Information graphics are often dry and uninviting. But

PETER GRUNDY:
THE CRAFTSMAN WHO COULDN’T DRAW
by JOHN O’REILLY
Information graphics are often dry and uninviting.
But by adopting an illustrative approach, Peter Grundy –
first as one half of design duo Grundy and Northedge,
and latterly as Grundini – revolutionised the way
information is presented. No more PowerPoint pie charts
or dreary graphs. In Grundy’s visionary reworking of
statistics, the facts come to life as if animated.
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INTEGRITY OF THE INFORMATION.
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For newspaper editors and advertisers,
information design is often used as a sweetener
– a little bit of sugar that helps us digest the
information that we know is really good for us
but which we can’t always be bothered with.
Yet great information designers take information,
data and raw numbers, and hang some
humanity on them. Alexander Isley’s info-satire
for Spy Magazine in the 1980s; Tibor Kalman’s
info-polemics for Colors in the 1990s; and
Peter Grundy and Tilly Northedge’s info-iconic
work over the past two decades. Tilly Northedge
has gone off to pursue passions beyond datacrunching and visualizing, but Peter Grundy is
still putting pictures on data.
Reading The Guardian on the train to his
Brentford work/living space there’s a spread of
his recent work for Shell, part of a big
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campaign that looks like an ongoing
re-positioning of the oil company for
consumers, and in a sense for Shell
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themselves, as climate change or not,
oil is running out and we need a new
energy source quickly. The ads have the Grundy
signature of bold shape and colour, driven by
an idea that talks to your intelligence and tickles
your emotions. It’s easy to forget as you are
drawn in by their warmth, engagement and
vitality, just how tightly edited these ads are.
Great information design leaves no room for
messy thinking.
It’s why when I go into his studio I take off
my shoes, and place them by the row of shoes
by the door. Grundy says don’t bother, but it’s
more of a nod to the work than the man, that
taking off dirty shoes seems tonally correct. But
the idea that information designers need to be a
little bit anal, obsessively spick and span, is
dispelled as Grundy makes coffee and then
roots around in a black bin bag on the floor for
some milk, apologising that he meant to go out
and get some. He assures me it’s fine. It is.
ALMOST A CRAFT
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Though Grundy’s work remains utterly
contemporary his journey as an illustrator and
graphic designer begins in an age when graphic
design was viewed differently. ‘I think the nature
of design in the late 1970s was different to what
students have now,’ says Grundy. ‘I mean the
1980s hadn’t arrived. That was the period when
design suddenly became a business, people
realised you could make a lot of money from it,
it was still, almost a craft.’
Grundy and Northedge had met in the
Royal College of Art in 1976, where Grundy was
doing graphic design and Northedge was one
of the first students on a new information design
course run by Herbert Spencer. The course was
analytic and research-intense, explains Grundy:
‘once you had acquired enough information
for a particular project you would use that to
produce some design. Whereas on my course
we were down in the V&A doing advertising
briefs, they were up in Jay Mews next to the
main building in the Royal College, gathering
information on shelving systems and then
working out the various ways in which a shelving
system could be assembled. I think Tilly felt the
course didn’t really address creativity, so she
kind of looked towards my course. It’s why we
got talking because what interested me about
her course was that it wasn’t about selling
things. I was more into design that was about
explaining things.’
‘Explaining things’ is modest, information
designer language for a genre whose cardinal
sin is self-expression, ‘show’ and flash. In the
world of information design the tradition is that
everyone is a Roundhead, the Cavaliers can go
to hell. A critic of their work quoted in Graphis
magazine would later say, ‘Though trumpeted
as “intellectually coherent” their diagrams are
cumbersome, wasteful and lacking in logic,
economy and accuracy.’ In information design,
thou shalt not waste.
Yet ‘explaining things’ doesn’t really explain
the visual scale of Grundy and Northedge.
They invented an iconic language, a style that
blurred the boundaries between visual and
verbal imagination, and did it in a way that
enhances the integrity of the information.
‘The first job we ever did was a cover for
Design magazine,’ says Grundy. ‘We produced
a book based on a black and white booklet
we’d done at the Royal College of our work,
because we had done some projects together.
There was one project – how to tie a bow-tie,
showing various ways in which you could tie one
using creative instructions, like back-to-front
instructions you stuck on your front, and we sent
that out.’ The choice of a bow-tie is inspired
because it is an iconic object, because tying one
is a skill, and most of all because it is a tactile
experience. As much as their work is informative
it communicates by being solid, tactile and
sensual. Art Director of Design magazine,
Keith Ablett saw it and commissioned them to
do a diagram for the cover, and they came up
with a Thomas the Tank Engine scenario.
