Design

Design historian and curator Nanette Carter wrote the following monograph. It was first published July 2008 in the catalogue for Pen To Pixel: 100 years of design education at Swinburne, an exhibition at Chapel Off Chapel, Prahran as part of the Centenary Celebrations of Swinburne University of Technology during Melbourne Design Week 2008.

TONY WARD

A highly creative communication designer with considerable local and international experience in advertising, publication and illustration, Tony Ward has an association with Swinburne that began in 1960 and while subject to major interruptions, continues to this day. As a teenager Ward’s passion for visual communication had been stirred by his encounter with The Hiroshima Panels. This is a series of highly expressive paintings begun in 1950 by husband and wife team Iri and Toshi Maruki was exhibited in Melbourne on their journey around the world to combat the widespread Cold War acceptance that further nuclear war was not only possible, but likely.

Ward came to Swinburne with his mother at the age of sixteen for an interview with Laurence Pendlebury in one of the cramped offices off the staircase of the Haddon Art School building in 1959. He was accepted at once and began four years study in the Art School from 1960. Art and crafts were still significant in the curriculum in the School of Art in the 1960s. In addition to learning about type, printing and photography in the first year, there were classes in ceramics, metal work and enamelling and Ward enjoyed a final year subject in which students worked in a team to design and produce a large scale mosaic mural. Other differences from contemporary design education practice was the assessment of final folios by a state-wide panel appointed by the Victorian Education Department and the ‘spreadsheet’ of students’ marks that was openly displayed and updated as each task was assessed creating public triumph or humiliation.

Taught by Ian McNeilage who Ward says taught from a set of design principles he had formulated in response to the Bauhaus teachings and the urbane and sophisticated Brian Robinson, he benefited from the reinvigorated staffing of the Art School that occurred 1958-61. Ward maintains that many of the briefs students received were challenging and exciting and that the constantly changing display of student work through classrooms and corridors stimulated a high degree of peer learning(Interview with Tony Ward, 9/5/08). A list of ‘films to see this week’ was posted for students and it was customary to move on for after school drinks and music at Brian Robinson’s home on Thursday evenings. Swinburne Art School students of this period unknowingly signed up for a total immersion in contemporary culture that had a lasting impact on their lives (Interview with Tony Ward, 9/5/08).

After completing his diploma Ward worked as a Graphic Designer for ABV Channel 2 (now ABC1), and as a Designer and Art Director for Orpin and Bourne a design and photography studio. Between 1965 and 1966 he worked as a Graphic Designer for the World Record Club of Australia creating record cover designs where he learnt about the production and commercial imperatives that made him a better designer (Interview with Tony Ward, 26/5/08). As an Art Director at Paton Advertising Services 1966-7 he worked on projects for clients including Mobil and Alcoa.

As a freelance designer Ward devised an identity and poster campaign for Melbourne’s iconic Berties discotheque in 1967 that shows his playful and irreverent use of Victorian era vernacular type and illustration. A key characteristic of emergence of youth culture in the 1960s and ‘70s was its re-coding of vernaculars through changes of context, purposeful confusion, irony and flagrant abuse, something Ward was prepared for with his training, and his enthusiastic bibliophile and collecting tendencies. The certainty that the Victorians expressed through their visual culture is overturned by the head of Queen Victoria’s consort protruding indignantly from an undersized monument, a chaotically scribbling script and proliferating inky blotches.

Ward undertook teacher training and was awarded the Technical Teacher’s Certificate by the Victorian Education Department in 1969. He had begun teaching at Prahran Technical College in the early days of the current Faculty of Design building in High Street from 1969-1973 along with fellow Swinburne graduate Winston Thomas. The art and design college was expanding with a largely young staff with an enthusiastic spirit of experimentation shared by their students. Ward then spent two years travelling throughout Asia, the Middle East and Europe.

On his return Ward joined Mimmo Cozzolino, Con Aslanis, Geoff Cook, Izi Marmur, Neil Curtis and Meg Williams at All Australian Graffiti from 1976-1978. The members of this unique studio shared a vision of a new Australian cultural identity that was egalitarian and anti-elitist. Their work was a reaction to the dominance of a modernist idiom formed by ‘Swiss School’ rationalism and the seamless communication of American corporate design. His work appears in one of the practice’s publications, The Kevin Pappas Tear Out Postcard Book, published in 1977.

