Quentin Newark: a graphic designer working with architects

I attended an interesting lecture yesterday by Quentin Newark, hosted by Cornwall Design Forum.

Newark is the co-founder (with two partners) of Atelier Works, positioned in Design Week’s triennial review of design awards as one of the 25 "most creative" studios in Britain. Newark himself was chosen as one of the "ten leading graphic designers in Britain" by the Independent on Sunday.

His projects include a 6 metre wide stone sundial for the Houses of Parliament, benches and Islamic screens for Tate Britain, an exhibition for the renovated Roundhouse in Camden, Tony Blair's moving card and Cherie Blair's website, and numerous books, posters and logos. He served a term as director on the board of the leading industry body, Design & Art Directors Association (D&AD). He has represented design at events at Windsor Castle, Number 10 Downing Street and the British Embassy in Paris. He has judged and chaired competitions of his peers' work and lectured and examined at numerous colleges.

His most recent project, which kicked off just two weeks ago, is for provision of the branding, graphics and signage for the extension of the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, designed by Norman Foster. This is, Newark says, the most exciting project of his career so far.

The title of last night’s lecture was, “A graphic designer working with architects – stories of humiliation and discovery”. This was an entertaining and inspiring, if somewhat opinionated, talk about his ongoing symbiotic, love/hate relationship with architects and the world of architecture.

Over the 20 or so years of his career, Newark has developed close working relationships with many leading architects including Norman Foster and David Chipperfield. His work focuses around the use of architecture as a platform for graphic communication and dialogue with its users. He strongly argues against the well-established view of architects being at the top of the design tree, and insists that architects regularly fail to focus on architecture from the everyday user’s perspective – focusing instead on self-indulgent aspects of a building’s form, light and shadow and so on.

Like many of the best design agencies, Atelier Works involves and observes end users in the early stages of the design process. Through observation, user interviews and other participative research methods, they invest much time and effort in fully understanding the relationship of users with the buildings they occupy and fully defining design problems, before committing pen to paper.

Newark’s personal stories of the ups and downs of working as a graphic designer alongside architects were amusingly presented. His argument for a much-needed shift in the attitude of architects towards the value of other design disciplines in place-making was passionately delivered. However for me, the most valuable aspect of this talk was simply hearing how a small graphic design company had managed to carve themselves a viable and highly regarded niche in the role of designing space, through passion and intuition, and by employing strong, sound design principles. Newark believes, as I do, that architecture and space play a role in communication.