When is a design considered 'National'?
As we say goodbye to the old National Gallery of Ireland visual identity, it is interesting to reflect on the factors that influenced that design, created almost 25 years ago to the day. In the late 1980s the German designer and educator, Gerd Fleischmann of the Fachhochschule Bielefeld, visited Design Factory and pronounced their brochure for TDI, the Trade Development Institute of Ireland, ‘very Irish’. The reasons why a particular design is considered ‘national’ are very difficult to pin down. Fleischmann considered the choice of colours to bear some relationship to the natural environment of Ireland. He commented on the pale blue of the sky after rain, the way light reflects on trees. This approach to defining national style—which avoids identifying specific symbols or traits in favour of less rhetorically-charged factors such as climate or geography—is one favoured by many design historians. John A. Walker, however, in his succinct account of the problems of