The Archives of Regret

By Aria Novosedlik

The first design firm I ever worked at was partially owned by an ad agency, which meant that we often piggybacked on their pitches so clients could enjoy a one-stop-shop deal. At one point, we were given the opportunity to pitch to KFC. After a heated debate between the two partners of our firm—one saying it was wrong, the other keen on a fat paycheque—it was decided that we’d ditch the pitch. 

I’ll never know if the decision was made because of a client whose farming practices were vile, or because taking such a client would tarnish our firm’s youthful, rebellious identity. This was at a transitional time in the world of design: we were past the era of design superstardom, but hadn’t yet reached our current, oversaturated freelancer landscape. Many designers nowadays can’t afford to be ethical.

Many celebrated women designers of the late 20th century and early 21st got their start at the helm of some of the most reductive, infantilizing women’s magazine redesigns ever. In order for them to compete in a space dominated by men, these women had to take on work that was an affront to their talent and intellect. However for some, while working on fluff may have been demeaning, the resentment conjured up by that experience would prove to be a valuable asset in a more feminist future. 

The all-American girl next door: an affront to the designers’ talent and intellect

For instance, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville and Geraldine Hessler were put in charge of designing the covers of magazines like Seventeen – publications that taught young girls how to adhere to unrealistic and sexualized beauty standards while maintaining the innocence of the girl next door. In other words, they taught young women how to embody the dialectic of both the Madonna and the whore. 

Unsurprisingly, both Hessler and de Bretteville expressed deep regret for working on this kind of content, even though it was these jobs that would catapult them into the spotlight and give them the notoriety they needed to follow a more feminist path. 

Nuts and bolts feminism

De Bretteville, now in her 80s, managed to rebel against her old work and carve out a feminist-focused path. From her poster for Women in Design: The Next Decade, depicting the female gender symbol with nuts and bolts as a concrete show of a woman’s strength, to her EVERYWOMAN lithographs and spreads—it’s hard not to long for that kind of groundbreaking work in today’s climate.

Other mainstream design heavyweights like Paula Scher, Sam Potts, and more recently, Richard Turley, have also had the balls to come clean and repent for less than savoury clients. Every first-year design student will eagerly recite the legendary tale of how Paula Scher created Citibank’s logo in mere seconds on a sullied napkin. Wide-eyed youngsters are likely unaware that Scher has since gained the hindsight necessary to acknowledge just how destructive capitalism 

The sketch that launched a thousand anecdotes

has become and how Citibank contributes to it. Sam Potts and Richard Turley—like Hessler and Bretteville—were hired to create magazine covers for Esquire and Bloomberg Business Week respectively. Potts was pressed to create hyper-sexualized and sensationalist covers that he deemed ‘shock for shock’s sake’. Turley, too, admitted later that covers he designed — particularly those depicting racial stereotypes to illustrate economic crises — crossed a line, and that he should have resisted the editorial pressure.

While these superstar designers openly admitted if not flat-out rebelled against work they regret having done, it’s far more common for designers to take the easy road and distance themselves from gigs they’ve had a hand in. This is especially true for work that has a calculable negative impact, like cigarettes. In 2003, Landor was tasked with essentially whitewashing Philip Morris’s image. They chose to rebrand Morris as ‘Altria’ in order to sanitize the tobacco giant, while also seemingly attempting to hop on the dot-com bandwagon. The new Altria logo seen above shows a rainbow-coloured pixelated cube, perhaps meant to imply that Altria’s cigs were formulated with some kind of futuristic tech that evades the health risks of tobacco. 

‘Beyond Petroleum’: greenwashing at its most brazen

Anonymous designers at Landor also went off books to discuss their contempt for being assigned to work on branding for British Petroleum. Countless juniors with nothing to lose have come clean about their true feelings while toiling away at the vacuous campaigns for fashion brands like Juicy Couture and Abercrombie and Fitch. It’s a lot easier to anonymously discuss the frivolity and detriment of your work when nothing’s really at stake.

Disembodied masculinity

Nowadays, the fact that designers are clamouring for work in a broken economy means that the privilege of being discerning when it comes to choosing ethical work has all but evaporated. That doesn’t, however, mean that regret for taking on such gigs has disappeared, too. We may need to bury the guilt in far deeper layers of our psyches, but it’s still there. Stay tuned for part two of this regret-laden series, where we talk to designers about recent work they’ve done much to their dismay. Oh, and if you personally have anything you want to get off your chest, please submit to anovosedlik@gmail.com.

Aria Novosedlik is a Toronto-based designer, writer and researcher.