The client is always wrong

By Daniel Dylan Wray

Ian Anderson never intended to get into graphic design. When he arrived in Sheffield in 1979 to study philosophy, as a self-described teenage geek from Berkshire, he was drawn to the city by the radical music he heard John Peel play on the radio by the likes of Cabaret Voltaire. Well, that along with the romantic allure of the city’s staunch left-wing politics. Sheffield, for Anderson, was “a utopian industrial city fuelled by industrial music and socialism.”

Perhaps his later career was inevitable: after all, Anderson always had an eye for aesthetics. As a teenager, living near Bracknell New Town and working in Sainsbury’s, he got moved off stacking shelves to sorting out the trolleys because he would spend so much time making sure all the labels were facing outwards in perfect immaculate order — perhaps subconsciously mirroring those tins of soup he’d seen in the Andy Warhol pop art book he’d read as a child.

When settled in Sheffield, Anderson got into design by making flyers and posters for gigs and DJ nights he was promoting, along with creating fanzines such as Grey Matter and Voodoo Voodoo. This role ballooned when he started managing the band Person to Person and doing their artwork.

Album covers and band logos followed, and by 1986 Anderson — along with his friend Nick Phillips, a sculpture student with a skill for drawing – had launched The Designers Republic (tDR), which boasted the tagline: SoYo North of Nowhere. To celebrate, they got a new look. Anderson knew the guy in Rotherham who made the sparkly suits for the Sheffield pop band ABC and so the pair had custom Nehru-style outfits made. “We were going to be the socialist Sheffield version of Gilbert and George,” Anderson says in the 2019 book The A-Z of the Designers Republic.

tDR made record sleeves for the likes of Pop Will Eat Itself and Age of Chance, artists connected to Sheffield’s FON studios and record label. FON spawned a record shop of the same name, which gave the employees the idea to start their own label. Warp Records was launched in 1989 by Steve Beckett, Rob Mitchell and Rob Gordon, and tDR was brought in from the off to help shape the visual identity of this new upstart. 

The label quickly established itself as a hip, zeitgeist-shaping operation. Its debut release, Forgemasters’ ‘Track With No Name’, is now regarded as a classic bleep techno record and upon its release, felt like such a fiercely fresh and intense piece of music that it was blowing minds on dance floors throughout the country. Just as distinct was the single’s strikingly purple artwork. While Anderson was inspired by Russian constructivism, pop art, modern art, Japanese letterforms and anime, along with subverting corporate images and logos, with Warp he wanted to create something that felt like ground zero. He decided Warp needed its own colour. The label quickly became associated with purple.

Anderson had already learned a lesson in making covers leap out when designing records for FON. Each release featured black and white stripes down the left-hand side, across the spine and down the back, “so if you put all your FON records together on your shelf, you had this block of highly visible, immediately identifiable black and white stripes.” The idea was to apply this idea of a visual theme to Warp. “In my head, I was thinking: the whole world’s turning purple,” Anderson says. “Everything’s gonna be purple. It was to be the label’s identity.” Why purple? “I just liked the colour at the time,” he shrugs.

In 1989, 19-year-old Nick Bax was working at tDR on work placement and would later go on to be its longest-serving employee, working there until 2007. As we sit in his Park Hill office (he eventually left to run his own creative studio, Human) he remembers the impact the purple had. “I worked in London for a year and I used to go to Black Market Records and you could just see the purple instantly,” he recalls. “There was a definite strategy where if you had a wall of 12” records you would spot the Warp ones immediately.” He thinks purple was perfect because it’s a non-political colour: “In a city like Sheffield, you have got to be really careful if you're using red or blue.”

Alongside the heavy blast of purple was the label’s new logo. Though it’s undergone a few tweaks over the years, the distinctive globe with a lightning-esque flash across it is still on every record release to this day. The label’s one request for the logo was for it to have “longevity”, according to Anderson. But to make something that had a feeling of the future about it, and that would last, he looked to the past. “We wanted something to look futuristic but wouldn’t date,” he says. “Which is really difficult to do. So I went back to all the Dan Dare comics and sci-fi magazines I had as a kid and took something that looked like it was from that.” 

The timing for Warp and tDr’s partnership was perfect. Not only was dance music booming, with Warp quickly becoming synonymous with releasing some of the most innovative stuff out there, but the opportunity for more design flex came with it.

Traditionally, singles were always released on 7”, but for dance music, they were 12” (more space allows room for longer tracks and remixes). 12”s came out on thicker and higher quality card, so they had spines, and they offered a larger surface area, meaning that a new format for graphic design had arrived at the exact time a flurry of completely new sounds emerged. “The design was intended to have a forward-looking, forward-thinking flavour,” says Anderson. “In the same way that the music was.”

