That is the work of William Morris for the Kelmscott Press before the rise of the machine age and modernism. Which means, everything there is manual labor. Even though it is probably not most of our cup of tea and we think ‘too much decorations’, we have to admit the mastery of his skills. A designer of the past. How many designers in the world now can actually make something like this? Of course, we are not even trained to achieve this sort of design anymore. We might just push this aside and classify this as art (although you must be able to see the design in this).
I’ll be honest and say, I have never read about design history before. Well I did once, but a very small part of it. But reading about the arts movement, well-narrated by Kenya Hara in his book Designing Design, it granted me a new kind of consciousness . Perhaps if you read this paragraph, you will feel the same way too:
Now, in the second half of the 20th century, when design was supposed to flower, the power of the economy, instead, began to drive the world. Design ended up being pulled along by the new engine of the economy. All design thought, whether of Ruskin and Morris or of the Bauhaus, has had a socialistic tint. Both Ruskin and Morris abhorred being controlled by an economy in which making things was synonymous with machine production, and because the birth of the Bauhaus was enabled by the social-democratic government in Weimar, it can be said that the social-democratic trend fostered the Bauhaus way of thinking. Basically, the concept of design was conceived and developed in no small measure on the premise of idealistic social ethics. Now, within the intense magnetic field of economic principle, the purer the concept, the less able it is to live up to its ideal.
pg.421, Designing Design, chapter “What is Design”
Yes… the designers of the past seem like heroes to me. They all have that “material” which drives their design, and it changes the world. Another way to look at it is: they all had an admirable cause. What is the cause for today’s design? Most people probably don’t even think past getting and maintaining their jobs, pleasing the clients, designing things that sell. As it is written in the quote, “the purer the concept, the less able it is to live up to its ideal.”
I almost see design in the same way I see music now. The soulful, expressive music from the past, and the overwhelming amount of half-baked songs we have produced today. We can also see this happening in the context of information – the well-composed books written by scholars, compared to the little scraps of inaccurate information on the internet (also reflecting on myself). But then again, exceptions are always present. To be fair, we see history as something so grand because it is pre-filtered. If we had to make a list of today’s pioneers in design, I’m sure we can name a few good ones too. One of which… must be Kenya Hara! :)
