7/9/2017 Can Graphic Design Save Your Life?

Save Your Life? review thrills, pills and big pharma | Art and design | The Guardian

Can Graphic Design Save Your Life? review

thrills, pills and big pharma
Wellcome Collection, London This hard-hitting exhibition explores the impact of graphic design in health
and pharmaceuticals as companies seek to educate, save lives, or simply sell us stuff

Oliver Wainwright
Thursday 7 September 2017 17.00BST

I f graphic design can save your life, it is eminently capable of killing you, too. Thats the
conicted message at the heart of a powerful new exhibition at the Wellcome Collection, which
explores graphic designs complex relationship with health, medicine, and the world of big
pharma and the dierent ethical positions that designers choose to take.

The show opens with a hard-hitting section on smoking, where creatives seductive and lucrative
attempts at selling tobacco over the years are paired with their equally clever eorts to encourage
people to kick the habit. We nd the iconic Lucky Strike roundel by Raymond Loewy
reproduced on T-shirts and baseball caps alongside the Silk Cut campaign masterminded by
Charles Saatchi in the early 1990s. The glossy 1/4
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Charles Saatchi in the early 1990s. The glossy

billboards, featuring luscious photographs of
skeins of purple silk being slashed and sliced,
were an ingenious response to the growing
constraints on tobacco advertising, which
explicitly prohibited the naming of brands.
Instead, the increasingly surreal and
impenetrable compositions of silk and polished
metal oered a reward to the cognoscenti
capable of deciphering the coded message. Silk
Cut sales soared, their loyal customers enticed
by the prospect of collecting the artworks as
miniature cards along the way.

By contrast, we are then shown the result of

market research agency GfKs quest to nd the
ugliest colour possible with which to wrap
Australias new plain cigarette packets,
following the governments 2012 ruling
prohibiting the branded packaging of tobacco.
They settled on Pantone 448C AKA opaque
couch a queasy shade of greenish brown.
The muddy hue is now used to cover the 25%
of the packet not already taken up with gory
photos of tar-addled lungs and rotting gums. It
seems to have had the desired eect. An
A design for a standardised cigarette pack in opaque couch.
Australian government report estimated that
Photograph: AFP / Ash (UK)
the number of smokers fell by more than
100,000 in the three years following the
introduction of the new sickly brown packets.

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A 1941 British poster warning against malaria. Photograph: Wellcome

Library, London

The World Health Organisation has called on every government to take up the plain packaging
pledge, thereby rmly cementing the role of graphic design as a key battleground in the war on
smoking. Design sells, but it can equally put you o picking up a cancer stick ever again.

The exhibition is full of other examples of the provocative power of graphics in ramming public
health messages home, from the famous Dont Die of Ignorance Aids awareness campaign which
saw every UK household leaeted with a mock tombstone in the 1980s, to the Kill Jill adverts,
designed to encourage organ donation in Scotland. Presenting viewers with the choice of killing
someone, by deciding whether or not to sign up as a donor, the campaign was subject to a litany
of complaints. But the shock tactic paid o: donor registration surged by 300%.

The sensationalism is stirring, but the show also demonstrates graphic designers capacity to
inform and explain with subtlety and sophistication. The section on hospitals includes a
thoughtful initiative by design agency PearsonLloyd aimed at reducing violence caused by
frustration due to unexplained delays in accident and emergency departments. The designers
installed a series of clear information panels throughout A&E areas, explaining every stage of the
process, from the waiting room to triage and consultation, that also provided live waiting times.
Following a one-year trial, violent incidents fell by 50%.

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A similar no-brainer solution comes in the form of the communi-cards developed by designers
Poulin + Morris in the 1980s. As colour-coded charts of simple pictograms, the cards allow
patients to communicate with doctors, identifying the type of pain, its location and severity,
without requiring spoken language. First introduced in New York, they are in use in 150 hospitals
across North America.

Poster created for Het Nederlandse Rode Kruis, by Dick Bruna in

1986. Photograph: Wellcome Library, London

If the ability of graphic design to transcend language barriers is the overarching theme, it is
particularly evident in the section on the rise of the big pharma companies, driven by the need to
dierentiate their brands with a strong visual identity. We see the brand development of Bayer,
whose circular logo could be easily stamped on its aspirin pills, and the beautiful packaging of
Swiss pharma giant Geigy, who commissioned leading designers of the 1950s and 60s to design
sleek abstract graphics for their drugs which might tempt you to become a junkie from the boxes
alone. On the package of Petrofran, for rapid resolution of depressive states, a ball and chain
runs around the box. The chain links are triumphantly broken when a perforated strip around the
middle of the package is torn open.

Ultimately, it is tting that the exhibition should be held here in the Wellcome Collection, given
that Henry Wellcome whose company rst patented the tabloid, or tablet, in the 1880s was
one of the most savvy marketers of them all. Hailing from a sales background, he was the rst to
establish the practice of direct marketing to doctors. From 1890, he also started giving out
branded appointment diaries as promotional gifts, beginning the cosy practice of pharmaceutical
companies showering medical practitioners with merchandise which has helped to keep the
drugs giants, and their designers, in business ever since.

Can Graphic Design Save Your Life? is at the Wellcome Collection, London, until 14 January.

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