Designs that try to keep us healthy
Can Graphic Design Save Your Life? Wellcome Collection, London NW1
Many of us are born – and many of us die – in hospital. Along the way, we go there to see our own children born, to receive good news and bad. But how many of us notice, let alone think about, the typeface used in the signage pointing us through all those swing-doors?
When you see it, however, you’ll instantly recognise it: Margaret Calvert’s New Rail font from 1965, the ultimate institutional typeface, found on motorway signs and railway stations throughout the land – but seen first in hospitals. Its unadorned, functional forms will bring a sense of reassurance to some, dread to others and recollections to just about everybody of time spent in the hands of the NHS.
While the interaction of medicine and graphic design might sound a rather obscure subject for an exhibition, we’re continually surrounded by the packaging of health: boxes and bottles above all, but also ambulance signage, warning posters and preventive campaigns. The show looks at the changing face of this stuff we barely notice, asking not so much whether graphic design can save our lives, but how it makes us feel about our health and the medical industry in particular.
It marshals a fascinating array of objects, from a 17th century pop-up surgery manual to a cotton-walled, washable hospital ward from the creator of Muji. A section on smoking brings together a quirky array of material, from a beautifully quaint Sixties cartoon film for schools, in which a character called Nick O’tine turns children into fag-puffing zombies, to Saatchi & Saatchi’s iconic Eighties campaign for Silk Cut cigarettes, in which verbal messages were replaced by a succession of ever more elaborate visual jokes – the latter strikes an anomalous note, given the show’s title.
It’s when it hits closest to home that the exhibition is at its strongest. Those reflective strips on the side of emergency vehicles – green and yellow for ambulances – are so embedded in the consciousness you feel they must have some truly ancient provenance. In fact, they date only from the mid-nineties.
If you’ve ever looked at a packet of pills with a sense of trepidation, you may find that Dan Reisinger’s 1986 branding for Teva Pharmaceuticals inspires confidence with its austere but classic simplicity. The plain white boxes with colourcoded chemical components look as though they’ve been designed for some gleaming hospital of the mind. These, along with some exquisitely designed Fifties promotional material for the Swiss firm Geigy and, of course, that classic NHS typeface by Calvert are examples of how good health became synonymous in the 20th century with “clinical” modernist design. However, the exhibition misses a trick in not showing how private health companies used design to provide a more exclusive alternative to the NHS’S institutional modernism.
The Aids terror of the Eighties is represented through the apocalyptic, but still powerful, John Hurt-narrated Don’t Die of Ignorance film, and by a display on that quintessential Eighties artefact, the condom. A wonderfully sleazy selection from the Twenties to today, from the brown-paper packaged Pro-kit – “for army use only” – to Seventies soft-porn and a Japanese ring-pull tin of “10pcs”, doesn’t paradoxically include the Eighties market-leader Durex or Richard Branson’s Mates, which were launched in the same era.
The final section on medical graphics for children featuring a bluntly titled Haemophilia Colouring Book by Dutch illustrator Dick Bruna, creator of Miffy the rabbit, barely brings a change in tone. Bruna’s lessis-more style fits perfectly with the prevailing direction of medical design over the past century, which has been towards a kind of infant’s-book clarity and verbal brevity in which crucial facts can’t be misconstrued. It’s a quality the exhibition itself could have paid more heed to: it’s full of thought-provoking material and facts but, walking through it, involves, as do many exhibitions today, an enormous amount of reading.