Holy Grail. Once in a lifetime opportunity etc to get one of only four exclusive set of four printer’s proofs of an iconic TDR design. Available only as a set of 4.

Set of 4 consecutive A2 printers proof test prints showing the build up of the layers, each a different colour starting with the fluorescent orange crucifix, overprinted with metallic green, then bronze and finally a silver overprint.

In the early days toward the dawn of The Designers Republic we sent out a Christmas Message to clients / friends / fellow travellers (a print instead of an Xmas card) that felt more in keeping both with the times (knee deep in Loadsamoney (bull-)shit and pre-recession bust boom!

As a kind of 10 year anniversary celebration in 1997, typically a year late, we remade the print in a then contemporary TDR style.

Vectored pixels… check! Product / machinery scans… check! Visual sampling… check! Consumerism… check! Religion / conspiracy theories… check! Hand drawn text… check! Re-made / remodelled grids… check! Graphic de(con)struction… check! Layers… check! Symbology… check!

(From AZTDR) “The cloying schmaltz of supplier’s Xmas cards with photocopied (now digital) signatures and a coronary of Quality Street and Celebrations was never going to be a TDR™ ‘thing’. But Xmas is a time of giving and we decided to send something more in keeping with the true spirit of the season, as it is really lived.

‘Department Stores Are Our New Cathedrals’ is a line from We Are All Prostitutes by The Pop Group, written by the godlike genius that is Mark Stewart.

This design is an example of what happens when designers who don’t WANT to make a decision, because there is no one solution, no one truth, are let loose with layers. I’ve always felt that the ‘classic’ approach to design, being the distillation of ideas down to singular, neatly resolved and vacuously presented solutions, missed the point — life isn’t like that. Celebrate the contradictions, the best answers are questions and the best things in life aren’t things.

We were trying to represent everything multiplied by everything else, like the cubists trying to represent all perspectives at once. In there somewhere would be something approximating what some of us might fancy as an answer, or at least another question. Or not.

We built up layers based on different solutions, different responses, all valid based on perspective(s). Then we’d cut away the top layers (in Freehand) to reveal what lay beneath. We imagined that what we revealed, crushed with what lay on the surface, might be a truth we liked better.”