Peter Saville (q.v.), interviewed at Wodcast:
My early work… was work that was pretty much an expression of my own point of view. And I found myself in this exceptional circumstance of… Factory Records, which provided me a kind of autonomous platform from which to express my point of view about the kind of small world I saw around me as a person in their 20s in Britain in the ’80s. And of course communication design is not about expressing your own point of view. Communication design is for others and to others….
The graphic aspect of it is just a necessary part of the process of communicating it. Most graphic designers, when given free space, so often default to sort of rather dumb things like alphabets rather than actually having anything to say. I studied graphics because it seemed like the right thing to do at the time – from a young person’s point of view – and I think that graphic design is interesting to young people. It’s entry-level visual arts. I mean, there’s a sort of a simplicity and a directness to it that sort of appeals to our limited awareness when we’re in our teens and early 20s. […] I find it quite worrying meeting people in their mid-life who are still fascinated by, you know, typefaces and layout. Actually, the content of the work is actually the interesting part. The graphic part of it is just the means by which that content’s delivered.
So, in the early years, I had this platform to express my own opinions, and then sort of pretty much spent the ’90s struggling with finding a sense of place within a professional environment which is about other people’s problems, not yours.
All of the foregoing is delivered in a surprisingly offputting, jaded, borderline hectoring tone of “I learned all this the hard way and don’t you think for a minute it isn’t true.”