Designer passion

Richard B. Doubleday is a man of great vitality whose work illustrates his perpetual curiosity and passion for graphic design. In his studies of Jan Tschichold, Doubleday researched the iconic typographer's tenure at Penguin in the 1940s to reveal the reasons behind the radical modernist's shift back to the conservative dogma inherent in the British printing tradition. Doubleday's painstaking investigations of Tschichold's hand drawings illustrate how his beliefs returned to the superiority of symmetry over asymmetry, roman types over sans serif types, and harmony over function, in accord with the demands of mass production in the modern publishing house.

Doubleday is also a prolific international educator, having taught workshops and lectures in Boston, London, Suzhou, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Mexico City. He attempts to break through the preconceived ideas and images in the human memory by having his students participate in spontaneous drawing sessions in which they create new artworks using pieces of foreign ephemera, postcards and newspapers. Students love these design sessions, wherein images of the city are reborn before their eyes into radical new environments through the synthesis of hand drawing, text and image.

 

Doubleday's most notable contribution to the design world is the graphic design he produces for the international stage, in which he integrates vernacular color schemes and works in a variety of languages of the Middle East, South America and Asia. His work inspired by Japan and China is especially notable in its emphasis on new aspects of Far East culture that are often overlooked by the native eye. Doubleday places Chinese and Japanese characters in unusual layouts, along with cultural objects such as the Japanese Lucky Cat or a statue of Buddha that together create a novel aesthetic of poster layout. This may be the distinguishing trait of Doubleday's designs: the way they help their audience perceive alternative dimensions within their own daily lives.

By Masayuki Yamamoto, Ph.D
Associate Professor
Department of Graphic Design
Tama Art University
Tokyo, Japan