Designers Republic

Designers Republic 

I’ve come across this company when I was a child playing the PlayStation on a game called Wipeout. The Designers Republic was a graphic design studio created in the 1980’s by Ian Anderson, which was based in Sheffield.  It was known for working with big brands such as Orange and Coca-Cola however the studio closed in January 2009. Despite this, Warp Records announced in 2010 that the studio had designed Oversteps and Move of Ten, Autechre's tenth album and EP respectively, as well as designing their 1991–2002 EP collection artwork in 2011.

The Designers Republic's works are often playful and bright, and considered Maximum-minimalist, mixing images from Japanese anime and subvertised corporate logos, with a postmodern tendency towards controversial irony, featuring statements like "Work Buy Consume Die", "Robots Build Robots", "Customized Terror", "Buy nothing, pay now", and "Made In The Designers Republic". They also celebrated their northern roots with phrases like "Made in the Designers Republic, North of Nowhere" and "SoYo" (referring to Sheffield's county of South Yorkshire) — affirming they were not from London's design community in Soho.