David Gentleman (RDI, AGI), recent winner of the Prince Philip Designers Prize, is internationally recognised as an artist and designer. Well known for countless Royal Mail postage stamp designs, the murial at Charing Cross underground station London, cover designs for Penguin Books, the memorable ‘Say No’ poster series for the National Trust and his popular illustrated picture books on Britain, London, the British coastline, Paris, India and Italy. 

 

 

In the following article, we asked David Gentleman to write about his concept and design of the poster designs for the ‘Stop the War’ campaign.

Twenty years ago, provoked by the American bombing of Libya from their bases in Suffolk, I felt angry enough to design a book of polemical graphic images and send it to Faber, who quickly published it. ‘A Special Relationship’ isn’t anti-American. I love much about America – its energy and creativity, its writing, music, films, clothes. Some of my own books and prints have been published in America and I’ve had good times there. What dismayed me was our dangerously lop-sided relationship with recent American administrations. It has lately been categorised as ‘joined-at-the-hip’, but that makes it sound too equal, too evenly balanced. The book was about the relationship which was later to drag us into a needless, criminal and catastrophic war. Some of ‘A Special Relationship’s images were as shocking as I knew how to make them. It briefly enjoyed a modest notoriety – the Standard’s review was headed ‘No longer a Gentleman’ – and it won a couple of design awards, one of them, to my surprise, in New York. Now, twenty years on, its thesis has been confirmed by subsequent events. But at the time, some critical friends said it was merely preaching to the converted; and later on I began to regret that the more savage images in the book had ended up tucked harmlessly away out of sight inside it, when they could instead have been used as posters that more people, whether converted or not, could have seen.

 

 

But it wasn’t entirely forgotten. Ten years later, John Sauven of Greenpeace remembered the book and asked me to design several environmental posters for them, which were clearly both highly visible and political. And then, early in 2002 when the invasion of Iraq was brewing up, I joined one of the protest marches, and noticed that many of the printed placards people were carrying were quite hard to read, as can be seen in this newspaper photo of the march. So when, in 2003, the war looked really imminent, I designed several posters off my own bat, including one that just said ‘NO’. I also pasted lots of these NOs all over the press photograph to show how such a placard would look on a march. This quickly-done photomontage of the march with the added NOs must have done the trick, for Stop the War accepted the design. For the finished versions, besides the NO, I added as a subtext a column of much smaller words that could only be read from nearby – words like ‘collateral’, ‘friendly fire’, and ‘body-bags’ that were soon to become chillingly familiar. This design was used first with white letters on black as a poster announcing the march, and then with black lettering on white in a upright format on thicker card for the placards. These were carried by many thousands of marchers on the demonstration by two million people of 15th February 2003, the biggest march in British history. The original artwork for it is now in the British Museum.

 

 

At that point, I had no thought of producing a series of designs, nor any idea of what a Iot of work I might be letting myself in for. But from then on, I designed most of Stop the War’s posters and placards. Some, announcing future meetings and demos, reduced their dates to the bare numerals we’d grown used to after 9.11. Others consisted of merely a word, with as few letters as possible. They were also used for various purposes unforeseen by me – for T-shirts, buttons, car stickers and the like.

On all of them there was a bloodstain. This had appeared on the earliest poster as an amorphous splatter, but the blood grew simpler as the series progressed, even ending up sometimes as a single drop. It also began to pay its way in various ways, sometimes by standing in for a letter, like the ‘O’ in ‘NO’ and the ‘o’s in ‘no more lies’. Sometimes the bloodstain became merely the counter – the space within a character – as in these ‘outs’ and ‘nows’. Once, indeed, it served simply as the dot over the ‘i’ of ‘Bliar’.
(I had this Bliar design on the studio pinboard for many weeks before I felt ready to use it). ‘No more lies’ started off in capitals, with two drops of blood, but changed to lower case so that a third drop could dot the ‘i’.

In every design, the blood was crucial. Red blood is an emotive image: evena glimpse of it can make one wince. When the same bloodstains were used again on the posters for the Imperial War Museum exhibition, especially the big 96 sheeters in the tube, it had to be kept fairly small – the Underground authorities, responsibly enough, were worried that bigger splashes of blood might distract or upset the drivers. 

These blood stains weren’t as casual as they might seem: they were laboriously made using a ruling pen to hold the red watercolour and then dripping it from about six feet up onto expensive watercolour paper, to get a crisp and vigorous splash. Usually the blood drops were reproduced without distortion, but once or twice I emphasised this dropped-down effect by stretching the bloodstain as if seen in perspective. I also tried overprinting the type in a transparent dark grey for extra subtlety. Later on, however, I felt this device was self-indulgent and superfluous, merely a
distracting design cliché, and didn’t use it again. But I did use the dripped-down blood again on one of the anti-Bush placards. This particular march, ignored as always by Blair, nonetheless had a dramatic effect on what should have been a triumphal Bush visit to his London ally: the Bushes had to hide away out of sight, holed up in their embassy or at the Palace throughout their visit.

At first, my roughs were scribbles in pencil or Pentel marker followed by paste-ups of Helvetica photocopied from an old Letraset type-book. This isn’t a bad way of working – Alan Fletcher liked it – but, at the time, being then still quite computer-illiterate, I had no other option. So I was dependent on other people to translate my paste-ups of Helvetica into printable digital images, tweak the letter-spacing and generally get the whole thing ready to print. In this I was helped a lot at the outset by Stop the War’s assistant, Phil Whaite. I also liked going to the printers (then East End Offset), watching their studio staff nudging the blood-drops into just the right places and seeing my crude paste-ups become printable digital separations under the impatient eye of the printer waiting to get them onto the press. But as the work went on, I got fed up spending time writing letters explaining precisely how my proofs ought to have looked. I also realised, rather late in the day, that it was silly to be so out of touch with technology. So I got a scanner/printer, and found out instead not simply how to set my own type on my laptop, but how to adjust its letter-spacing and how to print out and email presentable colour visuals instead of making do with tracing-paper or acetate overlays.

