Category: History

More veteran design studios

There was much interest in my previous post introducing some veteran design studios that I think should be voted to speak at The Design Society Conference in April, so I thought I’ll try to profile the rest of the studios that I missed out:

Design 3 (1981)
Started by two industrial designers who could only find graphic design work viable during that period. Its two founders, Tan Khee Soon and Lim Lay Ngoh, were  part of the 13 that founded the Designers Association Singapore, our country’s first multi-disciplinary design association. Two pieces of their work that many Singaporeans will remember growing up with is the old logos for the Neighbourhood Police Posts and that of the Singapore Civil Defence.

Ransome Chua Design Associates (1986)
One of the few locally-trained designer who was brave enough to set up his own studio. After graduating from the Baharuddin Vocational Institute, he worked at Hagley and Hoyle for three years before starting his own studio. They specialised in editorial work, working on several art books for the cultural institutions here.

Lancer Design (1989)
Mark Phooi started out as a freelancer and dropped the word ‘free’ from ‘freelancer’ to form his studio name. Over the last two decades, he has grew his business to include a design school, First Media Design School, which wants to nurture “designpreneus” of the future.

Design Counsel (1989)
Another powerhouse design studio of the ’90s that was formed by a female, Kim Faulkner. She was the marketing manager at multinational Addison Design before breaking away to create her own multi-disciplinary design studio and she made it explicit that it was to help the Singapore industry grow. Some of her corporate identity clients include custom shirt maker CYC, slimming studio Expressions International, and the former Television Corporation of Singapore. Eventually, she grew the studio big enough to sell to multinational branding agency Interbrand.

Duet Design (1990)
This all-female team left Viscom Design to do their own thing and have quietly built a reputation serving the hospitality industry in Singapore and around the region. They’ve worked on the signage and environmental graphics for several of WOHA’s architecture projects and also did Rj Paper’s calendars for several years.

Crunch Communications (1993)
This studio was started by Sim Kok Huoy, who founded Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts’ graphic design course. He got a graphic design degree from the UK in 1973 and returned to work in various multinational advertising agencies throughout the ’70s and ’80s before coming out to start his own studio.

Bonsey Design (1993)
Jonathan Bonsey was the creative director at multinational Addison Design, Singapore’s biggest foreign design firm in the ’80s. The studio did many packaging projects for F&N because it was a relatively new field here. He then went to Addison’s overseas offices and returned to Singapore to start his own studio in 1993, focusing on branding, then also a rather new concept.

Momentum Design (1993) + Then Design (1993)
Two firms started by expatriates in Singapore and fondly remembered by younger designers for their cutting-edge designs during that period, e.g. Then Design was said to have worked on many Song + Kelly projects. However, founder Spencer Ball eventually sold the studio and is now with Anthem Worldwide’s Singapore office. As for Momentum, it is now based in Malaysia and is still run by creative director William Atyeo.

DPC Design (1996)
Patrick Cheah headed the Singapore office of Australian multinational Cato Design through the 1990s. Cato was one of the three big foreign design studios to have an office in Singapore together with Addison and Landor. Patrick left to start his own studio in 1996 and worked on projects like the corporate identity of Keppel Corporation’s family of companies, Boncafe and the Swissotel. He currently also runs design offices in both China and Indonesia, an arrangement that is quite rare for a Singapore studio.

Whose independence story do you want to hear?

Public voting is now underway for the speakers of The Design Society’s third annual conference. For the first time ever, you can decide the four Singapore graphic design studios that will be invited to share their tales in going on their own to practise design independently.

This is also the first time a list of Singapore studios that have come and gone since the 1960s has been compiled, all presented in a beautiful timeline designed by ROOTS. While most would be familiar with studios set up since the late 1990s, the earlier pioneer studios might be unknown to many. So here’s a short write-up of some of the studios I’ll like to hear from based on interviews I’ve conducted with them.

HAGLEY & HOYLE (1969)
This is one of Singapore’s earliest graphic design houses set up by British creative directors John Hagley and Brian Hoyle. They were part of the first incarnation of the Creative Circle in the 1960s and set up their own design house to offer specialised graphic services in what was essentially a market made up only of advertising agencies. They gained a reputation for their print publications and typographic swashes, as seen in their logo. Amazingly, the studio is still alive today, now headed by Peggy Tan, who joined it in 1972.

DESIGN OBJECTIVES (1979)
Arguably the longest-existing design studio set up by a Singaporean,  Design Objectives was founded by Ronnie Tan over three decades ago and is still going strong. He was educated in Baharuddin Vocational Institute, Singapore’s first graphic design school, and worked briefly for all of the country’s big studios of the ’70s including Hagley & Hoyle and Central Design. The studio has done corporate identity work for Comfort Cab and EZ-Link card and has continued to work on major projects such as the signage of Khoo Teck Puat Hospital, which won Design of the Year in last year’s President’s Design Award.

VISCOM DESIGN (1980)
This studio was started by Sylvia Tan, who was probably the most educated designer in Singapore during the ’80s. She received a degree in typographic design from the London College of Printing and a Masters in Communication Design from Pratt Institute. Viscom’s speciality was in book design and the studio has worked on many “national” books and also regional publications like Mimar: Architecture in Development.

SU YEANG DESIGN (1983)
Another design studio set up by a female designer, Su Yeang is regarded as the most commercially successful designer of her times. She started her design career working in Cold Storage where she was the in-house designer for the corporate identities’ of the company’s various arms and the packaging of their products. In 1983, she formed her own studio and eventually sold it to a multi-national branding company. Her studio worked on the packaging of Tiger Beer for years, and also created the identities for The Esplanade and National Library Board. In 1997, the World Trade Organisation adopted the logo the studio designed as their official emblem.

IMMORTAL THE DESIGN STATION (1990)
The founders of Immortal broke out from Addison Design, Singapore’s biggest multi-national design company in the ’80s. These overseas-trained designers set up during a period when there was much discussion about Singapore’s national identity and seeing design and creativity from an Asian perspective. It’s an issue close to their heart and they’ve continued to grow in Asia while being rooted to it by being part of The Design Alliance, a network of design studios across this region.

BLACK DESIGN (2004)
This studio is fairly young but its founders Jackson Tan and Patrick Gan curated several design exhibitions that have helped establish the current network of Singapore designers from various disciplines by connecting them with one another and showcasing them to the world. Through their exhibitions 20/20, New Wave, UtterRubbish, UseLess and Shiok — Singapore designers had a platform to reach out to the world.

 

Singapore Flag Draft E

“Neither had I realised that our flag was designed initially to have three stars, until leaders such as then DPM Toh Chin Chye expressed concern that Singapore might be perceived to have associations with the Malayan Comunist Party, whose flag also had three stars.” — JASON LEOW giving a first-person account of a video shown at a localised citizenship ceremony in “History lessons with a few unfamiliar gems” (1988). The Straits Times. 12 January.