A New Order of Manchester's Finest

This all started with Power, Corruption and Lies! Our poster; Manchester - Great, Greater, Greatest took its inspiration from the iconic design for New Order's second album by Peter Saville who has, in time, become one of this country's most influential designers and quite rightly, as a Manc, appears on our poster.

Always someone to find language in design, Saville decided to NOT put the band name or album title on the cover. He thought and decided to 'write it' with an alphabet devised through colour combination icons on the reverse. So a good old fashioned vinyl album from 1983, but blessed with effectively an emoji styled inner design. Ahead, way ahead, of its time.*

It's been a design that has fascinated and inspired me and as a self confessed lover of the infographic (and New Order, and Peter Saville), I've pondered many times on how it could influence something I could design. And no better way to inspire than a poster devoted to the great and good of Manchester and as the title suggests, Greater Manchester as well.

The poster celebrates the famous and the well known Mancunians through eras and decades. Each circle represents an era from the 1850s of JJ Thomson and Emmeline Pankhurst and works out to the 90s and Gen Z collective including Keely Hodgkinson and Cole Palmer. The colours are defined by each person's creative genre which is listed as Sport, Actor, Writer, The Arts, Media, Science, Activist, Explorer and Entertainment.

So now for the slightly boring, technical stuff. 'Why the blank spaces?'. As the eras were marked down by the birth dates, a certain number of sections were allocated. If five names were born for example in 1974 it didn't mean five names appeared in 1944 (3) or 1954 (0) and so in order the complete each circle per year, the spaces became blank. The overall circle looks more interesting like that anyway!

And to do justice to the title we included names not strictly Manchester central but Greater Manchester and for the greater good of artistic licence those proud Salfordians!

So whatever happened to New Order and Peter Saville? Plenty! Ground breaking in their fields and only recently Peter Saville formed a colab with Adidas and Manchester United to produce club branded leisurewear based on his 'colour wheel' alphabet. Style never goes out of fashion!

*Saville's colour coded alphabet first appeared on the 12" 'Blue Monday".

Don Mammatt