Tony Ward
A highly creative communication designer with considerable local and
international experience in advertising, publication and illustration,
Tony Ward has had an association with Swinburne that began in 1960 and
while subject to major interruptions, continues to this day.
As a teenager Tony Ward’s passion for visual communication had been
stirred by his encounter with The Hiroshima Panels. This series of highly
expressive paintings begun in 1950 by husband and wife team Iri and Toshi
Maruki was exhibited in Melbourne on their journey around the world to
combat the widespread Cold War acceptance that further nuclear war was
not only possible, but likely.
Ward came to Swinburne with his mother at the age of sixteen for an
interview with Laurence Pendlebury in one of the cramped offices off the
staircase of the Haddon Art School building in 1959. He was accepted at once
and began three/four years study in the Art School from 1960.
Art and crafts were still significant in the curriculum in the School of Art in
the 1960s.
In addition to learning about type, printing and photography in
the first year, there were classes in ceramics, metal work and enamelling,
and Ward enjoyed a thirdyear subject in which students worked in a team to
design and produce a large-scale mosaic.
Other differences from contemporary design education practice were the
assessment of final folios by a state-wide panel appointed by the Victorian
Department of Education and the spreadsheet of students’ marks that was
openly displayed and updated as each task was assessed, creating public
triumph or humiliation.
Taught by Ian McNeilage, who Ward says taught from a set of design
principles he had formulated in response to the Bauhaus teachings and the
urbane and sophisticated Brian Robinson, he benefited from the
reinvigorated staffing of the Art School that occurred from 1958 to 1961.
Ward maintains that many of the briefs students received were challenging
and exciting and that the constantly changing display of student work
through classrooms and corridors stimulated a high degree of peer learning
(Ward 2008).
A list of films to see this week’ was posted for students, and it
was customary to move on for after-school drinks and music at Brian
Robinson’s home on Thursday evenings. Swinburne Art School students of
this period unknowingly signed up for a total immersion in contemporary
culture that had a lasting impact on their lives (Ward 2008).
After completing his certificate Ward worked as a graphic designer for ABV
Channel 2 (now ABC), and as a designer and art director for 0rpm & Bourne,
a design and photography studio. Between 1965 and 1966 he worked as a
graphic designer for the World Record Club of Australia, creating record
cover designs and learning the production and commercial imperatives that
made him a better designer (Ward 2008).
As an art director at Paton Advertising Services from 1966 to 1968 he worked
with Philip Adams on projects for clients including Mobil and Alcoa. During
this time he collaborated with Adams and Brian Robinson on the film Jack &
Jill: A Postscript.
As a freelance designer Ward devised an identity and poster campaign for
Melbourne’s stylish Victorian and Albert (Berties) discotheque in 1967 that
shows his playful and irreverent use of Victorian era vernacular type and
illustration. A key characteristic of the emerging of youth culture in the
1960s and 1 970s was its recoding of vernaculars through changes of context,
purposeful confusion, irony and flagrant abuse, something Ward was
prepared for with his training, and his enthusiastic bibliophile and
collecting tendencies. The certainty that the Victorians expressed through
their visual culture is overturned by the head of Queen Victoria’s consort
Prince Albert, protruding indignantly from an undersized, highly
embellished monument, a chaotically scribbling script and proliferating
inky blotches.
Ward undertook teacher training and was awarded the
Technical Teacher’s Certificate by the Victorian Department of Education in
1969. He had begun teaching at Prahran Technical College in the early days
of the current Faculty of Design building in High Street from 1969 to 1973
along with fellow Swinburne graduate Winston Thomas.
The art and design college was expanding with a largely young staff whose
enthusiastic spirit of experimentation shared by their students. Ward then
spent two years travelling throughout Asia, the Middle East and Europe.
On his return Ward joined Mimmo Cozzolino, Con Aslanis, Geoff Cook, Izi
Marmur and Neil Curtis at All Australian Graffiti from 1976 to 1978. The
members of this studio shared a unique vision of a new Australian cultural
identity that was egalitarian and anti-elitist. Their work was a reaction to
the dominance of a modernist idiom formed by ‘Swiss School’ rationalism
and the seamless communication of American corporate design. His work
appears in one of the practice’s publications, The Kevin Pappas Tear Out
Postcard Book, published in 1977.
‘With playful irreverence they invented, appropriated and reworked icons
and images especially those celebrating the “dagginess” and ordinariness of
Australia; the suburb, the house, the backyard, the meat pie, the Holden car,
the kangaroo, the Eureka flag … Their ironic stance on what was
quintessentially Australian was not unlike Barry Humphries’ take on the
Anglo-Saxon eastern suburbs. But MG’s focus was on popular culture and
the graphic image as they spotlighted cultural prejudices by representing
migrant culture as a worse than your worst nightmare, mate stereotype—
the wog calling the bigot’s bluff. This is most evident in The Kevin Pappas
Tear Out Postcard Book, which is challenging with its celebration of over the
top bad taste in a manner that predicts today’s Kath and Kim,’ (Whitehouse 2005)
Ward continued to do freelance illustration and design work outside of AAG
and returned to part-time teaching at Prahran College of Advanced
Education.
Restlessness saw Ward seek out a change in the direction of his work in
1983. Fellow Swinburne student Barry Owen recommended Ward for a
position with a subsidiary of the international advertising agency Ogilvy &
Mather in Thailand’s capital Bangkok. He spent the next seven years there,
becoming an associate creative director and working for a wide range of
international and local clients including Philips, Ponds and American
Express.
Ward returned to Australia and to teaching at Victoria College, Prahran
Campus in 1990 which subsequently amalgamated with Swinburne Graphic
Design in 1993. He has maintained his freelance practice as a designer and
illustrator documented in exhibitions such as ‘Ward on Wood’ curated by
David Lancashire in 1999 showing his work in 3D illustration and a range of
publications including Bursts with Matthew McCarthy and Loss with Peter
Salmon Lomas.
Ward continues as a valued educator, recognised with a
national tertiary teaching Carrick Award in 2006 as member of a team of
Communication Design lecturers. His commitment to enriching the
experience of students spawned ‘Protein’, an after-hours lecture program
for which he has relentlessly shoehorned an array of successful
professionals from all corners of the industry into contributing their
valuable time. Ward’s engagement with new technology, his curiosity about
people and critical approach to communication, have recently been used
within a team that is developing a digital community suggestion box within
the Faculty of Design.
Nanette Carter