The Designers Republic: 40 Years of Influential UK Design

Forty years ago in Sheffield, Ian Anderson founded one of the most influential UK design companies by mistake. “The name the Designers Republic was a joke, because we weren’t designers,” he recalls. “Early on, everything we did was in black and white because we didn’t know how to make it colour.”

With co-founder Nick Phillips, The Designers Republic (TDR) quickly became synonymous with music, designing record covers, packaging, logos and campaigns for everyone from Aphex Twin to Autechre, Pulp to Nine Inch Nails. They worked on groundbreaking video games, such as Wipeout and Grand Theft Auto, collaborated with brand behemoths like Coca-Cola and Adidas, and their work is held in the MoMA and the V&A. There exist such obsessive collectors of their work that Anderson cites one person who remortgaged his house twice to keep up with their output.

To commemorate the milestone, Anderson – now 65, who runs the company solo – has been selling a load of original TDR pieces (stickers, flyers etc), as well as launching a new merch line. After keeping five original copies of everything, he has amassed a staggering archive. “Storage is an issue,” he says, showing me around his Sheffield studio, which is stuffed with records, posters, flyers, books and artworks. “It’s like I’ve got a private museum that nobody visits – not even me. Yet there are people who would value some of those things and exhibit it on their wall. That seems to be the right thing to do, in honour of the work.”

Despite TDR’s naive, inexperienced origins – Anderson had been in bands and was managing one called Person to Person, while Phillips was a sculpture student who also played the organ in local band World of Twist – their self-taught experimentations in designs for local bands soon saw them in demand. Their aspiration, says Anderson, was simply to be like a northern version of Gilbert and George. “We went out and got matching Nehru suits made by the same tailor that made ABC’s gold lamé suits,” he recalls.

Their start in 1986 coincided with the birth of a new record label in Sheffield called Fon. They worked on covers for them, the first being Chakk’s 10 Days in an Elevator, which was inspired by photographer William Klein’s cover for his book New York 1954-55 and used woodblock typography to “mimic visually the onomatopoeia” of the word Chakk. It became the first in a series of designs for the label’s covers that utilised distinctive black and white strips over the spines, so that all Fon records could be easily identified on a shelf. Inspired by Russian constructivism, modern art, Japanese letterform and pop art, TDR made eye-popping work for groups such as Pop Will Eat Itself (for whom they designed a band logo that riffed on Pepsi’s) and Age of Chance, as maximal as Peter Saville’s designs for Factory records over in Manchester were minimal.

Anderson viewed TDR’s brightly coloured, text-crammed sleeves as an antidote to what he calls the “heaven knows we’re miserabilists now” brigade – meaning the Smiths and the bands they influenced. “Just fucking cheer up,” he says. “The majority of people who liked the Smiths had the luxury of being miserable. It was white middle-class students who could afford to moan. Council estate kids didn’t want someone saying they were miserable. They were the people going to clubs and doing jobs to get out of that life. I liked that ‘let’s have it’ attitude. Our world was very different. We were into dance and electronic music.”

TDR coined the term SoYo – an abbreviation of South Yorkshire, while the tagline for the company is: North of Nowhere. “We coined SoYo not as a great exercise in regional branding, just as a fuck off to a bunch of knobs in Soho,” says Anderson, who had moved from Bracknell New Town in Berkshire to study philosophy at Sheffield University. “We had a sense of us versus the world.” So when a new Sheffield record label started in 1989 – Warp – TDR created the label’s logo and a striking purple visual identity, becoming the primary driving aesthetic driving force behind its first 10 years. A hip, successful, and hugely influential label, with killer sleeves to boot – from LFO’s minimal yet striking covers to the psychedelic colour explosion of Nightmares on Wax’s A Word of Science, which doubled up as a visual tracklisting of the album – it put them on the global map as a design powerhouse.

Their work was so immediately impactful that they never even needed to pitch to potential clients, and Anderson developed a correspondingly spiky attitude. “We really didn’t care what the client wanted,” Anderson says. “We weren’t those people that would go and play golf with them.” Being in Sheffield meant that they were largely free to get on with the job. “No one was gonna jump on a train to come up and check on us,” Anderson says. “For most of them, the thought of going this far north was dizzying.”

In the mid-1990s, TDR experimented with postmodernism and irony, playing with themes of capitalism and consumerism, even establishing a faux corporation called Pho-Ku. They produced posters with slogans such as “Work. Buy. Consume. Die.” A recent reprint of this instantly sold out, and originals sell for thousands.

Anderson says that his approach was influenced by his philosophy studies. “A lot of our design is about asking questions,” he says. “If I’m designing a record cover, I don’t want it to look like a record cover. If I’m designing a corporate logo then I’d rather it look like a record cover. For me, things work, and they have more gravity, if you challenge people’s preconceptions.” When Aphex Twin had his music used in an advert for the mobile phone company Orange, an accompanying remix CD was released in 1997 with a format-twisting design from TDR, in which the visuals-free sleeve simply read: “An image of children chasing after an ice-cream van from an Orange™ TV commercial advertising Text Messaging.”

While TDR was very much rooted in Sheffield – they designed flyers and posters for numerous local nights and clubs such as Gatecrasher, NY Sushi, and Warp’s Blech – big names were now knocking on their door. By the 2000s, they had worked with countless huge brands and corporations. So, when this staunchly anti-conformist company started designing for Coca-Cola and Pringles, did they get criticised? “Yeah, it was all like, ‘You sold out’,” says Anderson. “People were like, ‘We thought you were all, up the revolution’. But from our point of view, it gave us all a lot of new opportunities and everybody has to draw the line somewhere. We refused a lot of stuff.”

By the late 2000s, TDR was a growing company with a staff of about 20, including several designers, Anderson having taken on a more hands-off role. They found themselves working during a time of shrinking marketing budgets post financial crisis, and in 2009 went into voluntary liquidation. “When I took a back seat to allow TDR to grow beyond me, it died,” Anderson said at the time. “Its creative spark was crushed under the weight of business self-interest.”

It returned as a slimmed down operation, just Anderson, and continued to make innovative work. Autechre’s 2010 album Oversteps remains some of Anderson’s favourite work, while Aphex Twin’s hugely anticipated return album, Syro (2014), saw TDR employed to create a conceptually ambitious packaging design in which the album cover doubled up as a huge receipt for every penny spent on the album, alongside a detailed infographic listing the 138 pieces of audio equipment used to record it.

In many ways, Anderson has come full circle, and he’s back to working on record covers for interesting artists – recent work includes the electronic outfit Fluke, experimental hip-hop group Clipping, and longtime collaborators and Warp mainstays Seefeel. Meanwhile, the reputation of TDR has endured, with popular social media accounts digging into and celebrating the work for younger audiences. “I went into Covid with some uncertainty as a designer, well known or not,” says Anderson. “Then I came out of it and suddenly I was perceived as the Goat, the OG, like an elder statesman of design.”

Despite the blast of nostalgia around the 40th anniversary, Anderson says he’s more concerned about what’s next. “When I should be celebrating the past along with the rest of our new followers, at the same time I don’t know if I’ve ever been less bothered about it,” he says. “It’s like having a fantastic house full of stuff, but actually preferring to sit in your shed thinking about new things.”