Vive La Republic!

The Designers Republic™ has published its first retrospective, and as Tom May discovers it’s a bit of a beauty. Just don’t call it a monograph…

- Tom May

Thirty-three point three years isn’t a typical milestone for a business to celebrate. But then again, Sheffield-based design studio The Designers Republic™ could never be accused of being conventional. So it makes perfect sense that it would choose this time to publish its first retrospective.

A–Z of The Designers Republic™ features the most inspiring projects from the studio, founded in 1986by, Ian Anderson and Nick Phillips. But it’s not, stresses Anderson, a monograph. Instead, “it’s a way of explaining how and why we do what we do, illustrated by relevant work from the last 33.3 years,” he says. “It’s essentially: ‘What Ideas Look Like – To Us’.”

That’s the reason the limited-edition book is ordered alphabetically, rather than chronologically. “There’s no chronology to what we do,” notes Anderson. “Ideas bounce back and forward across time. Some work references other ideas from other times. Some is borne of other work. And some is a reaction to what we’ve done before in a given time, or maybe with a given client.