With both the record label and the design company being based in Sheffield, people were soon beginning to take note of activities in the city. “Warp very quickly gained a reputation,” recalls Bax. “I was in Essex a lot of that time studying, but even there it resonated.” He’d chosen Essex because it was an excellent design school — but also because he presumed his next steps would be working in nearby London. “In the ’80s if you were doing anything creative and you wanted to make a living out of it, you had to leave South Yorkshire. That’s just how it was. So, it gave me a sense of pride that these things were happening in Sheffield and had such an impact.”

Bax worked at tDR from 1990-1992, got poached and had a year in London before returning in 1993 for a further 14 years. Upon his return, not only did Bax no longer have to worry about leaving his hometown to find creative work, he was at the epicentre of it. “We had our own little gang,” he recalls. “We didn’t have much money but we were really into what we were doing and we felt it was important. For someone who grew up working class in Rotherham, to think you can design something and then within two weeks it's on display in HMV on Oxford Street or in Tower Records in Shibuya… that is mind-blowing.”

In many ways, the lack of outlets and opportunities in the city at the time was the exact same thing feeding its booming spirit. “The nature of Sheffield as a city is one where there’s lots of creativity almost in spite of the area,” says Anderson. “Richard Kirk always used to say that we only did Cabaret Voltaire because there was nothing else to do.” 

The result of this, historically, has been a very singular approach to music in the city because things are created from the ground up with little outside influence. tDR was similar. “We didn’t want to be part of the London thing,” says Anderson. “Our perception of London was all ad agencies and knobheads in red trouser braces and, well, just horrible. It's stereotypical, and probably nobody actually looked like that, but this was also compounded by my experience of meeting a lot of people at record companies down there.” For Bax, being in Sheffield was key to the work being produced. “If we'd have been in London, we'd have been influenced by so much more,” he says. “But in Sheffield, we had time to crystallise what we were doing and not be diluted by what else was going on around us.”

The early days of tDR were more akin to a band who would go out boozing together and throw parties in the studio. They were so keen to do things on their own terms and not turn into a typical dreaded ad company that they even embraced a half-serious half-joke mantra of “the client is always wrong.” The ethos was: “This is what we do, if you want to do it with us, great!” This approach was key to tDR’s growing success according to Anderson. “We didn’t do everything everybody else did because we were never initially committed to being a design studio forever,” he says. In the early 1990s, they were also designing anti-consumerist campaigns put out under a false corporate brand they created called Pho-Ku which utilised slogans such as ‘work buy consume die’. “It wasn’t like: let's be really weird,” Anderson explains. “We were just doing what we wanted to do and it just happened to be that we were getting noticed and other people weren’t.”

This felt especially pronounced when they would visit London. “We'd go to exhibition launches down there and it was like we were the invading hordes from the North,” he recalls. “It really was like that. Especially given we were a design company that was doing, really, what they [other companies] wished they'd done. Instead, they got trapped into doing some boring shit because they went along with that boring shit in the first place because they'd seen design as a career, whereas we just saw it as a way to get guestlists for gigs.” Although it was never intended to be an out-and-out North versus South assault. “Us and Warp never sat down and discussed: this is South Yorkshire rising or the North will rise again,” says Anderson. “Apart from whenever it suited us to stick two fingers up at the whole London thing.”

In 1992, Warp released the Artificial Intelligence compilation. Intended to showcase a new era of more chilled-out electronic home-listening music – rather than just associating dance music with clubs and high BPMs – it featured future Warp legends such as Aphex Twin (as Polygon Window at the time) and Autechre. It was a milestone release with a cover that was deemed equally pioneering at the time, a collaboration between tDR with another Sheffield-based artist Phil Wolstenholme, who designed the computer-generated sleeve image utilising 3D modelling and rendering software while it was still in its infancy.

The cover depicted a robot getting stoned in a living room listening to classic albums by the likes of Kraftwerk and Pink Floyd. It proved to be a perfect symbiosis of music and art that was pushing the boundaries of new technologies to its limit. Bax remembers an exhausted, sleep-deprived, chain-smoking Wolstenholme turning up at the tDR offices with stacks of floppy disks, with as many as ten required just to hold one image broken up into parts. It then had to be reassembled on tDR’s computer.

“Twelve-hour renders were quite common in those days,” recalls Wolstenholme of the gruelling process involved in pushing the tech to its extremes. He explains that as recording studios became possible at home, so did visual studios like his. “So suddenly tykes like us in Sheffield could release a product of equivalent quality to the major labels. So I think this release – and several others around that time – were game-changers.” 

Anderson compares tDR and Warp’s partnership to a romantic relationship. “We did feel aggrieved if anybody else ever did some artwork for Warp,” he says. “It’s like if you’ve got a partner and you’re going out with them and they snogged somebody else. It was possessive. And they were similar, too. If we did something for another artist on a different label that they felt was a bit in the Warp area then they’d be a bit like, ‘you can’t do that’.”

