The whole white square system. Interview with Ian Anderson (the Designers Republic)

Apparently, Steven Wilson (founder and leader of Porcupine Tree) once said that his mission is to restore progressive rock to its good name and give it its rightful place in modern music. I don't know if he'll succeed, but the artwork for his latest album may help a bit in those ambitious plans.

In fact, it's definitely more than a cover, it's a design system that was created to wrap up the Closure/Continuation album, along with all the accompanying singles, music videos, and subsequent special editions. The band's eleventh full-length album, released in June 2022, was recorded in a pandemic fashion (each musician recorded separately in his home studio.) Its content is probably also a side effect of the pandemic, how it affected the creator, his surroundings, and his perception of the world.

The graphic design of the whole thing was created by Ian Anderson, founder of the legendary design studio The Designers Republic. Work on this project was preceded by long discussions during which ideas were born. Earlier this year I spoke with Ian about this project, which, although musically it's not my fave, but packaging design immediately caught my attention.

Could you tell us more about this project? What was the idea at the beginning and how did it evolve during the design work?

At the beginning was a discussion about Closure / Continuation as a way of dealing with life (and death) in the context of beginnings (optimism / birth / new growth) and ends (resignation / death / decay etc.)

We talked about how what lies between these extremes can be seen as a blank canvas — birth and death are finite and absolute, but what happens between these events isn’t. If we focus on the beginning and the end, we sometimes miss the really important part which is, say, life.

So the purpose of the white squares, in this sense, is to obscure the subject of the image, the key content, or the action / event. At the time of the initial conversations between Steven and myself, the title was as much a question for him / the band (is the album a new beginning or an end) as it is for the audience / fans. This raised questions about permanence (about life in general and about the band’s reunion).

The question of permanence also informed the nature of the content of the design. Should there be a sense of permanence (epic/classic rock, or even old school Porcupine Tree type imagery), should it look like an epitaph or should it be more of the moment, something visceral, immediate / instant? Should it be in the ’now’, not in the ‘forever’?

What strikes you from the start about this cover (or rather, these covers) is precisely the lack of the (sometimes kitschy) "epicness" characteristic of progressive rock...

For Steven, I think there was a sense of making something different, something contemporary to reflect the music — a summing up of everything Porcupine Tree or an album made in the here and now by musicians who happened to make albums ten years ago, when they and their audience were different people.

I wanted to go with iPhone snaps as an aesthetic — immediate, unplanned, and often snaps capturing moments rather than epic choreographed imagery. I wanted to use photos where the relevance could be said to be hidden in plain sight. And I wanted the selection to appear random. It’s based on the psychology of our brains naturally trying to make sense of whatever we encounter. If we encounter ‘random’ images in a single context with no guide to the interpretation provided, it’s natural for us to join the dots in the way that suits us. Most of the images are treated in some way to further dislocate them, and the reason for their inclusion, from the norm.

Because it's about the coming together of the images and not individual images per se, and therefore there was a deliberate decision not to create a collection of amazing epic photography to represent the album, both as a collection of music and as an ‘event’, but to lean towards instant design (the curation and treatment of the images were deliberately fast-paced and intuitive on my part).

All of the images relate directly and personally, if not universally, to the notions of beginning and end as described above. That was also a conscious decision — that all the images were taken and/or found on my iPhone prior to starting the design was important. The uncertain future built on unintentional hindsight etc.

So, all the images (with some exceptions were snapped by me with no intention for their use in design or artwork… they are just images of things I saw which had some relevance at the time they were taken. There’s a sense of the accidental tourist having a holiday in my life.

What about the tree on the cover? Was this design the only option you showed??

It was an idea developed with Steven and executed with Steven’s approval. There was no need to show other options — it wasn’t a blank canvas. There were some discussions around the front cover image. My reasoning was that using a tree was always going to be the elephant in the room. Do we ignore the tree reference or do we bite the bullet and go for it? The tree image was taken on my regular weekend walk near my home in Sheffield and I’d started playing with it for a different project from before lockdown. It wasn’t used but I kept revisiting it, and then I got the contact from Steven. To me, it was an obvious choice but other people took some convincing because it was an image of a tree. Was it THE Porcupine Tree? Well for me, it is if you want it to be :-)

The reality was that as the other images were being selected for the formats and booklet, there was nothing that really represented the title on its own, and, actually, we didn’t want there to be. So, in that context, what else could the cover be?

One of the covers features a photo of a young boy, is it someone from the family?

There are various family images included because the questions of birth and death, hope and despair, beginnings and ends are intrinsic to our notions of family, permanence (or temporality), etc.

