{"id":563735,"date":"2026-07-23T04:57:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-23T04:57:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/563735\/"},"modified":"2026-07-23T04:57:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-23T04:57:08","slug":"we-didnt-care-what-the-client-wanted-sheffields-designers-republic-on-their-art-for-aphex-twin-pulp-and-pringles-art-and-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/563735\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018We didn\u2019t care what the client wanted!\u2019: Sheffield\u2019s Designers Republic on their art for Aphex Twin, Pulp \u2026 and Pringles | Art and design"},"content":{"rendered":"

Forty years ago in Sheffield<\/a>, Ian Anderson founded one of the most influential UK design companies by mistake. \u201cThe name the Designers Republic was a joke, because we weren\u2019t designers,\u201d he recalls. \u201cEarly on, everything we did was in black and white because we didn\u2019t know how to make it colour.\u201d<\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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 remortaged his house twice to keep up with their output.<\/p>\n

\u2018We weren\u2019t designers\u2019 \u2026 Ian Anderson, left, and Nick Phillips in 1986. Photograph: Jeremy Lawrence<\/p>\n

To commemorate the milestone, Anderson \u2013 now 65, who runs the company solo \u2013 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. \u201cStorage is an issue,\u201d he says, showing me around his Sheffield studio, which is stuffed with records, posters, flyers, books and artworks. \u201cIt\u2019s like I\u2019ve got a private museum that nobody visits \u2013 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite TDR\u2019s naive, inexperienced origins \u2013 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 \u2013 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. \u201cWe went out and got matching Nehru suits made by the same tailor that made ABC\u2019s gold lam\u00e9 suits,\u201d he recalls.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 10 Days in an Elevator, which was inspired by photographer William Klein\u2019s cover for his book New York 1954-55 and used woodblock typography to \u201cmimic visually the onomatopoeia\u201d of the word Chakk. It became the first in a series of designs for the label\u2019s 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\u2019s) and Age of Chance, as maximal as Peter Saville\u2019s designs for Factory records over in Manchester were minimal.<\/p>\n

Maximalist \u2026 the cover art for Age of Chance\u2019s single Kiss. Photograph: The Designer\u2019s Republic<\/p>\n

Anderson viewed TDR\u2019s brightly coloured, text-crammed sleeves as an antidote to what he calls the \u201cheaven knows we\u2019re miserabilists now\u201d brigade \u2013 meaning the Smiths and the bands they influenced. \u201cJust fucking cheer up,\u201d he says. \u201cThe 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\u2019t 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 \u2018let\u2019s have it\u2019 attitude. Our world was very different. We were into dance and electronic music.\u201d<\/p>\n

TDR coined the term SoYo \u2013 an abbreviation of South Yorkshire, while the tagline for the company is: North of Nowhere. \u201cWe coined SoYo not as a great exercise in regional branding, just as a fuck off to a bunch of knobs in Soho,\u201d says Anderson, who had moved from Bracknell New Town in Berkshire to study philosophy at Sheffield University. \u201cWe had a sense of us versus the world.\u201d So when a new Sheffield record label started in 1989 \u2013 Warp \u2013 TDR created the label\u2019s 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 \u2013 from LFO\u2019s minimal yet striking covers to the psychedelic colour explosion of Nightmares on Wax\u2019s A Word of Science, which doubled up as a visual tracklisting of the album \u2013 it put them on the global map as a design powerhouse.<\/p>\n

Sells for thousands \u2026 Work. Buy. Consume. Die. Photograph: The Designer\u2019s Republic (tDR)<\/p>\n

Their work was so immediately impactful that they never even needed to pitch to potential clients, and Anderson developed a correspondingly spiky attitude. \u201cWe really didn\u2019t care what the client wanted,\u201d Anderson says. \u201cWe weren\u2019t those people that would go and play golf with them.\u201d Being in Sheffield meant that they were largely free to get on with the job. \u201cNo one was gonna jump on a train to come up and check on us,\u201d Anderson says. \u201cFor most of them, the thought of going this far north was dizzying.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u201cWork. Buy. Consume. Die.\u201d A recent reprint of this instantly sold out, and originals sell for thousands.<\/p>\n

Anderson says that his approach was influenced by his philosophy studies. \u201cA lot of our design is about asking questions,\u201d he says. \u201cIf I\u2019m designing a record cover, I don\u2019t want it to look like a record cover. If I\u2019m designing a corporate logo then I\u2019d rather it look like a record cover. For me, things work, and they have more gravity, if you challenge people\u2019s preconceptions.\u201d 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: \u201cAn image of children chasing after an ice-cream van from an Orange\u2122 TV commercial advertising Text Messaging.\u201d<\/p>\n

While TDR was very much rooted in Sheffield \u2013 they designed flyers and posters for numerous local nights and clubs such as Gatecrasher, NY Sushi, and Warp\u2019s Blech \u2013 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? \u201cYeah, it was all like, \u2018You sold out\u2019,\u201d says Anderson. \u201cPeople were like, \u2018We thought you were all, up the revolution\u2019. 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

New horizons \u2026 Coca-Cola bottles designed by The Designer\u2019s Republic. Photograph: The Designer\u2019s Republic (tDR)<\/p>\n

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. \u201cWhen I took a back seat to allow TDR to grow beyond me, it died,\u201d Anderson said at the time. \u201cIts creative spark was crushed under the weight of business self-interest.\u201d<\/p>\n

It returned as a slimmed down operation, just Anderson, and continued to make innovative work. Autechre\u2019s 2010 album Oversteps remains some of Anderson\u2019s favourite work, while Aphex Twin\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Down to the penny \u2026 the cover art for Aphex Twin\u2019s 2014 album. Photograph: The Designer\u2019s Republic<\/p>\n

In many ways, Anderson has come full circle, and he\u2019s back to working on record covers for interesting artists \u2013 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. \u201cI went into Covid with some uncertainty as a designer, well known or not,\u201d says Anderson. \u201cThen I came out of it and suddenly I was perceived as the Goat, the OG, like an elder statesman of design.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite the blast of nostalgia around the 40th anniversary, Anderson says he\u2019s more concerned about what\u2019s next. \u201cWhen I should be celebrating the past along with the rest of our new followers, at the same time I don\u2019t know if I\u2019ve ever been less bothered about it,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s like having a fantastic house full of stuff, but actually preferring to sit in your shed thinking about new things.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Forty years ago in Sheffield, Ian Anderson founded one of the most influential UK design companies by mistake.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":563736,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[307,304,305,306,308,93,61,60],"class_list":["post-563735","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563735","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=563735"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563735\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/563736"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=563735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=563735"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=563735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}