“This book was only possible in the first instance because of the work of a large number of unknown artists.”
- Richard Wolfe, Well Made New Zealand: A Century of Trademarks (Reed Methuen, 1987).
I first encountered Well Made New Zealand: A Century of Trademarks when a friend got a copy in the very early 1990s. We were in a band together at the time and we willfully ripped it off on a regular basis, using the images from it like ‘clip art’ – free and easy, unattributed source material – for posters that we’d cut-and-paste together using a photocopier and then stick up around the city to advertise our gigs. It only occurred to me many years later – when I eventually got myself a copy and had also started teaching graphic design – that this book was a rare and early example of a specifically New Zealand-focused piece of graphic design history.
It’s embarrassing to admit this – the blatant plagiarism obviously, but mainly my lack of awareness as to the book’s motivating context. In the early ’90s I was studying graphic design at the University of Canterbury, and I probably should have known better. In hindsight though, my education might have been partly responsible, because the program I was enrolled in was a very dogmatic mid-century modernist one. Anything that didn’t look like the Swiss ‘International Style’ – minimalist, reductive, asymmetrical, unjustified sans-serif type – was, to some extent, not considered to be ‘real’ graphic design.
The work this book documents is all ‘pre-modern’ in this sense. Much of it is from the Victorian era – eclectic, ornate, illustrative, and colonial – typical of Western European graphic arts in the late 19th Century. Perhaps it was my misplaced sense that such content was ‘outside’ of real graphic design that allowed me to appropriate so heavily from it. As well as to not bother to actually read it! Whatever it was, I wasn’t a great student anyway, so I can’t blame my education entirely.
The reproductions in the book itself are quite rough and curiously ‘low-fi’. Perfectly prepared for any teenager with access to a photocopier in the post-punk, pre-grunge world of the early 1990s. I was already very influenced by British designer Peter Saville, who had famously used an unattributed reproduction of a pulsar graph from an astronomy encyclopedia on the cover of Joy Division’s first album, Unknown Pleasures (1979). The blatant appropriation of imagery like this just seemed fair game.
Only recently have I discovered that the images in this book look the way they do because they were all collected from the same ‘low-resolution’ source to begin with, by the book’s author and designer, Richard Wolfe. All of the 1560 images were reproduced from The New Zealand Gazette (Te Kāhiti o Aotearoa), or from 1912 onward, the New Zealand Patent Office Journal. The clue, of course, is in the book’s subtitle A Century of Trademarks. All the images used in the book had been supplied originally via applications for registration according to The Patents, Designs, and Trade Marks Act. In an email interview with Wolfe this year, he told me that he reproduced the images “as they were”, although “some of the solid blacks didn’t photocopy too well so needed a bit of filling in with my rapidograph [pen]”.
Richard Wolfe’s interest in this kind of material had been sparked when, as a child, he took up stamp collecting. He gave up the hobby in the 1960s, realising that his real interest “was more in the design of the stamps than in the need to acquire them”. In 1969 he began studying at Auckland University’s Elam School of Fine Arts, where his interests in graphic design became more focused – “as a result I specialised in designing and printing posters, typesetting, and the production of publications”. Graduating in 1973, he moved to Christchurch to take up a position as a display artist at the Canterbury Museum, and it was here, alongside other staff who were working on books and journal articles, that he developed a more serious interest in design history as a research subject. It wasn’t until the mid-1980s, however, when he took up a new position as Curator of Display at the Auckland War Memorial Museum and discovered the archive of early trademarks in the Gazette in the Museum Library, that he decided to “write on an aspect of New Zealand graphic design.”
His work on Well Made New Zealand coincided with what he perceived as a “growing general interest in national identity” at the time. The mid-1980s were a moment of radical political and economic change in New Zealand as the result of the 1984 Labour Government’s aggressive deregulation of the economy, alongside the selling-off of state assets. The decade that began with unprecedented nationwide protests over the infamous 1981 Springbok tour, was set to end in 1990 with the Sesquicentennial – the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi – and the moment was ripe for someone to reflect on the evolution of our national identity through the signs and symbols of trade and commerce.
New Zealand was a colony of the British Empire from 1840 until 1907, and it is to be expected that trademarks of this era – representing, as they do, the owners of businesses – would reflect the pervasive influence of the dominant colonial power. Nowhere is this more challenging, from today’s perspective, than in the widespread exploitation of Māori imagery. The earliest use of the hei-tiki – a heavily appropriated Māori taonga – as a trademark dates back to 1910. Even more offensive now are perhaps the number of images of Rangatira, dating back to 1890, being used to represent all sorts of commercial goods; from butter to coffee, to Worcester sauce, clothing, soap, and maybe most problematically, water.
Wolfe addresses such cultural appropriation in the book. “When ethnic characteristics are employed for commercial gain, culturally insensitive results are inevitable,” he wrote on page 26. And he has, in our correspondence, described the inclusion of these images unapologetically as reflecting “the attitudes of the day”. From my perspective, especially as a teacher of young designers, it is precisely this uncomfortable, or inconvenient, history that makes the book so relevant now.
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I can happily report that I didn’t use any of these kinds of images when I was making posters for my bands back in the 1990s. I had, by that point, studied art history in high school and learned about cultural appropriation by way of artists like Gordon Walters and Theo Schoon. On the other hand, the – admittedly ad hoc – 'graphic design history’ I encountered at university didn’t contain any references to New Zealand at all. Design history was – seemingly – something that happened in Europe and the United States, not here in Aotearoa. This was the result of design history being taught as a chronological series of formal and aesthetic innovations, an approach common at design schools of the time.
What I eventually learned through Richard Wolfe’s Well Made New Zealand, was a different way to think about the value of design history – one that deemphasises formal innovation in favour of revealing complicated attitudes and ideals as they are represented in the more ephemeral signs and symbols a society produces.
By the time this book was published, in 1987, we had become pretty adept at trying to understand ourselves, for better or worse, through the methodologies of art history. But what we hadn’t been very good at – and still aren’t, I’d suggest – is looking at the signs and symbols that businesses, corporations, and institutions use to represent themselves, and considering how one day they might end up representing us.
The National Grid is a monthly collaboration with the graphic design journal of the same name. It positions itself as a “peripheral publication for graphic design.” Instead of being focused on the design industry, it is concerned with graphic design's place in culture and society. The National Grid is currently edited by Luke Wood, Matt Galloway, and Katie Kerr.
