Design Council images online
Furnishing fabric designed by Lily Goddard for Halle (Overseas) Ltd of Manchester, 1951.
Four thousand images from the Design Council Slide Collection have just been made available on line, an important addition to the Visual Arts Data Service’s offering
This newest launch is part of a long process of digitising the entire Design Council Slide Collection and means that there are now over 13,000 images from the collection available on line. The slides were originally part of Council of Industrial Design’s Photographic Library, set up as a weapon in the fight to improve British design. The collection was then taken over by the Design Council in the 70s and was steadily added to until 1993 when it was forced to give up on luxuries such as photographic libraries. Luckily Manchester Metropolitan University stepped into the breach, giving the library a home and gradually, as part of the Joint Information Systems Committee programme, digitising the collection.
It makes for an invaluable archive for anyone interested in design, with images covering a huge range of fields from furniture, lighting and tableware, to town planning, graphic design and engineering componants. For example, a random trawl through the site threw up images of packaging for Shisiedo men’s cosmetics designed by Pentagram (1988), a combined lock and pump designed by Simon Thrower for the 1986 Schools Design prize, and, surprisingly, a pair of porcelain vases designed by Josef Hoffman for the Wiener Werkstatte.
Check out the collection here.
