Design Anthology - Asia Pacific Edition
Graphic Design
Singapore’s journey to becoming a design-led nation is inextricably linked to its history of visual communication
nternational, trendy and a blend of East and West: graphic design in Singapore is often viewed as indistinct and an inevitable outcome of its physical constraints. But beneath the surface, much of the discipline is by design, just like much of the city-state. While Singapore is exposed to global economic, social and cultural tides, the tropical island has developed a graphic design industry on its own terms just as it has reclaimed land from the sea to redefine its geography.
As a port city dating back to the 13th century, Singapore has long had a need to support its commerce with graphic design. However, its modern expressions emerged only after the British established a trading post at the mouth of the Singapore River in 1819 and the citystate experienced an influx of immigrants from China, India and Europe who came to live and work alongside the native Malays. Singapore’s development into a thriving emporium in the 20th century saw the rise of various trades including the ‘commercial artist’, the precursor to the graphic designer. These creative individuals were typically Chinese, who made up three-quarters of the population by then, and they worked in advertising houses owned by Europeans, who dictated prevailing styles.
Although commercial artists formed the Singapore Art Advertisement Institution as early as 1937, the profession only became prominent in the 1960s, when the locally elected government embarked on an industrialisation drive to secure Singapore’s economic autonomy as it marched towards independence. Design became part of a national policy to improve Made in Singapore goods, and the Baharuddin Vocational
Institute was established to train local designers. ‘The reason for this institute is that we have reached that stage of industrialisation requiring greater focus on design,’ declared member of parliament Lin Ken Wong at its official opening in 1971. ‘In this way, our Republic will someday be able to depend entirely on our own designers and craftsmen.’
Until then, design in the nascent nation fell to foreigners and a small number of overseastrained locals. A pioneering graphic designer was William Lee, who returned from London in 1969 to start Central Design. One of his early clients was the newly formed Singapore Airlines: while American designer Walter Landor is responsible for the company’s logo and livery, Lee and his team fleshed out the collateral for its launch in 1972. Over the next two decades, Central Design helped many local corporations adopt the International Style, including Shangri-La Hotels and United Overseas Land, both of which still use his strikingly modern logos today.
In Singapore, Lee’s generation successfully created the role of the design consultant, which was cemented by the founding of the Designers Association Singapore in 1985. The profession was further boosted in the nineties with a new national drive, this time to turn Singapore into a global design hub. As the government wooed multinational design firms to open shop here, they also encouraged local designers to export their services. These efforts to ‘internationalise’ Singaporean design paid off in 1997 when the World Trade Organization adopted a logo by local design house Su Yeang Design as its official emblem.
This progress was disrupted by a string of crises — the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the 2000 dot-com bubble burst and the 2003 SARS epidemic — that wore down the old guard but made room for a new generation. Powered by Singapore’s early embrace of information technology, young designers now had desktop publishing to streamline the laborious design process and broadband internet to explore new ideas and networks. A design studio could now be as small as one individual with a computer in a bedroom. The liberation was expressed with a rejection of the corporate suits worn by the previous generation, in favour of T-shirts and sneakers that better expressed the designer as a personality. As co-founder of local art and design collective PHUNK William Chan explained at the agency’s ten-year retrospective in 2005, ‘When we started, people thought all graphic designers could do were design “Big Sale” flyers and lay out text on posters. But these days, we’re viewed as trendsetters.’
Design’s new lifestyle function arose from Singapore’s efforts to regenerate its economy by attracting the creative class. Industrial manufacturing gave way to intellectual property, while cafes, museums and cultural venues sprouted up in the former cultural desert. In 2003, the government formed the DesignSingapore Council, which nurtured young designers’ desire to go beyond servicing clients and venture into creating content and crossing disciplines. Amid this flourishing of creativity in the 2010s, from indie magazines to design exhibitions, locally inspired souvenirs ultimately captured the popular imagination of what ‘Singaporean design’ is, fuelled by patriotic fervour as Singapore celebrated its golden jubilee in 2015.
From going international to celebrating the hyperlocal, with time Singaporean graphic design has clearly grown more comfortable in its own skin. The Singaporean designer today has one eye on the world and the other on home, and it’s this ability to traverse the global and the local that perhaps best defines what ‘Singaporean design’ is.