Gerard Taylor
4 Decades of Design
These 256 image tiles illustrate the diversity of design projects undertaken by Gerard Taylor over four decades of practice, including formative student work at the Royal College of Art and projects undertaken during five years with Sottsass Associati and Memphis in Milan.
As a student, Taylor considered Ettore Sottsass to be one of the world’s most important and creative designers. While at the RCA, he visited Sottsass’s Milan studio and in his final year he met him again while Sottsass was visiting London. Sottsass invited Taylor to Milan to work in Sottsass Associati, the new design studio he was setting up. Taylor went on to work with Sottsass through the early 80s and became part of the Memphis Design group from 1982-1987, a period now widely recognised as one of the most influential in contemporary design.
Taylor’s close relationship with Sottsass’s studio continued on his return to London, and over the next four years he designed multiple retail stores in Australia and New Zealand for global fashion brand Esprit. Over the same period, Taylor was establishing a design studio with fellow RCA graduate Daniel Weil. This was followed by over two decades with his selfnamed, London-based studio, designing furniture and creating retail and residential environments for global clients.
For the best part of the last two decades, Taylor has focused exclusively on his role as Orangebox Creative Director, helping build the company into the acclaimed global office furniture brand it is today.
Each of the featured images is sourced from the studio’s original research & insight, writing, client presentations, design renders, keynote talks and photography. More recent images feature the products, brand narrative and communications developed for Orangebox with the Orangebox design team and in collaboration with some highly regarded photographers and the renowned graphic designer Russell Warren-Fisher.
Multiple tiles pop-up to illustrate edited highlights of the extensive multi-channel brand collateral and research created for Orangebox, together with a portfolio of more than 50 product designs, some now in their second decade of production. These products range from the award-winning Ara and Kirn task chairs to extensive systems such as Away from the Desk®. Other tiles highlight early work, published articles on Taylor, and some of the many private homes and retail environments designed for diverse clients over a thirty-year period.
As Creative Director of Orangebox, Taylor’s focus has been on realising continuous vitality, starting with the Smartworking® narrative — first presented in 2005, and still going strong — and most recently made manifest in Relationship Buildings®, which meets the emerging needs of the new hybrid economy (in contrast with the increasingly reductive idea of the personal desk-focused office building of pre-Covid). It suggests that in the new, post-Covid world, the focus must be on bringing vitality back into workplaces. This narrative is reflective of the ‘realising continuous vitality’ brand positioning that has been central to the company’s success through the last decade, helping position Orangebox at the cutting edge of contemporary office design.
This tableau of 256-image tiles, which reviews four decades of work produced by Gerard Taylor and his studio, isn’t presented chronologically. That’s because design is a continuous process, centred on the generation of ideas that hold the potential to become successful products, environments and communications. A designer will always generate more ideas than the client project requires, but these are never wasted: they get banked, becoming part of the designer’s language, which weaves its way throughout their career.
It’s a contemporary misjudgment that vitality comes from continuous change. It doesn’t. Vitality and longevity of design come from the authenticity and the integrity of your thinking. An idea, a manufacturing solution, a product detail or a narrative from thirty years ago can be as relevant today as when they were originally created, as long as they arise from a meaningful and compelling point of view.
This is why student work from the formative years of Taylor’s career is presented with equal status to the most recent designs for Orangebox. Forty years is a mere blink of an eye, and good designers will always want to place their work within the joyous, beneficial and ever-evolving history of design.
These 256 image tiles illustrate four decades of studio projects for both private and corporate clients, including Anthologie Quartett; Bankside Residence; Basil Street Residence; Bernhardt; Cycle Surgery; Eaton Terrace Residence; French Connection; FullCircle; Glasgow City of Culture 1999; Habitat Croydon; Habitat Glasgow; Habitat Hamburg; Habitat Southampton; Knoll; KPG Residence; Memphis; Ocean Leisure; Orangebox; Orla Kiely; Selfridges London; Selfridges Manchester Trafford; Vincon Barcelona; Wigmore Sports.