But their idea of being able to come with the
idea and farm out the work to an illustrator hit
the buffers of a £160 budget. ‘We thought we’d
do the drawings ourselves,’ says Grundy. ‘We
both had drawing skills, mine were pictographic
because before I went to the Royal College I had
been taught to be a Swiss typographer at Bath,
and I was quite good at doing those things. But
to cut a long story short the whole direction of
Grundy and Northedge over the next 25 years,
was that the studio developed it’s own visual
signature because of budget necessity. We found
ways of drawing. If we didn’t know how to do the
drawing we invented ways of drawing. We would
still have ideas to solve the problem but we
would use our drawing, our typography, to make
these ideas come alive.’
PHYSICAL, TANGIBLE WORK
In LSE Professor Richard Sennett’s work The
Craftsman, a sophisticated defence of the
economic and aesthetic value of craft that is not
anti-machine, Sennett writes, ‘the tactile, the
relational, and the incomplete are physical
experiences that occur in the act of drawing.
Drawing stands for a larger range of
experiences, such as the way of writing and rewriting, or of playing music to explore again and
again the puzzling qualities of a particular
chord.’ Sennett’s account of the physicality of
drawing expresses the tangible quality of Grundy
and Northedge’s work, something that is
remarkably seamless even in the transition to
digital design at the beginning of the 1990s with
their diagram for Deyan Sudjic at Blueprint
magazine. It was a piece on the evolution of
London, Grundy calls it ‘illustration journalism’.
And they did it on the page and on the computer.
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Vodafone ad image, Grundini – 2007
VW Save fuel
Letterform remastered for the Grundini book, Grundini – 2004
Grundini
3 (page 6) Diagram explaining facts from a typical race
meeting, Red Bulletin magazine, Grundini – 2008
4 (page 7) New energy futures, global campaign (ongoing) for
JWT, Grundini – 2008
5, 6 (page 7) Poster, diagrams and icons for Shell
International’s Scenarios division, Grundy & Northedge –
2004/5
7 (page 7), 9 Everyday things containing chips (Micro
processors)
Page in AR, Luminous Design/Arm Industries, Grundini – 2008
8 (page 7), 10 G2 Music
Diagram for Guardian newspaper’s G2 section, remastered for
the Grundini book with originally intended coloured
backgrounds, Grundini – 2008
11 Diagram showing what was eaten in the court of Henry VIII
for Hampton Court book, Wolf Olins/Royal Parks and Palaces,
Grundy & Northedge – 2006
12 Commuter
Page divider for the Grundini book, Grundini – 2008
13 Money and football
Diagram for Guardian newspaper’s G2 Graphic spread,
Grundy & Northedge – 2006
14 The arms trade
Diagram for Guardian newspaper’s G2 Graphic spread,
Grundy & Northedge – 2006
15 G2 Rubbish
Diagram for Guardian newspaper’s G2 section, remastered for
the Grundini book with originally intended coloured
backgrounds, Grundini – 2008
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2 (page 7)
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‘IF WE DIDN’T
KNOW HOW
TO DO THE
DRAWING WE
INVENTED WAYS
OF DRAWING.
WE WOULD STILL
HAVE IDEAS TO
SOLVE THE
PROBLEM BUT WE
WOULD USE OUR
DRAWING, OUR
TYPOGRAPHY, TO
MAKE THESE IDEAS
COME ALIVE.’
PETER GRUNDY.
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‘We did it as a piece of painting and we
did it in Adobe Illustrator just to see. We weren’t
quite confident it would work so we did both.
And the two are exactly the same, funnily
enough they printed the painted one in the end,
because the printer preferred it – printers hadn’t
quite got to the point where they were happy
with us sending digital files. For the first 10 years
we didn’t have a computer, the images we
produced were done by drawing black lines on
Kodatrace and then painting underneath and
getting the printers to put the two together.
We were drawing mechanically before we got
Adobe Illustrator and really what Illustrator
allows you to do is draw mechanically. It just did
in a different way what we were already doing
using our hands.’
The computer made life simpler, allowed
for easier colour changes, but it didn’t change
the style. And some of that style is down to what
Richard Sennett might call the ‘incomplete’,
the gap in our knowledge which stimulates
understanding in the craftsman, which forces
the craftsman to think through the activity,
enhancing any physical quality.
‘The style was driven by our capabilities,’
notes Grundy. ‘As George Hardie once said
when I gave a talk at Brighton, “I’ve known
Peter, since college and Peter was always doing
things that were based on the fact that he
couldn’t draw very well.” In a way I was
simplifying things to make it possible for me to
be able to draw them. In the end that
simplification became the thing that people
wanted. They liked the actual simplification,
I can’t draw figuratively. Tilly can. Her work is
slightly different to mine. When you look at
Grundy and Northedge you can‘t tell the two
apart but people who know us know that
there are differences.’
