Annie and William Morris
—Eileen Powers, MFA, by Annie Powell curator
When I began working on the Annie Powell 100 Posters Project, I found myself posed with a design problem as opposed to a curatorial one: What should an Annie Powell poster look like?
In my work as a communications designer, I’ve learned through trial and error that rule one is always: Learn as much as possible about the product. In this case my product was Annie, and while we know a lot about her in terms of facts, we don’t have any first-person accounts that reveal clues about her personality and daily life. We know she was English, born in West Yorkshire in 1859, and emigrated to Massachusetts in 1891. Of course we have her archive of over 3000 photographs, but unfortunately we have no journals, diaries, or interviews to build a more comprehensive portrait of her life and work.
So what then? Where should I begin?
From the point of view of a designer, I began to make a list of design ideas. I knew that I didn’t want a series of 100 posters in traditional, black metal, photographic frames. I chose white frame; that item was at the top of my list. Black frames were too heavy for Annie’s work and the corridors of light often found in her images. By the way, I had to argue my case for white frames before both Bernie and our printer Bruce, who both initially preferred the dark metal variety so commonly found in photography galleries and museums that we often forget frame color is a choice.
Annie was a woman entrepreneur and I wanted to underscore both her femininity, and the era in which she created the bulk of her work. While doing some research for a recent academic paper, I was reminded of the decorative arts designs of William Morris (1834–96), and his studio, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. He too was English, an entrepreneur, and also an artist and poet. He designed printed books and worked with type designers. As the founder of the English art nouveau (or new art) and arts and crafts movements, his work was ubiquitous by 1900. Annie most certainly would have been familiar with the patterns, colors and textures of Morris’ wallpapers, rugs, furniture, textiles and tapestries. And based on the few portraits we have of Annie, floral motifs seemed appropriate.
Fortunately, many of Morris’ designs are in the public domain and available for free download. Morris, a socialist CEO running a retail business in capitalist economy, may have been in a quandary over the concept of free downloads. I too, had my reservations as such intricate, handmade designs fetched high prices in Morris’ heyday and now a Google search yields the fruits of his manual labor free of charge. Perhaps this is fodder for a subsequent essay.
In any case, I chose to use Morris’ floral graphics as backgrounds for the posters, partly because of their color and texture, and partly because black and white photographs with subtle details might be not catch the eye of the viewer from a distance. Posters are a form of signage, layered beneath the wider category of advertising. I kept this in mind and built a poster template that aimed at accentuating Annie’s images on softened, color-edited versions of Morris’ of repeating patterns. I chose the elegant, high-contrast typeface Playfair, designed in 2011 by Claus Eggers Sørensen, for the text as it is reminiscent of classic typefaces like Baskerville and Bodoni, yet designed for application in today’s technology as well as traditional print. I sure hope Annie would be pleased!
Morris was a complicated character artistically, socially and politically. If you’d like to learn more about him, Thames & Hudson has some spectacular books about his life and work. There’s also an excellent lecture called “William Morris: Design for Living” (sadly, the recording is of mediocre quality) by Dr. Anthony Buxton through Oxford University’s Department for Continuing Education. As for Annie, keep an eye out for our posters beautifully printed, mounted and framed (in white!) by Bruce at Eastern Photo located on Webber St. in Lowell.
