French fashion brand Lacoste has enlisted graphic designer Peter Saville to reinterpret its famous crocodile logo for a range of polo shirts.
Lacoste presented Peter Saville with a blank canvas to redesign its L.12.12 polo shirt for the Holiday Collector no.8 range.
Saville chose to keep to the original colours of white polo and green logo, but abstracted the iconic crocodile to adorn the left breast of the shirts.
He created a string of squiggly, spiky and minimal iterations of the reptile, to be used in place of the design that has featured on Lacoste’s apparel since the company first launched tennis wear in 1933.
The logo was kept to roughly the same size and shape, though some designs are more abstract than others. The shirts come in translucent green packaging to match the logo’s colour.
Tennis player René Lacoste, the brand’s founder, was nicknamed The Crocodile after his Davis Cup team captain promised to buy him an alligator suitcase if he won an important match.
Earlier this year Lacoste asked Saville to design a new logo for the brand’s eightieth anniversary, which was used to adorn polo shirts, bags and other apparel.
Saville won the London Design Medal earlier this year and working with Kanye West to design a new visual identity for the rapper. His prints were used on garments and footwear in the Spring Summer 2014 collection by Japanese label Y-3.
Graphic designer Peter Saville has created the prints and typography on these shoes by fashion brand Y-3 for sports label Adidas (+ slideshow).
Japanese fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto’s Y-3 line produced by Adidas includes a range of colourful casual footwear.
For Spring Summer 2014, Y-3 used colourful prints created by Peter Saville, who “found inspiration in the vastness of the internet, culling images and words from online forums, social media, and personal blogging platforms” to use for the Meaningless Excitement collection.
Saville warped and distorted the images taken from various corners of the internet to create the acid-coloured graphics printed onto high-tops and trainers.
He also designed the typography for chunky platform sandals that says “Hi! My name is Yohji” on the side.
More platforms have speckled bases in a bright yellow-green colour, paired with brown leather straps.
Silver-coloured foil is used on sections of black and white trainers.
On one pair, orange elastic cord ties the shoe to the extra upper section that sits above the ankle.
Purple netted fabric and rounded soles are also common details through the collection.
This season, Y-3 gets graphic with renowned art director Peter Saville, whose hyper-colourful designs form the basis of a collection inspired by digital noise and named Meaningless Excitement.
The title is both a critique and celebration of internet culture – its heights and depths – as well as the relentless pursuit of the next big thing. On the runway, this was clearly seen in acid-bright prints and distorted slogans, which swirled across sleek, paired-down clothing for men and women.
This collection served as testament to the irreverent brilliance of Peter Saville, who found inspiration in the vastness of the internet, culling images and words from online forums, social media, and personal blogging platforms.
He then cropped and warped these materials into an author less and strangely beautiful pulp, which found its war across classically American styles deconstructed through Japanese tailoring.
The collection pushed the limits of authentic American sportswear by elongating its shapes and subverting the codes of its style.
The show closed with a trio of breathtaking couture-style gowns in Yohji Yamamoto’s classic style, serving as a beautiful palate cleanser and reminder of beauty’s possibility.
Peter Saville‘s career kicked off after designing posters for The Haçienda nightclub in Manchester, run by the Factory Records label.
Joy Divison: Closer, 1980
Saville went on to create the artwork for musicians represented by Factory Records, including rock bands Joy Division and Roxy Music.
Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark LP, 1980
His most iconic cover is widely regarded as Joy Division’s 1979 album Unknown Pleasures (main image), a diagram of pulses taken from an astrology encyclopedia. Disney added Mickey Mouse ears to the graphic for a T-shirt design last year.
Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark: Architecture and Morality, 1981
Saville’s design for Joy Division’s second and final 1980 record Closer shows a photograph of a tomb, which proved controversial due to the suicide of the band’s singer Ian Curtis two months before the album’s release.
New Order: Blue Monday, 1983
Saville continued to design covers for the band after they reformed as New Order, taking images from historical artwork out of context and adding modern typography with geometric graphics.
After designing for new wave group Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark since 1980, the band asked Saville to create imagery for its latest album Electric English released earlier this year. It references the stripy hazard signs of his original Factory Records posters.
Saville also designed covers for English bands Pulp and Suede. He set up fashion film website SHOWstudio with his friend Nick Knight in 2000 and was made creative director for the City of Manchester in 2004.
