Chris Ashworth balances a career as a sought-after creative director with a second life as an experimental designer and typographer, a path he first took in the early 1990s, designing flyers for clubs in the north of England. His inimitable hands-on approach to graphic design, exemplified in his work on two classics of ‘90s music magazine culture—Blah Blah Blah in the UK (designed with Neil Fletcher) and Ray Gun in the US—has won him legions of fans. His creative approach, termed “Swiss Grit,” “is a blend of Swiss principles fused with a typographic street aesthetic that brings some soul,” he says.
Ashworth sees his work—craft-based, handmade—as a counterpoint to our screen-dependent digital culture. It’s the manifestation of an alternative view that argues that creative development away from the computer offers unique and precious merits. Disorder celebrates this approach to graphic design over nearly five hundred pages. Beginning with his influential work for Ray Gun and covering a wide range of printed and published work from 1997 to the present day, the book is concerned with the human craft of creativity and analog design, the details, imperfections, and happy accidents. An AI-free zone.
Contributors
Chris Ashworth
Author
Chris Ashworth achieved design notoriety in the late 1990s at Ray Gun magazine, the influential LA-based “bible of music and style.” His early schooling in the rigors and principles of Swiss graphic design fused with the gritty vernacular of the street came together to create the sounds of the '90s in visual print form. He has since worked with pop culture bands and brands from New Order, Michael Stipe (REM), Robbie Robertson, and Bush to Nike, Diesel, and Adobe, as well as spending over twenty years as a creative director running in-house creative studios at Microsoft, Nokia, and Getty Images.
Marvin Scott Jarrett
Foreword By
Adrian Shaughnessy
Afterword By
Adrian Shaughnessy is a graphic designer, writer, and senior tutor at the Royal College of Art, London. He has written numerous books, including a compendium of his design journalism, Scratching the Surface, and monographs devoted to designers Herb Lubalin and Ken Garland. He regularly contributes to design publications and blogs such as Design Observer, Eye, Creative Review, and Design Week. In 1988, Shaughnessy cofounded design studio Intro; today he runs ShaughnessyWorks, a consultancy combining art direction, writing, editing, and lecturing, and is a codirector of Unit Editions. He is a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale.