Ruth Sykes is an educator and graphic designer who visited the Design Archives for her essay about designer Dorrit Dekk.
I visited the University of Brighton Design Archives to research the career of illustrator and designer Dorrit Dekk (1917–2014). I hoped to find primary sources showing the strategies Dekk developed to make a name for herself professionally.
I’d been invited to contribute an essay to the forthcoming Bloomsbury book “Women Graphic Designers”, edited by Elizabeth Resnick, and wanted to explore how Dekk created a professional persona that, combined with huge talent, propelled her to the top of her field. At the height of her career, Dekk produced work that formed part of the fabric of everyday life in the UK and beyond. Varied and versatile, her practice encompassed design and illustration for advertising, publishing, retail, interiors and exhibitions. Air France, Schweppes, P&O Orient Line, London Transport and the Post Office Savings Bank were among her advertising client list. Publishing clients included fashion magazines Tatler and Harper’s Bazaar, British newspapers, and book publishers.
The question of how Dekk promoted herself first struck me when I saw how her name was listed in the Designers in Britain publication, produced by the Society of Industrial Artists in the late 1940s to promote and maintain high standards of professional visual communication. It gives her particularly striking pen name – ‘DEKK’, but a second name was also given alongside – ‘Mrs D Klatzow’, creating tension between a glamorous professional persona and a domesticated married role. It starkly illustrated the restrictive position of women trying to build a professional profile in the mostly man’s world of 20th century British design.
In the archive, there’s fascinating evidence of Dekk’s tactics to build a professional persona and to keep her name in the public eye. Press cuttings reveal Dekk’s skill at public relations and promoting the work she completed for the Festival of Britain (1951). She featured in an article in The Cape Times (1949) detailing her career so far, along with a photograph of her at work (image 1). The article discusses her difficulties in establishing herself as a freelance designer. A photograph of Dekk at an event promoting the Festival of Britain (for which she created design work) appeared in newsprint picturing Dekk in a similar manner to a film star.
Image 1, Crop from The Cape Times (1949), DDK-18-7, Dorrit Dekk Archive
In the 1960s, Dekk’s work was featured in newsprint again when her new way of picturing famous people – making intensely detailed visual collages taken from press cuttings, photographs and other ephemera from the subjects’ lives – attracted the attention of the media. This time the British national press featured her work (The London Times, and the Daily Mail). Dekk christened these portraits ‘personality panels’ and this new visual language won her commissions including a cover for Harper’s Bazaar, as well as a large interior panel for the head office of the National Provincial Bank, along with private commissions from highly influential people, including, for example, Robert Maxwell, The Duke of Bedford and actors Moira Lister and Dalia Penn. The Daily Mail even commissioned Dekk to make a ‘personality panel’ for the prime minister of the day, Harold Wilson, which they published in their paper (image 2). With her ‘personality panels’, Dekk had invented a way to create notoriety for her name by associating herself with powerful players in British culture and generating publicity about it. The Times article was also a way to drum up publicity for a selling exhibition of her personality panels at a gallery in London’s Sloane Street in 1967.
Image 2, ‘It’s a Hangup of Harold…by popular request’, The Daily Mail, 30 October 1967, DDK/7, Dorrit Dekk Archive
The archive also contains telling pieces of promotional material Dekk designed and illustrated to keep in touch with her clients. One communication comprises of three light- hearted sketches of Dekk herself in three different roles: (1) the artist (2) the saleswoman and (3) the artist on holiday (the message was to let clients know Dekk would be happy to visit them to show her portfolio and to inform them of her out of office dates that year) (image 3). Another communication invites clients to Dekk’s studio to celebrate new work for Air France – again, Dekk has pictured herself in a role, this time the role of hostess, carrying glasses of – perhaps – champagne on a tray (image 4). Visualising her personas in this way shows how energetically, and with great focus, Dekk was determined to control her public image amongst her audiences.
Image 3, Self-promotional information sheet, DDK/18/10, Dorrit Dekk Archive
Image 4, Invitation card, DDK/3, Dorrit Dekk Archive
These examples, found in the University of Brighton Design Archives, formed an important part of the story of how Dorrit Dekk made a name for herself in graphic design in Britain. But there were many more adventures in her colourful life story, which consistently broke the expected mould for a woman born in 1914 to a European Jewish family, and contributed to her identity and backstory that provided the foundation for her successful career. I glimpse into some of these mould-breaking adventures in the chapter I’ve written for Resnick’s book. They include escaping from Nazi Europe to the UK, securing an important early job as a poster designer for the British government (due to – Dekk claimed – the irresistible effect her Wren uniform had on her male interviewer – Dekk had apparently recently been demobbed from the British Navy after working as a ‘foreign Wren’, decoding – she claimed – enemy communications sent from hostile boats in the English Channel. Again, a highly unusual role – for a non-British born person to assume). Developing her inventive pen name, of course, was another effective tactic, along with an insistence on freelance work (so she could deal directly with clients); at a party she talked her way into a mural commission for the Festival of Britain touring exhibition (despite never having designed a mural before) … the list of her enterprising life events goes on, and would make a compelling documentary.
Dekk worked hard to develop a personal brand to help sell herself as a creative and talented professional visual communicator. Her archives held in Brighton hold some important and memorable examples of this, and I am very grateful to have been able to use them in my work.
