International TypoGraphics Magazine

Twenty years ago, provoked by the American bombing of Libya from their bases in Suffolk, I felt angry enough to design a book of polemical graphic images and send it to Faber, who quickly published it. ‘A Special Relationship’ wasn’t anti-American. I love much about America – its energy and creativity, its writing, music, films, clothes. Some of my own books and prints have been published in America and I’ve had good times there. What dismayed me was our dangerously lop-sided relationship with recent American administrations. It has lately been categorised as ‘joined-at-the-hip’, but that makes it sound too equal, too evenly balanced. The book was about the relationship which was later to drag us into a needless, criminal and catastrophic war. Some of ‘A Special Relationship’s images were as shocking as I knew how to make them. It briefly enjoyed a modest notoriety – the Evening Standard’s review was headed ‘No longer a Gentleman’ – and it won a couple of design awards, one of them, to my pleasure and surprise, in New York…

And then, early in 2002 when the invasion of Iraq was brewing up, I joined one of the protest marches, and noticed that many of the printed placards people were carrying were quite hard to read, as can be seen in newspaper photos of the march. So when in 2003 the war looked really imminent, I designed several posters off my own bat, including one that just said ‘NO’. I also pasted lots of these NOs all over the press photograph to show how such a placard would look on a march. This quickly-done photomontage of the march with the added NOs must have done the trick, for Stop the War accepted the design…

On each of them there was a bloodstain. This had appeared on the earliest poster as an amorphous splatter, but the blood grew simpler as the series progressed, even ending up sometimes as a single drop. It also began to pay its way in various ways, sometimes by standing in for a letter, like the ‘O’ in ‘NO’ and the ‘o’s in ‘no more lies’. Occasionally the bloodstain became merely the counter – the space within a character – as in these ‘out’s and ‘now’s. Once, indeed, it served simply as the dot over the ‘i’ of ‘Bliar’. (I had this Bliar design on the studio pinboard for many weeks before I dared to use it). ‘No more lies’ started off in capitals, with only two drops of blood, but changed to lower case so that a third drop could dot the ‘i’. In every design, the blood was crucial. Red blood is an emotive image: even a glimpse of it can make one wince…