Covid provoked a move away from all my work being created within my London design studio and broke my ties to London and my commercial studio, (space, more dog walking, big skies and long views just seem more important post Covid). It’s allowed me to start a new chapter where I have become the sole creator, focused on creating art more than design. Starting my move out of Orangebox has allowed more time to evolve this new period of my work and the Tray Series is the first result of this.
This is the latest insight report written in collaboration with the Psychologist and Leadership coach Clare Chandler, which identifies three current dynamics of societal change, which we believe will impact the workplace and suggests that organisations need to be aware of these headwinds as we enter the spring of 2025.
The fold-out poster format used here was created with designer Russell Warren-Fisher as a more engaging and relevant print publication in the age of all-digital. It became an invaluable means for the Orangebox sales team to engage clients visiting Orangebox showrooms. This poster uses an office floorplate to illustrate the migration away from offices dominated by rows of facsimile desking, and towards Orangebox’s Smartworking® proposition.
This foldout poster was for our BAE (before anyone else) team tables and was a key new generation wood-based product introduced into the Orangebox portfolio, manufactured via an important supply partner we established in Portugal. The partnership enabled us to produce, at scale, products that were imbued with a sensibility of made-by-hand craftsmanship.
After the Covid pandemic shattered everyone’s confidence and made it difficult to even imaging a return to the workplace, early research suggested that the combination of maintaining a distance of two metres and wearing masks, was an effective way to reduce transmission of the virus. We brought this to life in spring 2021 with The Hula-Hoop Office, which helped people grasp what a two-metre distance looked like, by showing everyone with their own, one-metre hula hoop.
An insight report written in collaboration with the Psychologist and Leadership coach Clare Chandler which offers some suggestions for how organisations could address the upcoming societal and economic headwinds, as we enter the winter of 2022.
8 Reasons is an insight piece produced in summer 2021, highlighting the beneficial attributes that the best client work environments bring to their workforce. It was part of our agenda to bring vitality back into workplaces fractured by Covid.
When Orangebox became part of the Steelcase group, we created documents to show Steelcase’s extensive European sales team how and why we created Smartworking® and what its vitality could mean for them.
Collaborating with a pioneering manufacturer such as Orangebox has been a privilege. They have had the imagination to sometimes try the unconventional, as with the Fielding Tables project, which we developed with our partner factory in Portugal. While this collection of workplace team tabling may not have achieved bestseller status, it contributed strongly to the positioning of Orangebox as a highly creative brand.
The further we migrate away from the Covid pandemic towards a new normality, the quicker we’re likely to forget the turbulence and uncertainty that reigned throughout 2020 and 2021. This January 2020 insight piece by Gerard Taylor for Orangebox reminds us that turbulence and uncertainty, if met with creativity, can prove highly beneficial in the long term, and that strength comes from acknowledging and embracing change head-on.
The sales team are critical to the success of any manufacturing organisation. Their vitality comes from being fully active in the moment, which means that if left to their own devices their universal mantra will likely be, 'canʼt you do ʻour version of whatʼs currently successful'. This runs counter to building from scratch a commercially successful brand that will prosper through the short, mid, and the long term. My role as Creative Director of Orangebox, (through the first two decades of building what became a highly regarded and successful brand) was not to glide into the slipstream of the current ʻlook and feel of the marketʼ, but instead create a new, more interesting, and individual brand personality.
Central to this was the location photography that we produced through the best part of two decades. The studio of Morag Myerscough set us on our way with our original identity before handing over to Russell Warren-Fisher and we are forever grateful to Morag for introducing us to the great photographer Richard Learoyd. I was aware of what constituted a great photographer having served my time in Milan working with Aldo Ballo and Oliviero Toscani and we worked with Richard for over a decade before he stopped commercial photography to concentrate on his now highly regarded camera obscura artwork. Richard refused to work digitally as he believed it diminished the quality of his photography, so he produced large format prints which we would then scan.
