In 1964, the British graphic designer Ken Garland produced a manifesto titled ‘First Things First’, in which he denounced the ‘sheer noise’ of the consumerist world of the sixties, with its ‘gimmick merchants, status salesmen and hidden persuaders’. In words laid out with the precision of the Swiss design of the era, Garland objected to the use of the ‘techniques and apparatus of advertising’ for ‘trivial purposes, which contribute little or nothing to our national prosperity’ (‘such things as: cat food, stomach powders…striped toothpaste’). In the year of the election of a Labour government for the first time in over a decade, Garland demanded a ‘reversal of priorities in favour of the more useful and more lasting forms of communication’: ‘signs for streets and buildings, books and periodicals…educational aids, films, television features…’ This was a vision of design as an ethical, socially useful art which could contribute to the reconstruction of Britain as a modern, rational, public-spirited country and produce a ‘greater awareness of the world’.

The starkly modern, minimalist books, posters, signs and logos created by some of the manifesto’s signatories – Germano Facetti, Gerry Cinamon, Robin Fior – circulate online today as decontextualised objects, ‘design classics’ for imitation or parody. Ian McLaren and Tony Pritchard’s Modernist Graphic Design in Great Britain 1945–1980 is the first book to take their shared project seriously. Its authors, veteran designers, have skin in the game – McLaren, best known for working with Otl Aicher on the 1972 Munich Olympics, signed Garland’s manifesto. Handsomely produced by the modernist, a Manchester-based publisher and gallery that grew out of a campaigning group, the Manchester Modernist Society, the bulk of the volume is composed of profiles of the major designers, illustrated with big, splashy pictures. The authors make a point of placing this work in the context of the European and American design of the time, to highlight what makes it unusual. There were shared influences – the Bauhaus, the early work of the German typographer Jan Tschichold, who refined Penguin’s visual identity in the post-war period. But British designers took a distinctly and deliberately ‘clunky’, angular approach. There are grids aplenty, but there is much less interest in the tiny type and vast white spaces that defined Swiss design, and less flashiness or bright colour than was common in the work coming out of the US. What there is instead is a sensibility which McLaren and Pritchard describe as ‘mischievously witty’, animated by a tension between the strictness and rectilinearity of high modernist design and a love for paradox, visual humour and surrealism.

This adaptation of modernist ideas from elsewhere rested, here as in fine art and architecture, on the presence of émigrés from fascism, who arrived in Britain between 1933 and 1945. Most were from Central Europe, like the graphic designers F.H.K. Henrion and Hans Schleger – both of whom shifted from producing hand-painted Constructivist posters in the 1930s to designing corporate logos by the 70s – or backroom figures like the publishers Wolfgang Foges and Bruno Schindler. Arguably the most important, Germano Facetti, was Italian, a veteran of the antifascist resistance, a concentration camp survivor and a trained architect. Facetti, hired as the new head of design at Penguin Books at the start of the sixties, took the paperback publisher’s familiar 1930s grid and replaced it with an ingenious new design by the Polish émigré and fellow camp survivor Romek Marber, which was deployed across Penguin Books’ range. But most of the designers in McLaren and Pritchard’s book were British-born, and typically for the time, a fair few were grammar school kids from unfashionable parts of the country, including Garland, who grew up in Southampton. This background perhaps helps explain an apparently paradoxical commitment both to leftwing causes and to the abundance of post-war consumerism: these designers did not want to abolish advertising, they just didn’t want it to lie.

There are four distinct groups of clients represented. First, nationalised industry: John Miles and Colin Banks’s purpose-designed typefaces for Royal Mail, British Telecom and London Transport; Margaret Calvert and Jock Kinnear’s brilliantly clever and clear signage systems for British Rail and the new motorway network, both of which endure despite privatisation; Edward Wright’s iconic revolving sign for New Scotland Yard, which has survived the demolition of the office block it was once part of. Then there are the institutions of consumer capitalism, best seen here in Henrion’s logo for Tate and Lyle, and especially, in Peter Dixon’s remarkable work for Sainsbury’s, in which own-brand goods were packaged in low-modernist tins and boxes that would have made Moholy-Nagy proud. Third is the new mass culture, whether pop music (David King’s consumer-modernist parody cover for The Who Sell Out) or glossy magazines (Derek Birdsall’s design for Nova), and the mass-market yet high-minded Penguins and Pelicans. Nearly everyone in McLaren and Pritchard’s volume designed a book jacket for Penguin at some point, including McLaren himself, whose great Pelicans, such as Punishment by Ted Honderich and Asylums by Erving Goffman, are reprinted here.

But less expected, the fourth group is the radical left. As ‘First Things First’ makes clear, many of these designers were committed to the New Left, working – often pro bono – for various causes. After Penguin, CND seems to have been the most common client, with Robin Fior, Garland and Henrion all designing posters and pamphlets. Facetti was the designer of the early issues of New Left Review, and Richard Hollis designed the paperbacks of Pluto Press and the Writers and Readers Co-Operative in an ordered but slightly rough, even expressionistic manner. David King was both an active Trotskyist and a neo-Constructivist who believed the Bauhaus aesthetic was a counter-revolution against the Marxist modernism of Aleksandr Rodchenko, Gustav Klucis and John Heartfield. Paying the rent designing hundreds of book covers and the Sunday Times Magazine, King would revive the loud, hard graphic style of the Soviet 20s in his personal projects on Trotsky and the Great Purge, and in his logo for the Anti-Nazi League. Fior, though more committed to the spacious, limpid modernism associated with Switzerland, took his graphic talents to revolutionary Portugal and Angola in the mid-1970s; one of his Lusophone political posters is included here.

Some of this is familiar, some of it not. One of the real finds is Desmond Jeffrey, who designed the menus for the original New Left Review’s Soho social space, Partisan Café. Jeffrey’s politics were on the non-conformist far left, distant from the Labour Party and the sects supported by King and others. On one occasion in 1968, Jeffrey came across a pamphlet by the tiny left-communist group Solidarity. Unbidden, he redesigned its amateurish layout and offered ‘500 beautifully produced copies of their text’ to the group for free, subsequently becoming their designer. Jeffrey’s own publication, the ‘Red Paper’, reproduced in Modernist Graphic Design, is more Situationist than Bauhaus in its dark agitational humour. The authors bring out a tension between those like Garland, Hollis or King, who, while doing plenty of commercial work to make ends meet, were essentially committed designers often working for far lower fees than they could command, and those who were making megabucks producing adverts and chic corporate identities, such as those employed by the design firm Pentagram.

Similarly unusual is the serious attention given to institutions – the art schools, polytechnics and colleges where these designers studied and taught. Figures whose output in terms of artefacts was fairly meagre are given their due, such as the Norwegian-British typographer Anthony Froshaug, revered by his students as a lone uncompromised modernist voice in the years immediately after the war. There was, in the schools, a mutual distrust between printers – a male-dominated, heavily protected working-class craft – and the arty types developing new ways of laying out print: the authors reveal that Facetti’s skills as a lock-picker, acquired as a Partisan during the war, were drawn upon by his students when they wanted to use the Central School of Printing’s workshops without consulting the printworkers. There was also, according to McLaren and Pritchard, a tension between the modernism of the institutions run by the LCC and graphic art as it was taught by establishment schools such as the Royal College of Art, where design was under the direction of the neo-Victorianist Edward Bawden.

It is immensely refreshing, in an era which has been busy reviving every kind of insufferable mid-century Englishry – from Eric Ravilious’s garden-of-England paintings and Bawden’s neo-Victorian book jackets to John Piper’s musings on country churches and Ithell Colquhoun’s misanthropic notes on neolithic Cornwall – to read of the hatred the British modernist designers had for this sort of nonsense while it was happening. As the authors, one of whom is old enough to have visited the Festival of Britain in 1951, put it: ‘it seemed…even as an immature teenager, that the graphics appeared quaintly out of place within the futuristic architecture’. This quaintness was an ingratiating means of converting what was assumed to be a hostile public to modern design, through offering them a cute, familiar version of it: think here of the fusion of modernism and the Regency in the Festival’s brochures and murals, and in its buildings such as the Royal Festival Hall or the Lansbury Estate in East London, or the modernised Gothic of Coventry Cathedral. The new generation of modernist designers ranged themselves against this tendency. For Garland, the design of the immediate post-war era was ‘muddled, ill-assorted, relentlessly whimsical and worst of all insular’. There was respect for some traditionalist design – the late work of the modernist apostate Tschichold and his followers including another émigré, the typographer Hans Schmoller – but something more like contempt for the nostalgic mannerisms of ‘Englishness’. June Fraser, a student at the RCA who would go on to design the logos of ABC Television and the Hong Kong Mass Transit Railway, recalls: ‘I really loathed all that Victorian stuff…the person I really revolted against was Edward Bawden, who was teaching us pattern design, and unless you put little boxes around your patterns you were out. I couldn’t stand that.’

Modernist Graphic Design in Britain makes a convincing case for its designers as a counter not only to the highest high modernism, but also to this agreeable but trivial guff: a dialectic of abstraction and personality – austerity tempered by eccentricity – exemplified by Romek Marber’s stunning covers for Penguin’s Crime series, where harsh, surreal, puzzling sketches and photomontages are contained within the now iconic ‘Marber Grid’. The book ends in 1980, roughly when postmodernism became dominant in graphic design and public institutions started to be commercialised and privatised, rightly damning much of British neoliberal design as a return to tweeness and patronising aesthetic cowardice. The decline of Penguin Books’ covers in the 1980s is the central case in point. The baby thrown out with that particular bathwater is the pop culture design of the 80s and 90s. McLaren and Pritchard do chart its pre-history, noting that post-punk designers like Peter Saville and Malcolm Garrett scoured one of the 60s generation’s publications, Herbert Spencer’s Pioneers of Modern Typography, for source material that they could plunder and adapt to their rougher, more populist uses; but their work, whether for the Buzzcocks and Joy Division, or for Manchester City Council and Wham!, was perhaps more a commentary on modernism than a continuation of it, which may explain the exclusion of this younger generation from the book.

