Design Will Eat Itself, obviously a riff on Pop Will Eat Itself, was originally designed as 2m x 1m banner for TDR’s part in the group show ‘Customised Terror’ curated by Yale’s Ronald Jones at Artists Space Gallery in NYC in 1995 (along with Playfair?, Flesh, Work Buy Consume Die and the Bank of Jesus triptych etc) and slightly re-engineered for TDR’s own Customised Terror show at The Forum in Sheffield.

This A3 print design, available here as an A2 uncut printers proof dated 06/07/96, was adapted for a series of prints published in conjunction with the Forum show. The original print run was 100, and a small number of proofs were supplied by the printer to check the print’s colour and repro.

Like all printer’s proofs these have never been commercially available being archived subsequent to serving their practical sign-off purpose prior to the print / crop of / for the finished product.

So, at the time, proofs were like demos… what we wanted was the finished thing. So we kept the proofs purely for future reference not a cherished prints in themselves. Now ‘everything's computers’ and most proofing is done digitally, these printed proofs have a charm that speaks of the process locked in the time they were run. Because the proofs were typically run-off in ones and twos they have acquired an inherent rarity. Sometimes, we’d have up to 10 proofs for stakeholder sign-off but generally  we would just grab one while overseeing the print run itself.