The 100 Archive, for those not familiar with it, is an ongoing archive of Irish graphic design, which has been running since 2012, and includes work from 2010 onwards. For a license fee, designers are invited to submit their work to the archive which, once it meets a minimum threshold of three ayes from peers on an adjudicating panel, is then added to the archive of that year. At the end of each year, a separate group from the design community, the archive panel, will make a selection of 100 pieces of significant work to represent that year.
“Essentially, it’s a mechanism to create a landscape of contemporary Irish graphic design, for it to be a landscape, it has to be as complete as possible,” says David Wall of WorkGroup, part of the 100 Archive’s steering committee, and one of its founders. “Where it’s getting really interesting is that we have five annual selections of work done so far, each one of them now you can look at them now with a little bit of distance that gets ever more interesting. There are other graphic design archives, but in terms of the specific mechanisms we’ve built, there’s nothing else like it.”
David also has another role with the archive, in that his studio WorkGroup built the new version of the 100 Archive’s website. “One of the really important things is that the redevelopment of the site really couldn’t have happened without funding from ID2015.”
“There’s a very positive, celebratory atmosphere around Irish design,” says Wall. “I think a lot of that is owed to Offset and Richard and Bren what they’ve done, even before that, the Candy stuff. For me I think industry reaches maturity when you’re able to have a critical discourse about it without people getting their noses out of joint about it. I think you need to go through that pure celebratory stuff.”
“Part of the redesign of the site was to take the writing that was there, which was very bloggy, was to rename them as ‘articles’, the idea that they can be bigger pieces, they can be critical and this could be a really good venue of it, because it’s unequivocally celebratory, it’s ‘look at all this deadly stuff that’s happening.’ But then let’s have a discussion about that, let’s see what’s interesting, what’s good and bad about it, and I think that will push things forward as well.”
The deadline for submissions for the 2015 Archive at www.100archive.com is Sunday 31st January and from the February 2016 the Design pages of Totally Dublin will be headed up by David Wall who will be delving into the 100 Archive’s landscape for our delectation.
Words: Ian Lamont
Images from
Lifelogging Exhibit, designed by Ruza Leko, Rob Warren at Science Gallery [Header image] – view project on 100 Archive
Platform Summit signage and visualisation, designed by Kenneth Deegan at Pentagram, Eddie Opara (Partner and Designer), Pedro Mendes (Designer) – view project on 100 Archive
JDIFF Jaws Poster designed by Jamie Murphy at The Salvage Press – view project on 100 Archive