Throughout, John Rees briefed me about the subject-matter when a design was needed, and I got on with it, but graphically it was a one-man job: I thought up the designs and sometimes – as in NO and Bliar – the copy too. Simplicity was essential, and designing stamps had taught me to be simple. In order to be easily read from a distance, the texts had to be short – ideally just a single word, as short as possible. Each poster was designed individually, not as one in a series, and with no thought of establishing a formula. It all took up more time than I had intended. I tried hard to vary them, and make them more economical and expressive. I enjoyed seeing people carrying the placards, but from time to time I got sick of doing them, and wondered if it was time to stop. But then the war would take a new turn, as new lies and atrocities were revealed, and I’d feel impelled to do another. Even so, I sometimes wondered if the designs themselves were getting repetitive. But the war itself was repetitive, getting deeper in the mire, killing and wounding more people, gradually abandoning the moral high ground. 

The danger of the war spreading to Iran occasioned another march and another placard. On the first mock-ups for it, the blood was big but the type was too small to read, so instead it became two separate placards with enormous letters placed diagonally. These were cropped as if spreading beyond the placards’ edges while retaining just enough of each word to keep it legible. In the end, these placards could be read right across Parliament Square. 

This square was the setting for an unusually perplexing design problem, one that was also quite different from all the others. It was a layout, described by Stop the War as an installation, in Parliament Square in February 2006. No accurate official civilian casualty figures had been published (they still haven’t) but in 2005 the medical journal The Lancet had reliably estimated that by then a hundred thousand people had already been killed in Iraq in the course of the war. The original idea came from the architect Nicholas Wood, who had proposed sticking a thousand wooden crosses in the grass of Parliament Square, each cross symbolising a hundred deaths. But I felt that while a hundred thousand is a good round figure, easily spelt out in words or written in numerals, it is probably still for many people an unimaginable abstraction, hard to envisage. I certainly had no clear idea of what a hundred thousand of anything actually looked like, but I wanted to find out and then show what a lot of individual human beings the figure of a hundred thousand really represented. So I suggested that, instead, one could print not a symbolic figure but an actual hundred thousand drops of blood, by printing a thousand sheets of card each with a hundred drops on it, and pegging them out in the centre of Parliament Square. Early on the Saturday morning, Wood and a small team of helpers began pegging them out and, as we did so, an impromptu army of onlookers and passers-by joined in. By midday, the whole thousand sheets were pegged out in position. For an hour or two they looked striking against the background of Big Ben and the Palace of Westminster. We knew they would have to be removed by the end of the afternoon anyway, and the pegs weren’t strong enough to withstand sudden, strong gusts of breeze; later in the afternoon some of them began to blow away, but passers-by ran to retrieve them, bring them back and peg them down again. (Note for the mathematically minded: they were printed on a thousand 96 cm x 60 cm sheets of card which were laid out in twenty-five rows of forty sheets to form a perfect square. To fit the rectangular sheet, the hundred bloodstains on each sheet had themselves to be arranged in slightly irregular rows: four lines of twelve making 48, separated by four of thirteen making 52 – a hundred in all).

 

 

Copyright photo Jess Hurd, www.reportdigital.co.uk

All this work was interesting, and John Rees and his colleagues at Stop the War were good to work with. And how effective were the Stop the War placards? But how far can art or design usefully be political at all? Did they succeed? Obviously not in stopping or even shortening the war: Blair/Bush were unstoppable. Even so, did the designs work, in the way commercial ads are supposed to? Such ads try to create or stimulate a desire, or a reaction; election posters, for example, hope to influence or even change the opinions of floating voters who haven’t yet made up their minds. These march placards, by contrast, expressed the already firmly-held convictions of the people carrying them, otherwise they wouldn’t have been on the march at all. But did this mean that my designs, like ‘A Special Relationship’, were merely preaching to the converted? I don’t think so. The bystanders on the pavements at the marches, like the people watching the news on television, or seeing pictures of the vast demos in the papers the next day, weren’t converts at the outset of the war, when a great many people supported it. But far fewer people in Britain, or indeed anywhere else outside neo-con America and Israel, do so now.

The Iraq war began in the foolish but euphoric certainty that winning the battle for the hearts and minds of the Iraqis would be easy. It wasn’t, and it still hasn’t happened. The longer the occupation, the more Iraqis were killed, and the more the rest wanted us out. Nor have many hearts and minds been won over in Britain. The Iraq war was wrong and futile; starting it at all depended on our being frightened and taken in by clever lies. But lies eventually become impossible to conceal, and people notice, and change their minds. And in the end, public opinion aroused New Labour’s fear that under Blair it might lose an election and its members their seats. This prospect eventually isolated him, and now he’s out of office and largely forgotten.

Even so, I periodically wondered if it was a good idea to keep on designing placards banging on about a war that, however disastrously it had already failed, was – and is – still grinding on. Maybe it was a waste of time. But this risk had to be taken. To feel, as I did, that the war was not only wrong but counterproductive, and then – whether from diffidence or inertia or despair – to have done nothing, would have been worse. As Noam Chomsky has written, ‘If you go to one demonstration and then go home, that’s something, but the people in power can live with that. What they can’t live with is sustained pressure that keeps building, organisations that keep doing things, people that keep learning lessons from the last time and doing it better the next time’.

(With the courtesy of Baseline Magazine Issue 54)