At the Global Design Forum on Monday night, graphic designer Peter Saville revealed that he’s working on a logo for musician Kanye West. In this transcript of the conversation Saville had with journalist Paul Morley, he discusses the project and what it’s like to work with the rap star.
Paul Morley: I must just ask a question I think puts us in two degree of separation with Kanye West because Peter’s last engagement [before coming here tonight] was with Kanye West. I love that idea that you’ve gone on to do the Manchester thing [Saville has been working as creative director for his home city], gone off to do grown up things but that there are still loads quite high up in the pop culture world that are still chasing you for your imprint. What exactly are they chasing you for?
Peter Saville: He’s charming, he nearly came [here tonight]. I said I’ve got to go, I’ve got a gig at 5. He said where and I said somewhere called the Victoria and Albert museum. He said he’s doing [TV show] Jools [Holland] tonight. He would have come.
Paul Morley: So he’s your new mate.
Peter Saville: He’s not my mate. One thing that you learn, in music I learnt this, just because you’ve been to see somebody, doesn’t mean that they’re your mate. So when you get called to meet Paul McCartney or I got to do Roxy [Music] covers, I got to meet Brian [Ferry] who I’d spent my teens trying to be like or look like, but you’re not friends and don’t call us, we’ll call you. Some of the younger ones, the dynamic changes when you’re older than them, Kanye is kind of weird, he…
Paul Morley: I guess he’s interested in you doing design for him, he wants you to be a graphic designer.
Peter Saville: He wants me to be Cassandre. Today I told him all about Cassandre and Cassandre did the Yves Saint Laurent logo. Cassandre, France’s greatest graphic artist in a way of the early 20th century. Cassandre was friends with Christian Dior, I guess they were contemporaries and pals and young Yves worked for Dior as an assistant and when Yves was leaving to set up his own label, it’s quite sweet isn’t it? He asked Cassandre to do the logo for him and Cassandre just rattled off YSL, which was pretty good.
And Kanye said to me, you’re Cassandre, thats what I want. Kanye wants me to do a YSL. And he’s collecting people. He said today he likes great people and wants to put them together and get them to do some great things and get some great people to check the things by these great people and really end up with some great things.
Paul Morley: The other side of the membrane, does this still have value in the world that we’re going into? That is now being shattered into so many surfaces, does a logo or image like that have a value? Does it join the glut? Join the status quo itself no matter how stylish it might be?
Peter Saville: I think I can sometimes say I don’t know. I get asked things and I feel obliged to know something or have an opinion and actually some things I don’t know. It’s sort of significant. Depends how you work. Some people just do stuff and it’s cool. A lot of people just do cool stuff. Then there’s other people that are doing something but that’s how they do it. That’s how they work. They’re trying to achieve something. That’s the pathway by which they make something happen.
I tend to – this old-fashioned slightly analogue idea, there is a way a problem to solve and the problem to solve is as much the context of the now as the thing itself. What is a logo now, what might a logo be for Kanye in a particular context?
I mean I like him, I didn’t expect to like him. I didn’t meet him to do work. Someone said to me that he would like to meet you so I thought it would be rude to say I’m not available. So we met six months ago and had a cup of coffee and that was it. I didn’t know his music and I still don’t know his music. I met him as a person, who wanted to meet me and he was nice and intelligent and an astonishing energy and astonishing intelligence.
I mean he is alive, he’s super live and he has talents. Sometimes you meet people who are talented and they don’t have energy and you meet people with energy but no talent. Every so often you meet a talent who has energy. And Kanye without a doubt is a talent with energy. At the moment he said can I help him with something, and I said ‘I don’t know, I’ll try’.
“We’re looking at ways of writing ‘Kanye West’,” Saville told Dezeen after the talk, held at the V&A museum as part of the London Design Festival. “What does ‘Kanye’ and ‘Kanye West’ look like written down?”
The designer added the collaboration was open-ended, rather than a commission to design a logo or a specific artwork. “It’s very casual,” he said.
During the talk Saville, who is best-known for his 1980s record covers for bands including New Order and Joy Division, explained how he had discussed the project earlier that day with West, who is in London rehearsing for a performance.
The two talked about Adolphe Mouron Cassandre’s iconic 1961 logo for Yves Saint Laurent, featuring the overlapping letters YSL, Saville said. “He said to me: ‘You’re Cassandre’,” he told Dezeen. “He wants a YSL”.
Saville is the recipient of this year’s London Design Medal. He will receive the award at a ceremony on Wednesday. Read our earlier story for more about the award, and for more details of the conversation with Morley.
