The Designers

Republic

BioFounded: 14th July 1986Creator: Ian AndersonClosed for Business: January 2009

“the physicality of the location isn’t so important, this is where I live and I don’t see why I should move and change my lifestyle to satisfy the demands of printers or clients,”

“It teaches you to think, to argue logically that black is white, which is very handy when it comes to dealing with clients. It’s probably that which makes The Designers Republic different from the outset,”

“People used to say ‘you’re at Designer’s Republic because you break the rules’ and we’d say ‘we’re not really, we just don’t know the rules… Every time someone rang up about work we’d put the phone down, piss ourselves laughing and say ‘one day someone’s going to suss out that we don’t know what we’re doing’,”

“We used to take on students for work placement so that we could learn from them. I got my first lesson in typography from someone at a typesetters who was sick of trying to work out my instructions.”

“It got us into loads of magazines,” says Anderson. “We went from being two people arsing about in Sheffield with all these preconceptions about what a designer was or wasn’t, to being one of the most written about design companies.”

“Say a red car is yellow and you’ll get a response… Confront peoples preconceptions of what is, by presenting what could be, and you get a response: maybe not the one you wanted, but you’ll still provoke dialogue.”

"It hasn't really been DR for the last two or three years: it had gone too far from what it was supposed to be.”

"We'd lost a couple of clients, didn't win a couple of pitches, got a tax bill which should have been sorted out and wasn't and a major client who didn't pay the money they owed us – in themselves any of those things would have been fine but when they come all at once there's not much you can do."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YS7tsvq6bas

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UP6cwEyOk70

Video Samples

Sources http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2009/january/the-designers-republic-remembered

http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2009/january/the-designers-republic-is-dead-long-live-the-designers-republic

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Designers_Republic

http://doctorvee.co.uk/2009/01/31/the-designers-republic/