HOMAGE TO INFORMATION
Back in 1996 Hugh Aldersey Williams, the then
Editor at Large of Graphis Magazine did a
feature on Grundy Northedge and categorized
their work into Pictograms, Diagrams and
Narratives. Their pictograms, such as those for
United Distillers are models of the art of
condensation, their diagrams such as the spread
for Creative Review on their carbon footprint
turns information into knowledge, and
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their narrative work such as the
letterforms for the VW Save Fuel
campaign, is a lesson in the aesthetic value of
‘the fresh’ in storytelling.
But outside the work, keeping fresh began
to become a challenge. By the end of the 1990s
Grundy believes that Northedge had begun to
lose heart, especially with requests from clients
who often didn’t seem interested in creative
solutions. Yet ironically, in 2005, they began one
of the most ambitious and exhaustive pieces of
information design in UK culture. In
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2005 The Guardian pushed the boat
out with its new Berliner redesign, and
was looking to make a visual splash in
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its G2 supplement with some infographics. Guardian Creative Director
Mark Porter knew Grundy and Northedge and
recommended them to Ian Katz the G2 editor.
‘It was an homage to information’, says Grundy,
who retells the story with a kind of wonder that
they actually took it on. ‘Ian Katz said, “Can you
do them?” and we said, yes. How many do you
need? He said, “We are going to do about 25.”
And we asked if this was over the period of a
year or two years?’ Grundy delivers the punch
line with a wry laugh: ‘He told us that we were
going to do one every week.’
Given the scale of the task, it was as much
logistical as creative. ‘Our job was really to
come up with a way of doing them,’ says
Grundy. ‘We had two months to come up with a
concept because we didn’t know what we were
going to do. We worked with Leo Hickman, and
his sole job was to work with this and every
week on a Monday he would send us a series of
5 or 6 topics, and we would come up with an
overall image and that image would be divided
into coloured segments which would carry
information. So the information he gave us was
the actual information that got printed. There
was no editing. By the end of the week we
would have to send a print ready Illustrator file.
They didn’t touch it, it went straight to the
printer, who put it in the QuarkXPress document
and printed it.’
The turnaround time was intense because
it was illustration journalism, not just decorating
facts with pictures. Grundy and Northedge did
alternate weeks for six months until a new editor
arrived and the job ended. ‘We didn’t want to
do them to be honest, we’d kind of run out of
ideas.’ I suggest to Grundy that they must have
been burned-out by the volume of work and the
tight deadlines, but in his honest, matter-of-fact
manner (no surprise for someone whose work
is the matter of facts) he begs to differ, ‘We’d
always been used to delivering. Part of the work
I do and did, it’s always about delivering. I make
sure that what clients get is what they need to
get, and at the time they asked for it. We were
always quite disciplined about that.’
SQUAREHEADS
In 2006, after 26 years of being a designer and
illustrator, Northedge left to enjoy and follow her
interests outside design. Grundy decided to
continue as Grundini, or escape into ‘Grundini’,
a fresh name and perspective, though one that
goes back to his Royal College days. ‘Instead of
answering briefs I’ll create my own briefs, and
do things that I will show and sell. I’ll do
pictures. One of the things I did before Grundy
and Northedge finished was an
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exhibition at my agent’s gallery Debut
Arts, it was an exhibition of heads,
and I did a set of posters which were
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called Squareheads and they were
there for sale and that was their only
purpose. I enjoyed doing that and with Grundini
there will be more of that.’
As he talks me through his Grundini book,
a self-promotion piece he is putting together,
you realise that post break-up, he is making the
most of this opportunity for self-reflection; the
self-promotional piece is not just a showcase
but a chance to interrogate his own work.
‘I’m planning to do another book. They are
signposts for me to work out where I am going.’
He’s doing a lot of work for the
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Scenarios department at Shell which is
a kind of futurology unit: ‘They call
them tools to allow people within
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Shell to think about the future. They
are not predictions they are a set of
parameters that you can apply to incidents
that happen, like 9/11 or the current economic
crisis.’ The assignment came to him via the
late Alan Fletcher. ‘He felt they needed
someone with more informational skills,’
says Grundy.
On the way out he points up at a large
series of posters by the staircase – The
Squareheads. Why squareheads? Then you
remember, anyone can draw a roundhead, it
takes real craft to draw a squarehead. uu
Further reading
www.grundini.com
www.grundynorthedge.com
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Action Aid poster
Grundini – 2004
17 Africa
Image produced for the Grundini book, Grundini – 2008
18 Headcase
Limited edition Squareheads poster produced for an exhibition at
Conningsby Gallery, Grundini – 2003
19 Warhead
Limited edition Squareheads poster produced for an exhibition at
Conningsby Gallery, Grundini – 2003
20 Utopia
Image produced for the Grundini book, Grundini – 2008
21 Sacred hand
Image produced for the Grundini book, Grundini – 2008
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