Name an iconic song, and I can tell you everything else that was occurring in my life at the time it was popular: Meat Loaf’s “Paradise by the Dashboard Light,” for example, had me driving a bronze Pinto, sporting yellow flip-flops, and arguing about the effectiveness of Jimmy Carter’s cabinet.
These remembrances are frozen in time—I have but a scant memory of what might have come before or after, and I find that I can’t recall experiences with the same zeal without the benefit of their musical accompaniments. The song plays, and time slows and then stops as this still-tangible reality pushes forth. The music is as much a part of the memory as the memory is of identity.
Such is the case with the designs of Vaughan Oliver, particularly the hugely influential work he did at 23 Envelope and v23, the studios he cofounded in the 1980s. At these firms, Vaughan created seminal album covers for the British independent record label 4AD and musical artists including the Cocteau Twins, Modern English, This Mortal Coil, and the Pixies. His work with these artists ushered in an unprecedented era of graphic revolution, and his indisputably unique style has influenced subsequent generations of designers eager to redefine the discipline of design and its possibilities.
In our interview, Vaughan reflected on his legendary beginnings, the recent changes in the music business, and his struggles with self-doubt.
[Oliver begins mid-sentence …]
I get stuck in my little mind when I’m left to my own devices.
What happens when you get stuck in your own little mind?
Oh, I think the anxiety increases. Feelings of self-doubt.…
Do you have a lot of feelings of self-doubt?
Oh, don’t we always, us creative people? Sometimes you’re on top of the world, and other days, you feel worthless and wonder what you’ve done and what you’re doing.
What do you do when that happens? How do you manage to crawl out of that?
Quite simply, I go for a walk. I like green. We have a beautiful, common green [park] that I’m still exploring ten years later. I enjoy that. Rather more than the public house [pub]; the public house can only lead you further into self-doubt.
In what way?
It can go either way, in terms of changing your chemistry. I think it can suspend the self-doubt for a few hours. Then you’re back to it.
Do you think that self-doubt helps the creative process in some way?
Not mine. I used to suffer a lot less in the old halcyon days in the 1980s and 1990s, when I had a deadline every day. At the time, I had two assistants, and I was working in the offices of 4AD, where I was doing a lot of work. There was a lot of activity around me, and the deadlines were relentless. The creativity was relentless. There was less room for self-doubt. We were on a roll. And it wasn’t only me; it was a period in time when we were blessed with the right juxtapositions of social, cultural, and artistic influences. After punk and post-punk, along with the great blossoming of design awareness, independent record labels and independent designers were flourishing.
When do you think that period ended?
It seemed to dip—to me personally, I don’t know about other people—around the mid-’90s. And if I can speak specifically, the music business changed a lot in that period. The adventurous independents were consumed by the majors. And the majors were increasingly run by accountants, who managed to throw out the men with the record collections. I think, generally speaking, that all of the budgets changed. The whole industry changed around that time.
Also, for a person who is not running a business with other people—and I’m not the only one—it’s been an unusual period adapting to the technology. I don’t mind talking about this 20 years later, as I am still adapting to it. But I expected to be able to relax a little bit, in terms of the effort that I put in.
And have you found that you can’t?
No, I can’t. It’s a kind of different world now, in terms of income, etc. I probably earn about 30 percent of what I used to in the ’90s.
Do you feel that’s a result of the technological changes, or do you feel like that’s a result of cultural changes?
I think it’s a combination. I don’t think it’s one or the other. Again, there are a number of changes. The whole thing seems to have shifted away from the likes of myself, the disempowered.
How do you feel that you’re disempowered?
I think it’s the disempowerment that fuels self-doubt. I don’t know, it’s—maybe it’s just me. Maybe I just feel less wanted. I still have a relationship with 4AD; but again, their budgets were cut to a minimum. So I’m working for less than I was getting ten years ago. So I’ve got to do a job more quickly.
But personally speaking, I’ve struggled because I never had a business partner. And I’m not naturally active in that way. I’m ambitious creatively, but I’ve never been ambitious businesswise. Whereas my 15, 16 years of business at 4AD fed me creatively and satisfied me creatively. I was cocooned; I never got out. I never networked or met people. I think I suffer from that. Why have I started off on this thread?
[Laughter.]
It’s the end of the week, and I would like some money for the weekend, please.
I’ve never felt comfortable about myself or my work. I was brought up just the opposite: If you spoke about yourself, you were being too bold. And one should always show curiosity about the other half of the conversation.
So you basically wait for people to come to you and say, “We need your genius…”
They less frequently do, really. So I’m not very active in finding new business, I’ve never really been good at it. 4AD still feeds me music, whether it’s Scott Walker, or, more recently, TV on the Radio. That moves me. I still want to work with these people and want to make them happy with the packages for their music. If you’re still turned on by it, I don’t think age is a boundary to your involvement.
Let’s talk about how you work. Do you feel that you’re more of an intuitive designer, or more intellectual and formal in your approach?
I’d like to think there’s a little bit of both. I’d like to think that there are ideas and concepts behind what I do and why I start projects. But often when I start to explain those ideas or concepts, folks find them bizarre or banal, and they aren’t always immediately recognizable.
How do you get people to understand them?
I make some pictures. And speak thoughtfully about their work. I’m speaking specifically about the music business here, although my work is much broader. I think we work very idiosyncratically, intuitively, and organically. It might be one word on an album that sets it off. The ideas are in that word. I try to describe the tone and the textures and the atmosphere of the music.
I said somewhere recently that we were not interested in reaching the audience—and in retrospect, that was an untrue thing to say. But first and foremost, I am keen on satisfying the musicians, for whom I invariably have great respect. But graphic design is nothing if it doesn’t communicate.