Annually we would source a vacant office building that had superb natural light and where we could access the standard galvanized metal tile structural flooring. The exception to this was shoot 5 where the volume of new products necessitated such a large space that we hired a yet to be commissioned aircraft hangar.
With each of these shoots the aim was to establish the personality and vitality of the products and how they could be aggregated to achieve a diverse mix of collaborative working scenarios. These location interiors achieved a balance between conviviality, warmth and a degree of abstraction that would illustrate each function setting for our customers. Below are some of the final photographs from our large-scale location shoots that we produced before handing them over to Russell who enriched them graphically within the key product publication of that year. These images would always be complimented with on white studio photography by John Ross who was introduced to us by our great mutual friend the designer Ross Lovegrove.
The first location shoot was the launch platform for the brand and the introduction of our first extensive product collection. It achieved our aim to create small groups of product combinations that would work both individually and collectively. We dressed them to convey the impression that the space had just been vacated. And we would both schedule and delay the shoot to ensure we had the best natural light conditions, which means these images are produced with minimal artificial lighting. Which was central to Richard’s way of working.
With the second shoot we followed our guidelines of arranging the product groups around the perimeter of the building to achieve the best natural lighting conditions, we could. Which went on to serve us well in initially creating and then developing a tone of voice that was unique and individual to Orangebox. Both Richard and myself believed that natural light and preferably full sunshine, created a warmer, more engaging, and optimistic image. By then the Air Pod’s were becoming central to the Smartworking® landscape and key to how we presented them in combination with the ever-expanding complimentary products.
Shoot three took us into the City of London, which proved a more logistical nightmare given the size and quantity of products that required photographing and the size of the Orangebox trucks needed to install them. These images were directed towards building the unique personality, look and attitude of the Orangebox brand and the Smartworking® landscape of products. Positioning them consistently on the periphery of vacant office floors on the galvanised tile floor and photographing them in natural daylight is as much about describing the attitude these products bring to spaces, as it is about illustrating their design and function. An ambition amplified with the graphic work of Russell Warren-Fisher, within our annual book of product publications, for which all of these photographs were created.
As noted elsewhere we developed our Network Landscape® collection with a new manufacturer in Porto and to celebrate this we decided to produce our location photography within the highly acclaimed Casa da Música by Rem Koolhaas in central Porto. Once we committed to this location, we maintained the same attitude of our previous shoots, all be it within more confined spaces. The shots with the famed blue and white Azulejo wall tiles remain and evocative reflection of our relationship with this new Orangebox partner and the expansion of our high-quality wood making manufacturing capabilities.
The volume of new products we had created for Orangebox, particularly the Network Landscapes collection and the large scale Away from the Desk® upholstery system, necessitated such a large space; we hired a just completed aircraft hangar. The size of a professional football pitch. Critical to the space was a row of high-level windows which offered a good level of daylight within the space and we swapped the galvanised floor tiles for a new polished concrete floor.
Aside from proving much easier to deliver and install such large pieces of furniture this location offered a new and more ambitious play in how we were creating collaborative settings and how they could aggregate to realise a workspace of scale and diversity. It offered a new large-scale approach to photography and enabled us to achieve a much more expansive attitude. While we had used models for the studio photography, to better illustrate the scale and function of Away from the Desk® we also used models for this location shoot. On reflection perhaps I wasn’t perturbed by the scale of ambition this space needed because of my previous experience with creating the equally sized Habitat store in Croydon and the very rewarding experience of working with Habitat’s superb visual merchandising team in creating highly successful domestic vignettes, within such a vast space.
With the architectural scale and presence of Away from the Desk® being used to effectively divide large open plan spaces. The ambition and scale of this shoot conveyed to the market the maturity, authority, and ambition of the Orangebox Smartworking® solution. Which was qualified with our informative research and insight.
