts, but inside they are full of belief in the power and importance of their work. And they lapped it up when typeface guru Neville Brody (live by satellite from London) told “the elected translators of invisible ideas into tangible form” that they had to take responsibility for their “terrifying power” to mould desire. It seems designers are even more tired of self referential in-jokes and “form is the content” boilerplate than the rest of us, but the alternative they offer is hard to take seriously. Brody wants designers “to bring love to the table” to “educate rather than dictate”.
Whether a heartfelt belief in the power and importance of design was enough to compensate for the non-appearance of two of the event’s main drawcards, Benneton advertising supremo Olivero Toscani – he of the Aids patients and refugees – and Thomas Mueller of digital-design hotshop Razorfish, is another matter. There were more than a few mutters from people who had ponied up R3 000 to hear them.
Mueller was apparently ill, which is fair enough, but Toscani simply had better things to do. I overheard one of the organisers explaining to a disgruntled patron that he was “shooting in a really amazing place … I can’t tell you where, but it is incredible; you must look out for the next campaign”. The person concerned – who said he was a former student of Toscani – seemed satisfied by this, his disappointment washed away by the universal solvent of celebrity.
Even without Toscani, there were big names to spare. Ken Cato, the leading figure in the antipodean new wave, David Carson who rode a more literal wave into the offices of Raygun and typeface history, Terry Jones of British style-bible iD and Walter Herbst, founder and chair of Herbst Lazar Bell Inc (one of America’s biggest design firms) to name just a few.
The result was that at its best the Indaba felt like a glossy design annual come to life. Even the most underwhelming speakers had articulate portfolios.
The highlight, by common consensus, was Tom Roope’s work for Tomato (all the best vegetables are trademarked these days). Roope steered clear of personal manifestos and statements of principal in favour of an insistence on the importance of developing true interactivity in digital design. You can see some of his work at the European site for Levi jeans, www.eu.levi.com.
Technical glitches prevented Carson from showing his new video designs for Nine Inch Nails. This left him and his numerous fans very frustrated, but he showed some beautiful slides to illustrate his blithe disregard for traditional notions like content and readability.
People outside of advertising and the magazine industry might have been a little troubled by the Indaba’s most commonly uttered maxim: design doesn’t exist to solve problems, but rather to make life interesting. Any nagging doubts, however, probably drifted away on the smoke from cigars laid on by British American Tobacco. Now there’s a design solution that makes life more interesting.