Informed 12


News Update


Rock against Racism


Tim Dawson recalls his teenage initiation to David King’s iconic agitprop


Like many 1970s teenagers, a postal order dispatched to Finsbury Park, London, initiated my engagement with politics. I received by return several sheets of lapel stickers, a poster and some leaflets. All bore a five-point star enclosing the words ROCK AGAINST RACISM. As Rick Poynor’s new book establishes, the graphic identity of the 70s and 80s Leſt was largely the work of this one designer – David King who died in 2016. As well as his RAR and Anti-Nazi League logos, many international solidarity campaigns and various leſt newspapers all owed their typographic signatures to King. His work for the NUJ has never been betered – King


designed strike posters and the recruitment series based on classic film stills that hang in our offices. Agitprop was only one side of King, however. From 1965 to 1975 as designer of Te Sunday Times magazine, he pioneered an approach to words and pictures that is imitated yet. He designed book covers, album sleeves and was an internationally recognised curator of early Soviet graphics. Rick Poynor’s beautifully-produced monograph


wonderfully reflects King’s work and is an evocative transport to the days when the off-set litho appeared to be history’s locomotive. David King Designer Activist Visual Historian, by Rick Poynor. Yale University Press £30.


City Limits


www.davidkingdesigner.com


www.davidkingdesigner.com


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12