Linda Sandino

Linda Sandino

Introduction

One of the anecdotes recounted by Colin Forbes, one of the founding members of the design group Pentagram, was graphic partner Bob Gill’s dictum that a good design idea was one that you could explain to someone over the phone.[1] Randall Rothenberg repeated this phrase in his essay for Pentagram Book Five, one of the group’s occasional publications, which sit uneasily as catalogue, manifesto and promotion.[2] In his essay, Rothenberg celebrates the heroic commitment to “idea-based design” at Pentagram:

As Alfred Sloan’s world slowly evolved into Michael Eisner’s, a new design

ethic was required. Pentagram represented it.

This ethic – it was strong enough to be called an ideology – was idea-based design. It asserted that design communicated both viscerally and intellectually – that it gratified the soul at the same time that it satisfied the mind…. Idea-based design posited that each communication opportunity – or “problem” as the firm referred to it- was unique and therefore invited a singular solution, one that could be intellectualised and elucidated. In a formulation usually attributed to one or another of Pentagram’s original partners, “an idea isn’t an idea unless it can be explained down the phone”.[3]



Whether or not Pentagram was the originator of this “ideology” is obviously open to debate, what it makes clear however is the significance the group places on the importance of words as well as the images. As an oral history interviewer however, the resurfacing of the anecdote in Book Five, raises interesting questions about what my recordings for the National Life Story Collection with original members of the group adds to this representation[4]. Forbes’ account of the anecdote was set in the context of his description of working with Gill, an American, who brought with him American ‘savvy’ and energy which impressed his English partners. Gill’s statement, therefore, was less the elaboration of an intellectualised ideology than an attempt to show his colleagues the advantages of pithy pitching.