Dave Stephenson

Sad news, confirmed yesterday by Creative Review - The Designers Republic has closed, with the loss of nine jobs.

TDR has been blurring the border between design and art for almost a quarter of a century and, along with Tomato and Peter Saville, has had an incredible influence on the creative side of my brain. Its work for Gatecrasher (so many hours spent looking for those tiny messages in the CD booklet), Warp, even it’s own website was so packed full of detail, clean and precise it made you stop and want to spend time looking at it, touching it, feeling it. Their use of language and, in their own words, “font-ology” added an extra layer to their work, bringing a level of personality far beyond the product they were designing for.

It’s founder, Ian Anderson, has said that it lost its way in the last couple of years, focussing more on big corporate clients rather than its core reason for being - to create. Compromise and the dilution of ideas is inevitable when dealing with large corporates. It takes integrity and honesty in approach and execution to be able to manage those compromises, whilst still delivering a project that both designer and client are happy with. It’s a very difficult balance to achieve - especially given the sums of money involved in large contracts - and Anderson is clearly uncomfortable with the position TDR had taken recently.

Anderson is looking on the end of TDR as a new beginning - an opportunity to return to the companies roots and move forward without returning to the enforced agency structure he’d moved into. It will be interesting to see what effect that has on the work he produces and whether more agencies and studios follow suit.