There are some absences. The authors’ distrust of commercial flash means pop-art-influenced designers like Alan Aldridge, Facetti’s successor at Penguin’s fiction line, are left out. More glaring, especially given McLaren and Pritchard make apologies early on for the very few women in the book, is the omission of Kate Hepburn. From the same generation as many of the subjects included in the book, her contribution is of note not only for defining the aesthetic of the new feminist press – she worked extensively for Pluto Press and was the first designer of Spare Rib – but also for her work for Monty Python, in the Monty Python Papperbok. This TV cash-in was elevated into satirical greatness almost wholly through Hepburn’s designs, which took aim at virtually every element of post-war graphic culture – with ruthless parodies of Henrion and Schleger’s logos, Facetti and Marber’s Penguin covers, Birdsall’s layouts and covers for Nova, Calvert and Kinnear’s road and railway signs – exposing the vacuity of so much of its actual content. The rational look of these designs often masked absurd messages: the reduction of design to the dressing up of an idiotic, ‘trivial’ culture that Garland railed against in his ‘First Things First’ manifesto. Hepburn made the point much more humorously.

The question it’s hard to avoid on reading Modernist Graphic Design in Britain is: what happened? There are a few public institutions which maintain high aesthetic standards in public life – Transport for London may be the only major example – and burrowing away below, there are cultists like the book’s publisher, reviving, cataloguing and enthusing for the common project that began in the 40s and ended in the 80s. But what of the design for Britain’s radical causes and radical press today, whose extent and quality in the post-war decades are so strikingly displayed in McLaren and Pritchard’s book? Like Penguin or London Transport, publishers such as Verso and Pluto produced some poor, incoherent designs in the 80s and 90s (search for Ralph Miliband’s Socialism in a Sceptical Age if you want a laugh). In the same period, the punchy neo-Constructivism of David King became a boring orthodoxy on placards and posters.

Since 2008, there has been some movement. The student protests of 2010–11 threw up some great posters and subsequently, book covers, particularly by the Dutch-based British designer Michael Oswell (the finest being his surging, sloganeering cover for Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek’s Inventing the Future). Corbynism revived a long-lost tradition of good graphics for the Labour Party; ironically, given that New Labour in the 1990s were great modern design enthusiasts, one of the immediate consequences of Starmer’s seizure of the leadership was that the party’s skilled – left-oriented – graphic designers were fired and replaced with clipart incompetence. Online outlets such as Novara Media and New Socialist have built up strong brand identities, avoiding the clumsy non-aesthetic of blogging or, worse, sect newspapers. Pluto and Verso’s book covers improved a great deal, under the direction of Melanie Patrick and the design firm Rumors, respectively. The latter are based in Portland, Oregon, a reminder that the new New Left of the Corbyn and Sanders years was a Transatlantic phenomenon. Jacobin’s design, a peculiar fusion of the New Deal aesthetics of the Works Progress Administration and the deadpan style of 2000s indie comics, clearly influenced the design of the relaunched post-war Labour left magazine Tribune. The new iteration of the magazine’s audacious combination of symmetrical layouts, deliberately evoking old Arts and Crafts union banners, with Constructivist angles and Chris Ware-style block-colour comic book figures, is the work of the US-based Ukrainian designer Polina Godz. Even some of the corners of the left most resistant to aesthetics have been imaginative in recent years: the American neo-Stalinist publisher Iskra Books have favoured witty, knowingly nostalgic combinations of Constructivist dynamism and Maoist classicism in their paperbacks and the journal Peace, Land, and Bread, produced by editor-designer Ben Stahnke.

Older institutions have tended to hew to a pre-modernist notion of ‘timeless’ elegance. Both the London Review of Books and New Left Review stick to designs by the late Peter Campbell which are decades old. Through these, both avoided the patronising horrors of the worst designs of the 1980s and 1990s, whether in their traditionalist or postmodernist guises. A similar approach is taken by one of the major left-wing publishing successes of the last decade, the London press Fitzcarraldo Editions, with their high-quality paper, centred, symmetrical layouts and serif fonts. Campbell’s work for NLR and LRB or the Irish designer Ray O’Meara’s for Fitzcarraldo all take their cue to some degree from the neoclassicism of French paperback publishing houses like Gallimard or Les éditions de minuit, a conspicuous absence from the post-war canon of Modernist Graphic Design. The French aesthetic aims at a refusal of the chaos and crassness of the marketplace, preferring pre-capitalist values: the basic form of the Gallimard cover is modelled on Renaissance design. These achingly tasteful layouts do not, however, secede from the market; they place themselves snugly in one of its niches. What is enduringly exciting about so much of the work in Modernist Graphic Design in Britain is that it tried to barge its way into the market, into mass communication. While retaining modernist values of order, precision and clarity, Facetti, Hollis, King et al. tried to shout as loud as the ‘gimmick merchants, hidden persuaders and status salesmen’. When they put their work in the service of the left, it meant competing with capital on its own turf. That quixotic but heroic effort explains why their work retains such a thrill today.

Read on: Tom Nairn, ‘Hornsey’, NLR I/50.