Dog-eared pages. A compilation of freehand illustration, transferrable ‘rub down’ lettering, cut-out photographs, and passages of typewritten text, arranged and adhered to cyan grids. Yellowed tape that is beginning to fail, and squiggly lines of glue seeping through the paper. Scribbled printing notes, percentages; scales and opacities. Messy, urgent, underlined, emboldened. Seemingly incomplete collages that evidence a slow, laborious and now obsolete way of creating graphic design.
Prior to the introduction of the desktop computer graphic designers created these “paste-ups” to lay out compositions. Each layer corresponded to a different colour and offset lithography printing plate. The final outcome existed in the imagination and would only be seen when eventually printed, with all separate layers combined. No screen previews, no WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get).
These paste-ups exhibit the physical labour involved in the design of each page of Earwig magazine, archived in the Heather Knowles Collection at the Macmillan Brown Library, University of Canterbury, and on display at CoCA Centre of Contemporary Art in Ōtautahi Christchurch from 21st February.
Earwig magazine was first launched by Jonathan Milne in 1967 when he took over the college magazine at Palmerston North Teacher’s College where he was a student. It ran for 22 issues, and featured critical writing, poetry, and political commentary. In 1969 Jonathan relocated to Auckland and restarted Earwig, this time as a fiercely independent counterculture magazine that operated as part of an international Underground Press Syndicate, a network of countercultural publications that operated from the mid-1960s through the 1970s and allowed other members to freely reprint their content. Jonathan and his co-editor Heather McInnes edited, designed, and printed the magazine at 10 Norfolk Street, Ponsonby, where they published eight issues sporadically over a four-year period.
The primary objective of Earwig, and of the wider Underground Press Syndicate in general, was “to serve as an antidote to the indoctrination of mass media and mass society.” This goal was signalled through the use of psychedelic graphics, bright colours, bold freehand lettering, and confrontational imagery that set the ‘free press’ apart from the mainstream, and became the visual language of liberation and resistance at the time.
Writing for the book Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia (2016), Lorraine Wild and David Karwan describe how underground publishing of the late 1960s is characterised by a necessary employment of highly economical and accessible design and print methods (typewriters, mimeographs, etc.) and is therefore often more formally experimental, urgent, and dense in information than it’s aboveground counterparts. They wrote that counterculture design “smacked of amateurism to anyone with a trained eye.” Work like this has therefore been generally dismissed from the graphic design canon of the period, and has only recently begun to be taken more seriously.
Coming into graphic design in an era where it is becoming increasingly automated, I have enjoyed discovering the evidence of the human hands behind Earwig. These paste-ups communicate a type of care and effort that is uncommon in many design practices today. To physically conceptualise, plan and construct a paste-up design exercises a level of thought, craft and complexity that is at odds with the resources, space, and time available in our contemporary world. My interest in the design processes and aesthetics of this type of publishing, in particular its highly tactile means of production, comes from a lingering sense that this is a way of working that feels especially relevant, now more than ever.
Many design decisions now exist within a machine and are managed by software at the command of the designer. In recent years the smooth automation of digital platforms with embedded AI has led to an increasingly frictionless ability to generate graphic design without any real ‘labour’ at all. This new version of graphic design is fast, flexible, and immaterial – excellent for consumption and profit, not so great for anyone genuinely interested in the doing of design. We can now engage endlessly in a frictionless design of convenience. The old physical craft of graphic design that is visible in the original artwork for Earwig magazine is now obsolete.
J. L. Wall, writing about the lack of friction in our digital worlds, frames this development not just as the result of technology, but of the choices we have made about it. He also warns us, “we’ve chosen to prioritise efficiency over friction… despite plentiful evidence of the need for friction to help us learn, remember and be satisfied with our experiences.”
In November last year, two well-known New Zealand authors were controversially ruled out of the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards due to their books having AI generated covers. The decision to exclude the two books was later overturned, but the public conversation around regulating AI generated artwork in creative fields pointed to a larger concern about the ‘creep’ of AI into the things that we tend to really care about.
It seems we want to know that somebody put some effort in. Connecting effort with meaning, American economist Kyla Scanlon has suggested that “the most valuable commodity in the world is friction”. And, according to art historian and curator Lars Bang Larsen, “our life environment has become so abstract... there is an understandable desire for that which is not mediated through digital media or conceived as readily transferable information.” In a fully digital world people – some people at least – still yearn for physical relationships and tactile objects.
In the digital mainstream there is no shortage of subversive or ‘alternative’ content, and equally there is no limit to the design conventions that can be delivered on-screen. Through the algorithms of social media, we may engage with a constant feed of material that proliferates through controversy and outrage, but there is no landing place for the necessary friction to do anything about it. As Yuval Harari states in his most recent book Nexus, “we have the ability to connect with billions of people all over the world, and yet humanity is closer than ever to annihilating itself.” Kyla Scanlon further explains “the more we optimise individual experiences for frictionlessness, the more collectively dysfunctional our systems become.”
My interest in looking back in time to publications like Earwig comes from a hunch, an evolving hypothesis, that rethinking analogue processes and platforms might circumvent an otherwise dystopian trajectory.
While the cultural mainstream continues to move towards eliminating effort, and the path of least resistance is endless generation, manual practices that require more time and more effort become radical. ‘Slow design’ has been described as a form of creative activism that can contribute to a shift in values towards more sustainable practices. As Carolynn F. Strauss and Alistair Fuad-Luke state in The Slow Design Principles, “in looking beyond the needs and circumstances of the present day, slow designs are (behavioural) change agents”. Actively inconveniencing ourselves with tactile craft invites friction back into creative practices, that are surely anyway about creating ‘meaning’ – be that for ourselves as artists or for those that experience the work. This generative friction works against the modus operandi of the digital world. It becomes countercultural, acting to centre humanity – rather than technology and industry – in graphic design and wider creative practice. It creates room for, in the words of Earwig, “CHOMP”.
CHOMP: The Paste-ups of Earwig Magazine is an exhibition of original Earwig artwork archived in the UC Art Collection, curated by Claudia Long for CoCA Centre of Contemporary Art in Ōtautahi Christchurch. It runs from 21 February – 29 March 2026.