Children are universally seen, in general, as representing hope and optimism, innocence, birth, rebirth, a fresh start, etc. So, it was about using images of children to represent a theme / make a point, and I didn’t have to seek permission to use the images, other than asking my kids if they minded me using pictures of them for an album for a band they’ve never heard of… they’re used to it!

The white squares hopefully push people to think about the bigger picture rather than focusing on each image.

Could you reveal some details from the design kitchen? Did you assume from the beginning that this would not only be the cover of one album but also "spill over" into singles, music videos, and other releases??

There were always going to be numerous formats with a lot of real estates for design. We always knew there would be several pieces of vinyl and special editions, and the same for the cd format. Everything was effectively designed at the same time. There were always going to be singles (digital or physical) taken from the album. There was always going to be a promo campaign and there was always going to be merchandise.

My creative conversations were always with Steven, the ideas grew between us and not with the other members of the band. I think that was because he realized that to see this through needed a singular vision, it was deliberately something different for Porcupine Tree. You’d have to ask him, but I felt that he realized that the idiosyncrasies of the design and image selection would be lost in design by the committee.

Richard (Barbieri - keyboard player of the band) was more involved with the merchandise so while there are some core TDR designs in that collection, others were more his interpretation/evolution of what we’d done.

What was the process of selecting illustrations/photos for each layout??

The process of image selection was essentially me plowing through the thousands of seemingly unconnected / disconnected photos on my phone and selecting those which for me had some sense of closure/continuation (birth/death, optimism (hope) / resignation (decay), etc about them, Then it was a case of distilling successive selections down to the number needed for the formats and the image book in the ltd edition cd / blu-ray box version). I tried to keep the process as randomized as possible but obviously, in any curatorial process certain aesthetic decisions are made as to what images work well together — or sometimes which ones don’t… the aim, I guess for me, was to provoke the audience into asking how and why the images connect — a sense of guided response.

What about the typography?

The typography was always intended, and designed, to be functional but with personality. Importantly, it is designed to appear ‘added’ to the squares on each page. The design is three-layered — image obscured by negative space compromised by additional type… the way a well-designed form is compromised by the typing of details into (onto) it by someone tasked with filling in the information, not design (insurance claims, etc) Consequently the information starts at the same point and finishes where the information finishes irrespective of the design or slotted space.

I mean the white square that appears on Bowie’s album. For you it has a completely different context, but do you feel any affinity with that cover?

It is a different context although there are similarities. We arrived at the white square independently for the Bowie cover but once we realized where we’d landed with our design we had to make a call on whether it was valid to use it. I think for Steven there was a little sense of, maybe homage, but it's not really the same thing, and not really for the same reason. We looked at other ways to communicate the same thing, should we use a circle instead of a square for instance but by that point, I started to feel that changing our design because of the Bowie cover was in some ways no different to them being similar. People will see what they want to see and react to that how they want to react accordingly. There are also other similarities of course… both are squares on squares, both album covers are the same size, both are a mix of flat graphic/photography/typography, etc, and both have slabs of vinyl in them which are pressed with grooves which contain music, etc.

Was it Steven Wilson idea to hire you for this project? Did he take an active part in the design?

I think it was an enjoyable relationship — we share a lot of ideas and inspirations (although over the years they’ve manifested themselves in different ways, which is interesting in its own way). It was his idea to work with me / TDR, he’s a big fan of a lot of the music covers I’ve done for Warp Records related artists ( Autechre / Apex Twin / LFO / Plaid / Seefeel, etc), R&S, and more recently Arjunamusic in Berlinand Rune Gramafon, etc.

One image I loved was a close up crop of a fast food burger… to me it looked great visually / graphically and was a comment on life as fast food (etc). Steven’s been a vegetarian, quite vocally / publicly, and he didn’t feel comfortable with meat as part of his album artwork even though he got the point being made. So that was a no-go!

He took an active part in the design process rather than the design itself. He was interested and interesting in his comments and encouraging in support of the creative route we’d decided on. His main input came at the start of the process where we defined the core creative such as the nature of the images and the use of the white square and the reasons for it. He expressed preferences when given choices, and vetoed some images.

And last question, I read somewhere that you designed the flag of Slovenia for a competition in 2003 (?). Is this true?

We were invited to pitch for the redesign of a new Slovenian flag because we were doing a lot of work with the architects Sadar + Vuga at the time. They had then recently completed the design and construction of the Slovenian Chamber of Commerce building in Ljubljana, about which we had made a book (with Sadar + Vuga) ‘3D>2D’. Around that time because of work with them, I was in Ljubljana every 4-8 weeks and coincidentally I got to know some of the right people at the right time. I was really happy with what we did but in the end, they didn’t change the flag. I think the reasons for both commissioning the new flag, and retaining the old were politically complex at a sensitive time. Or maybe they just didn’t like any of the ideas submitted, international flag design is a minefield, for sure.