With playful irreverence they invented, appropriated and reworked icons and images especially those celebrating the ‘dagginess’ and ordinariness of Australia; the suburb, the house, the backyard, the meat pie, the Holden car, the kangaroo, the Eureka flag … Their ironic stance on what was quintessentially Australian was not unlike Barry Humphries’ take on the Anglo-Saxon eastern suburbs. But AAG’s focus was on popular culture and the graphic image as they spotlighted cultural prejudices by representing migrant culture as a worse than your worst nightmare, mate stereotype – the wog calling the bigot’s bluff. This is most evident in The Kevin Pappas Tear Out Postcard Book, which is challenging with its celebration of over the top bad taste in a manner that predicts today’s Kath and Kim. (Denise Whitehouse, ‘Wogs, Skips and Icons: Designing a Cultural Identity – All Australian Graffiti, A Vision Unfurled: design and the politics of cultural identity’, Melbourne, Post Master Gallery, 2005).

Ward continued to do freelance illustration and design work outside of AAG and returned to part time teaching at Prahran College of Advanced Education.
Restlessness saw Ward seek out a change in the direction of his work in 1983. Fellow Swinburne student Barry Owen recommended Ward for a position with a subsidiary of the international advertising agency Ogilvy Mather in Thailand’s capital Bangkok. He spent the next six years there, as an Associate Creative Director working for a wide range of international and local clients.

Ward returned Australia and to teaching at Victoria College, Prahran Campus in 1990 which subsequently amalgamated with Swinburne Graphic Design in 1993. He has maintained his freelance practice as a designer and illustrator documented in exhibitions such as ‘Ward on Wood’ curated by David Lancashire in 1999 showing his work in 3D illustration and a range of publications including Bursts with Matthew McCarthy and Loss with Peter Salmon Lomas. Ward continues as a valued educator, recognised with a national tertiary teaching Carrick Award in 2006 as member of a team of Communication Design lecturers. His commitment to enriching the experience of students spawned Protein, an after hours lecture program for which he has relentlessly shoehorned an array of successful professionals from all corners of the industry into contributing their valuable time. Ward’s engagement with new technology, his curiosity about people and critical approach to communication have recently been used within a team that is developing a digital community suggestion box within the Faculty of Design.


From: THE KEVIN PAPPAS TEAR-OUT POSTCARD BOOK AND ALL AUSTRALIAN GRAFFITI. (UNATTRIBUTED PRESS RELEASE WRITTEN BY RENNIE ELLIS, 1977).

TONY WARD enjoys (?) the distinction of being an ex-movie star, which is something of an unusual claim for a person who has made a substantial name for himself as an illustrator of the offbeat, or as his friends tend to put it, an offbeat illustrator. Back in 1969, Tony played the lead in Phillip Adam’s first film, a short feature called Jack and Jill, which, despite its low budget, was to win some of the major Australian film awards of its time. The role of Jack, a mood bikey from the wrong side of the river, is difficult to reconcile with the Tony who fills the role of eminence grise of All Australian Graffiti.
For five years he was a lecturer in the graphics department at Prahran College where two of his more promising students were Mimmo and Con, the founders to be of All Australian Graffiti. Tony still sees the mantle of teacher as one he wears with grace and one cannot discount the influence of his style and attitudes on his present colleagues. Over the years his amusing and ironical drawings which gave form to the wondrous imaginings that hovered around behind his eyes, earned him a special reputation amongst his peers. In 1976 he received an Award of Excellence from the New York Art Directors’ Club One Show, for his illustrations in the Army, Navy and Air Force Nursing brochure.

Tony thinks of himself as a painter working in illustration, but is quick to point out that visual communication is only one ingredient of the marketing mix. "I like to use my art as a method of making something else happen. I love to be involved in marketing and its associated configurations. And I like the idea of taking humour as a serious business".