Category: History

It’s live: Singapore Graphic Archives

SGA

When I first started working on INDEPENDENCE: The history of graphic design in Singapore since the 1960s some five years ago, it opened my eyes to the breadth of visual culture that we produce and consume in this city-state. As I wrote this book on Singapore’s graphic design history, I also started keeping a collection of graphic materials found in Singapore. I picked up flyers, bought books, and even started making colour photocopies at our library—paying a dollar a piece. It struck me that instead of just amassing cabinets of these materials, I should share them so as to raise awareness of Singapore’s visual culture. That led to the founding of the Singapore Visual Archive in 2011, a digital repository of things that can be seen here.

Five years on, I have relaunched the website as the Singapore Graphic Archives. The name change reflects the focus on graphic design and visual communication from Singapore, but the aim is still the same: to collect and document graphic design from the Southeast Asian city-state to encourage research on the industry, and to promote a critical appreciation of its visual culture. I’ve also had the privilege of working with local digital agencies Pettycache and Watchtower to come up with a cleaner and more functional (responsive!) website. In preparation for revamping the archive, I “studied’ many other design archives around the world through writing for AIGA’s Eye on Design blog. Two in particular inspired how I’ve gone about running this operation entirely on my own: Kind Company’s Display and the Seymour Chwast Archive.

Now that the archive is live, I can return to the laborious process of discovering, researching, scanning and uploading graphic materials on to the website. The dream is that I can get paid to do this, or at least find funding to enable the website with more features and create better archiving processes. But the pleasure for now—and hopefully always—is discovering designs from Singapore that widen my eyes and I go, “Wah lao! I need to share this!”

Saving Indonesia’s Graphic Design History Before It’s Lost Forever

One group is on a mission to open the country’s first design museum 

A propaganda poster created when Indonesia was occupied by the Japanese during the second World War. COURTESY OF DGI

As Indonesia was liberated from an authoritarian regime over a decade ago, a democratic government emerged—and so did a graphic design archive.

In 2003, the Southeast Asian nation was recovering from a recession and was on the cusp of holding its first direct presidential elections when Hanny Kardinata started an electronic mailing list to share his notes and artifacts on Indonesia’s graphic design past. This casual conversation with fellow designers Henricus Kusbiantoro and the late Priyanto Sunarto blossomed under the country’s more permissive climate, growing into a community that was formalized in 2007 as the Desain Grafis Indonesia (DGI).

➜ Read the full story in AIGA’s Eye on Design

Russia’s First Design Museum is Racing to Preserve its Greatest Soviet-era Treasures

Discarded financial documents, burnt archives at dachas [countryside houses], and metal closets missing keys for more than a decade. A Russian spy drama? It’s actually the true story behind the building of the Moscow Design Museum’s archive.

The institution, founded by two graphic designers, a journalist, and an architect (Alexander Sankova, Stephen Lukyanov, Nadezhda Bakuradze, and Valery Patkonen) has been racing against time to recover the quickly disappearing artifacts of Soviet design history. For a period that stretches from the 1920s to the dissolution of the union seven decades later, this means sifting through what has become discarded as junk and tracking down elderly designers who are surprised to be remembered at all.

“When we started collecting Soviet design artifacts, many designers cried out, ‘Where were you two months ago? I’ve just burned all my archives at dacha!’” explains Sankova over an e-mail interview. “They couldn’t believe that someone would ever want their archives for the museum.”

➜ Read the rest in AIGA’s Eye on Design