While words like “mystery” and “ambiguity” can be used to describe our work, that work still needs to communicate a message.
I think our work has been successful because we leave it open. We’re not trying to define anything. But at the same time, we’re not just settling for the bandwidth like, “This is the signifier you get from their clothes and their hair, and the way they hold their instruments.” I would like to think there’s a deeper imagination that is brought to bear.
Imagination is an old-fashioned word, but I still believe in it. It’s an old-fashioned term, like “care” and “quality.” Old-fashioned values and things are still at the heart of what we do.
Did you always want to be a graphic designer?
When I left school, I thought, “I want to work in art.” I loved music and record sleeves—it was as simple as that. And I thought the best way to achieve this was to study graphic design.
I originally thought about pursuing fine art but immediately reconsidered. I couldn’t help but wonder how many painters make a living at the end of the day. There was a practical side to me, and I needed to make a living. Let’s not forget that I am a working-class boy from the Northeast! I had no real contacts in business and no real understanding of where one could go from a fine-art curriculum; I thought, “Graphic design can lead to a job.”
And I remember turning up for an interview at the college in my school uniform, with a tie, sweater, and the school badge on the blazer. The interview room was in the space where people met for coffee. After seeing all the paint splattered over the halls and 3D hairdos, I felt so straight!
I remember going into the interview and being asked what graphic design meant. And that morning, I’d been wise enough to reach for the dictionary and just reiterated what I’d read there: That design was intended for mass reproduction. Then the interviewer wanted me to expand on that, and all I could do was repeat it.
So I didn’t have any notion of what graphic design really was. I didn’t dare say I wanted to design record sleeves; that wasn’t a potential profession in those days. All through college, I focused on illustration; I saw it as a means of personal expression in the commercial world. I actually avoided design. In fact, the only graphic designer I’d heard of after three years of college was Milton Glaser. I didn’t really have a fascination for graphic design and its history.
I left college under a cloud; it was very disappointing. And I applied for jobs locally, but no one was interested. I was a small-town boy; I didn’t really want to go to London—I resisted for a long time. I applied for the police force. I was delivering bread. I wanted to do anything but what I seemed obliged to do. I came to London and couldn’t get a job in illustration after two weeks. Rather than get a bad job, I moved into design; and slowly things began to take off.
So this was something that happened naturally for you, in terms of your ability to practice graphic design? Did you ever feel like you had to struggle to understand how to do this?
Initially, yes. The first piece of artwork I put together for 4AD was the first piece of artwork I put together, ever.
So how did you know it was good?
I didn’t. In terms of developing art that was practical for print, I needed a lot of conversations with the printer to prepare the work correctly.
But what about the aesthetic?
How do I know when it’s right? That’s a good question: How do you know when it’s right? How do you know when to stop? You just do. You just do. I think it’s a combination of being satisfied and the client being satisfied. That’s generally where I’d stop. More often than not, in those early days, I was full of wanting to change things, and I wanted to do something different. I wanted to go against the grain. I suppose I am a punk at heart, even though I didn’t have a punk aesthetic. But I found I was generally at loggerheads with the bands I was working with. They would constantly tell me: “This is what we need. This is what we should have.” But I was showing them things that they hadn’t seen the likes of before.
We were trying to do record sleeves that didn’t look like record sleeves, and we had to believe in what we were doing if we were going to get anyone else to believe it, too.
I remember one day—I think I was working on the first Modern English album—I was designing a photograph within a border, with a nice bit of type centered at the top and a nice bit of type at the bottom. And I recall one of the senior designers saying, “That’s more like it! It looks more like a record sleeve.” At that point, I’d done something wrong. I knew I’d done something wrong. It looked predictable. That’s not what I was after.
You said that you were at loggerheads with some of the bands. I find that interesting, given where we started the conversation. You felt very strongly you wanted to do something different. What gave you the courage to do that?
Well, just the very opposite of self-doubt. Being bullish. I think at the end of the day, I always wanted to take the work further. It’s not that I had particularly strong persuasive powers. In those days, I didn’t know how to sell a job. But I always had ambitions for my work to be timeless.
Sometimes I’ll look back and I’ll see certain package designs that I’ve done, and I think there are some that look dated, and then something changes, and suddenly it’s classic. And then, after a certain amount of time, it becomes timeless, accepted, and beloved. But I always think there’s that pain barrier before it morphs into that.
What do you think about the music industry right now?
I’m not sure I’m qualified to say, but I think it’s in a sad predicament. There is a lack of rebelliousness and surprise. I also see this in students. I think we’re going through a period where the concept of a young person being rebellious is unusual. I think we’re going through a period where students in the U.K. are going to college not for an education but to get a job. And I see staff-to-student ratios of 1 to 100. One staff to 100 students—I find that shocking.
How do you see yourself in the future? What will make you the happiest?
What would make me happiest? I would like to get back my love for graphic design, because I think I’ve lost it. I don’t want this to sound like a lament for the olden days, but I find that working on a drawing board with a parallel motion and having a scalpel with a comma on the end of it—and placing that comma into a filigree list with a bit of type—was very satisfying. I found that there was a physical and mental connection between my brain, my heart, and down my arm; I had a degree of precision, with a tool, and I had a sense of craft. And that’s what I miss, really, that sense of craft. I miss having physically done a day’s work at the end of a day.
But again—it doesn’t have to be one or the other. There are so many fantastic things about the computer that I enjoy. But a question about how much I enjoy work is also connected to where I am in life and the kinds of things I’ve gone through and how much confidence I have. It is easy to lose confidence when things implode. And the designer thrives on confidence. For me, it’s just seeping back.