However, both parties were growing bigger year on year as the 1990s pressed on. tDR was crafting visuals for Britpop as often as it did for dance music, working on campaigns for everyone from Pulp to Supergrass, and their work on the PlayStation game WipEout was considered era-defining in the video gaming world. This was while Warp was releasing landmark albums by the likes of Boards of Canada, Aphex Twin, Autechre, Squarepusher and countless others, as well as running the club night Blech in the city (tDR designed the artwork, of course).   

So, with tDR’s output being so varied, spanning various styles, what is it that gives it a distinct edge that created so many beloved Warp covers? It’s something less obviously visual, according to Anderson: “I think narrative should underpin everything,” he says. “I think people should always think about story. Pretty much any record cover that's come out of Designers Republic, there's a story to it, and a context, and why we did it in a certain way, and who we were doing it for.”

One great example of a story circulating through Anderson’s Warp work comes via Aphex Twin’s 2014 album Syro. When Aphex Twin came back with his first album in 13 years, it was a huge event. Warp literally launched a blimp into the skies of London to announce his return. As one of the most influential electronic artists of all time, it was a hugely anticipated record but Richard D James found himself querying the whole process and music industry landscape of promoting an album in the modern age. 

“Through our conversations, we arrived at the idea that the album was basically a product,” says Anderson. “And so, how do you communicate that it's just a product?” They decided to list every cost attached to making the record, along with every bit of software and hardware used to create the music. “He thought it would really piss Warp off or make them feel uncomfortable but they really liked it,” he says. “So they came back with the costs of everything. Even down to getting stickers printed to put on lampposts in Australia or the cost of sandwiches and coffee at an advanced listening party for music journalists. It was about deconstructing the physicality of a manufactured product and the promotion of it.”

While some of Anderson’s favourite work for Warp has been in the 2010s, there was something of a shift that took place around the turn of the millennium. When Warp turned 10 in 1999, Anderson was finally able to see his world-turned-purple vision come to fruition. The artwork he designed for some of the celebratory releases included Sheffield buildings being given a purple makeover – hitting home the impact of the label being as significant and foundational as some of its concrete monoliths. “That was like the realisation of that original idea,” he says.

But it also marked a period of significant change at the label. The following year they moved operations to London and the year after that the label's co-founder, Rob Mitchell, who Anderson was close with, died at 38 from cancer. The days of tDR and Warp being a Sheffield gang with nearby offices who would drink in the Rutland Arms together was now over. And while they continue to work together to this day, the visual identity of the label has become more stretched out in line with the label’s growing roster, which today includes the likes of Yves Tumour, Oneohtrix Point Never, Squid and Flying Lotus. And there’s now been a huge number of creatives involved in shaping the visual output of the label, such as Weirdcore, YES, Matt Pyke, Eva Vermandel, Deidre O’Callaghan, Jonathan Zawada, Hassan Rahim, Michael Place, Braindead, Michael Oswell and numerous others. 

“We’re very artist-centric,” says Warp’s General Manager James Burton of their current approach to design. “And as the label’s artists started coming from different places, they brought their own favourite designers. Some wanted to work with tDR — some didn’t. That means less of a strict label identity, but it wouldn’t be appropriate to insist on a specific designer for most of our artists now.”

When an outside designer comes in and does something for Warp — a label with such a strong visual history — are they just looking to try and do best by the artist, or are they primarily focused on the label’s history and legacy? “You have to strike a balance,” says Julian House, who is the go-to designer for all of Broadcast’s releases on the label from the early 2000s onwards. “I’m there to serve the band but I have to take into account how the label sees them,” he says. “Luckily this is usually a harmonious experience, and everyone is more or less on the same page, looking for the best solution.”

What you have with Warp is a label synonymous with groundbreaking design work across the decades, but also something that is deeply eclectic and relies on the personality of a lot of people. The reason there can often feel like such a connection between some of the work — even when, in reality, it can be wildly different — is a joining of the dots that fans make. “People tend to pick out the threads they are most interested in,” Burton says. “The original Warp visual identity is still important and I think there is a throughline. But it does feel like a different time now. We represent more diverse artists and the visual identity of those records needs to represent the artists. It’s not about one specific thing.”

Consistency is nice — but adding variation to the mix is even better. For Lionel Skerratt, the label’s Production Manager, including more people as the years go on has created an important balance. “It’s been quite a big benefit just having one megalomaniac [Anderson] handle all the early stuff,” he says. “Then to bake in all his little design trademarks to the style of Warp. I often see other designers reference certain little things [of his] which reinforces it all too. Most labels only have a logo to tie it all together.”

It might be a very different label from the one that started 35 years ago in Sheffield but for Anderson there’s still something pleasing about how some skint mates mucking around in the studio can still see the results stamped on records all over the world. “I am proud that we did it,” he says. “And this isn’t meant to sound arrogant, although maybe it is, but it was designed to withstand the test of time. It was designed to have longevity.”