Can Graphic Design Save Your Life? Wellcome Collection, 7 September 2017 – 14th January 2018

Flags showing the emblems of the Red Cross, the Red Crescent and the Red Crystal

In a time of ‘Fake News’ when nothing can be trusted, advertising is still governed by rules and regulations from the Advertising Standards Agency. The recent ‘Are you beach body ready?’ from Protein World, in particular, springs to mind when thinking about an ad that pushed the boundaries of what a modern audience expects. But when it comes to our own health and wellbeing advertising has the power to persuade, inform and empower in equal measure.

Street artist Stephen Doe paints an educational mural about Ebola in Liberia, 2014. Photograph by Dominique Faget, AFP/Getty Images

The new exhibition at the Wellcome Collection, ‘Can Graphic Design Save Your Life?’ delves into the world of graphic design and health over six sections including – Persuasion, Education, Medication, Hospitalisation and Contagion, and it is a fascinating reminder of the power of the visual to engage the public.

Silk Cut sliced bread proof. 1988. Saatchi & Saatchi designed a campaign for Silk Cut cigarettes. Instead of using the product’s name each advert featured purple silk- the brand colour- that had been cut in different ways. 1980-90s.

For me the first section on Persuasion is a real jolt of nostalgia, not only remembering the cryptic Silk Cut ads of the 1980s and1990s but also a time when my own Father was working in advertising. I remember a few trips up to his office, being deposited in the reception of Saatchi & Saatchi while he delivered hand re-touched colour transparencies of artwork for ad campaigns. Before email and computers changed the landscape for ever, my Father took work in person to be debated and discussed. I remember the light boxes and inks, the brushes, and the skilled art workers hunched over photographs.

Curators Lucienne Roberts, graphic designer and Rebecca Wright, design educator. 

The transition from the 1980s to modern anti-smoking imagery and plain packaging.

Cigarette advertising is the perfect case study to begin the exhibition with, curators Lucienne Roberts and Rebecca Wright start by explaining that the ban in cigarette advertising and enforcing blank packets has shown that the power of graphic design and its influence has been recognised. Australia unbranded cigarettes from 2012 even market tested Pantone background colours to find the least appealing and settled on Pantone 448 with it’s connotations of tar and pollution.

Much of health related graphic design is ephemeral like these Boots prescription packets. 

Help Remedies, 2011.

Teva Pharmaceuticals packaging 1986

Rebecca and Lucienne remind us of the ephemeral nature of many of these graphic outputs with a look at medicine packets and old Boots prescription paper bags that prompt another wave of nostalgia.

Burroughs Wellcome products used the unicorn emblem, chosen because unicorn horn was thought in the Middle Ages to neutralise venom. 

Where the exhibition really connects for me is in the use of more historical items from the Wellcome Collection, in particular delving into the practices of Henry Wellcome, a great marketeer himself. I loved looking at his Unicorn branded diary that he used in direct marketing to doctors from 1890, a great way to build brand recognition and trust.

Diagram showing mortality statistics of the British army in Crimea, 1858 by Florence Nightingale.

Seeing Florence Nightingale’s innovative use of graphics to present her statistics of soldier deaths in the Crimean War is another great way to show the power of presenting information in a visual format to get your message across.

AIDS: Don’t Die of Ignorance advert and tombstone prop, 1987. The world’s first public-health campaign relating to HIV/AIDS.

Sometimes I am left wanting a little bit more on the story behind campaigns and perhaps a few more personal reflections. It is a lovely insight to hear that the designer who worked on the ‘Don’t Die of Ignorance’ AIDS campaign actually had the tombstone used in the advert in his back garden. But this is related to us by the curators and not reflected in the text. It is these little gems that often bring the stories out and bring the campaigns to life. There is a great article in the Guardian that expands on this further. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2017/sep/04/how-we-made-dont-die-of-ignorance-aids-campaign

Great use of hospital curtains to demarcate areas of the exhibition.

It is an exhibition that gives us a timely reminder of the power of graphic design in a post-truth world when we are not sure what we can and can’t trust. ‘Can graphic design save your life?’ is a real designers exhibition, there is great use of colour and even hospital curtains to demarcate sections. But what I can’t forgive and what spoilt my enjoyment was the text panels which were rendered unreadable by the lighting and reflective surface of the text. If the medium is the message then I left fearing style over substance has got in the way of delivering the detail.

Reflective text is incredibly hard to read in the exhibition. 

As I left, the words of curators Rebecca and Lucienne were in my head on the ethics of designing for cigarette brands. The question all young designers are now asked, would they design for a cigarette brands or an oil company? When I got home to my Father who was kindly watching the kids, I posed the question to him, did he have any qualms over working on iconic campaigns for John Player Special ‘Back to Black’ in the 1980s? His answer…’Not at all’. I think I kind of admire that ‘Mad Men-esque’ honesty.

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Can Graphic Design Save Your Life? is on at the Wellcome Collection from 7 September 2017 – 14 January 2018 and is free. For more information on opening times please see the website. https://wellcomecollection.org/graphicdesign