News: British graphic designer Peter Saville has tonight been named winner of this year’s London Design Medal, and has declared: “Manchester is now the capital of the UK”.
Saville, best known for his record covers for bands including Joy Division and New Order, will receive the medal at a ceremony on Wednesday at Lancaster House in the West End during the London Design Festival.
Born in Manchester in 1955, Saville studied graphic design at Manchester Polytechnic and made his name designing artwork for Factory Records in the same city. He moved to London in 1979, where his design consultancy clients included department store Selfridges, record label EMI and fashion houses such as Jil Sander, John Galliano, Christian Dior and Stella McCartney. He has been creative director of the City of Manchester since 2004.
London Design Festival chairman John Sorrell announced the award at the V&A museum tonight, when he introduced a conversation between Saville and journalist Paul Morley at the first session of the Global Design Forum.
In the conversation with Morley, Saville described his career as a 20-year meandering journey. “I’ve spent 20 years looking for a job,” he said.
Saville also spoke about his work as creative director for Manchester, helping his home city forge a new post-industrial identity and coming up with the slogan “Original modern” to give a timeless spin on its history as the world’s first industrial city.
“Manchester is the capital of the UK,” he said, talking up the city’s prospects. “London is no longer the capital of the UK. London has floated off to be a world city.”
Talking about his early work for Factory Records in the early 1980s, he said: “It was nothing to do with the record and nothing to do with the title. It was just a feeling of the now. It was entirely about lifestyle, it was about making you feel better.”
“In a limited, amateurish way, I was suggesting how I thought things could be,” he said of his iconic record cover designs. “Not how record covers could be, but how the ephemera of everyday life could be. It might just as easily have been a bus ticket or a cinema ticket or a cigarette packet.”
He added: “The culture of design we could perceive as young people in the 1970s or even in the early 1980s was very different from the way it is now. [Graphic art] was still a virtuous task, it was still a battle to raise standards. It was a challenge throughout the rest of the 1980s. The last recession was the watershed. The current culture is clued-in as to the power of applied imagery. Twenty-five years ago people talked about the logo-type, nowadays they talk about branding.”
Paul Morley and Peter Saville at Global Design Forum
Explaining why he has never worked for mainstream brands, he said: “With communication design being a service, there haven’t been many things I’ve wanted to serve. I wouldn’t want to work with British Airways. I wouldn’t actually want to make British Airways look better, because it’s not genuine.”
“Record covers are weird,” he continued. “You can do great work for a mediocre record and no one talks about it. You can do mediocre work for a great record and everyone calls it iconic. The iconic label that much of my work has is because the records were fundamental to many people’s lives.”
“The worst time for me was the 1990s, because I was the last big thing, or one of the last big things. I defined the 1980s. It was a nightmare, I felt obsolete, I was very passé.”
His reputation was later rehabilitated when a new generation of London design firms including Tomato and Fuel hailed him as a key inspiration. “My work was many people’s – many designers and creative people’s – first introduction to new ideas.”
Today, Saville accepts he has himself become a brand. “There’s so little meaning in the production of products today that people invite me to do what I want,” he said of recent collaborations. “They invite me to be facetious about the medium itself,” he said, recalling how he recently emblazoned the slogan “meaningless excitement” on a range of clothing for Yohji Yamamoto.
Now in its seventh year, the London Design Medal is awarded annually by a panel of judges to an individual for their contribution to design and London.
British graphic designer Peter Saville references stripy hazard signs in the artwork for the latest album by experimental pop group Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark.
Peter Saville, who made his name in the late 1970s designing album sleeves for bands including Joy Division and Roxy Music, worked with designer Tom Skipp on the cover of OMD’s English Electric (above), out on 9 April.
Above: Saville’s 1979 cover for Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures
“English Electric is best described as brutally simple dynamic energy,” explains Saville. “Briefed by OMD to be as reductive as possible, the cover captures but barely contains the high tension of an industrial legend.”
Above: Saville’s 1981 cover for OMD’s Architecture and Morality
The artwork also appears to reference the yellow and black hazard signs that were the signature look of The Haçienda, the Manchester nightclub operated by Factory Records in the 1980s and 1990s.
Saville began his career at Factory Records creating now-iconic sleeves for post-punk band Joy Division before going on to design artwork for New Order, Ultravox, OMD, Roxy Music and other new wave bands.
Above: Saville’s 1983 cover for New Order’s Blue Monday
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