How did you come to be doing this book?| Factory design: in conversation | - Matthew Robertson will be appearing alongside Factory designers Peter Saville, Pat Carroll and Trevor Johnson at Urbis, on Thursday 13 July at 7pm
- They will be discussing the visual legacy of Factory
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"That’s a question on everybody’s lips, as it comes to a surprise to a lot of people that I actually come from Sydney. But I grew up with my older siblings bringing home New Order. Not only was the music amazing, but the way it was packaged left an indelible mark on me, as later I’d become a designer, partly due to the influence of that. "In more recent years, I was surprised that no-one had done a book on this work, because it contains some of the most amazing graphics of the 1980’s and a lot of those involved have gone onto to not only been significant in popular culture but also have a massive influence on graphic design." How important is Factory to design? | | FAC 220: Happy Mondays - Bummed |
"It has made a major impact, especially the work of Peter Saville. It’s had an influence on not only music graphics, but corporate design, publications, other aspects of graphic communication that Factory was never originally dealing with. "Generally, the Factory experience, in terms of the way they approached things and their willingness to invest in design, is a benchmark that lots of companies have since gone onto aspire to – I’ve met people in publishing houses, trainer design, things like that, who cite Factory as a model for where they’d like to be, which is ironic, because while they did create a wonderful product, they weren’t the greatest business people on earth." Do you have a favourite piece of Factory design?| "One of my classmates bought that record and knew that if his parents saw it, he’d get in trouble, so he drew underwear over the pornographic image..." | | Matthew explains why Bummed had such a powerful inside cover |
"I find it changes every week, but that’s the beauty of the Factory catalogue; there’s so many different voices in that body of work. There are some pivotal pieces for me. The first is New Order’s Shellshock. When my sister came home with that, it blew me away, but the unusual thing was that the record didn’t give anything away. There was a mystique, I never knew what the band looked like, and I actually constructed a portrait of how I thought they looked. When I saw them years later, I was shocked! "By the time I was a teenager, Happy Mondays had hit their peak, and the sleeve of Pills, Thrills and Bellyaches stood out like nothing else. What fascinated me was that not only was it visually seductive, but for the first time, it was a sleeve that spoke to me and I could understand it. "Not only that one, but also Bummed. Pat Carroll (the designer on Bummed) says that he’s had so many people come up to him and say ‘your sleeve got me in so much trouble’. I remember that one of my classmates bought that record and knew that if his parents saw it, he’d get in trouble, so he drew underwear over the pornographic image in permanent marker!" |
