Turner Duckworth: Friendly rivals

Graphis, May/Jun 2001 by Coupland, Ken

Working thousands of miles apart, a couple of British designers maintain a close collaboration that's a meeting of two minds in a creative tug-o-war. Story by Ken Coupland Collage by Turner Duckworth

It's a neat effect: shadowy twin clocks, their moving hands projected on the wall of Turner Duckworth's San Francisco office, one set to Pacific Standard, the other to Greenwich Mean Time. You couldn't ask for a more apt symbol for this unique operation. What makes David Turner and Bruce Duckworth so unusual is that there's no head office, and no branch office either. Both the London and San Francisco studios function as separate but equal-strength partners.

Guiding a writer through a dim front room (kept dark, no doubt, to enhance the clock effect), David Turner ushers his visitor into his private precinct, a sunny, spacious enclave facing the street. "When we started out, Bruce and I would talk on the phone, and that would be the link between the two offices," Turner recalls. "But since then-- rather than being just an interesting element-it's become the driving force in the way we work, and more and more the reason to use us."

A lanky 39-year-old with aquiline features, Turner does most of the talking. The 37-year-old Duckworth is at somewhat of a disadvantage because he's coming through from London over the speaker-- phone. But it soon becomes clear that Turner and Duckworth are, in many ways, very similar. For one thing, both are British. For another, "We were married within weeks of each other, and two of our children were born within days of each other," Duckworth chimes in. "We seem to live very similar lives and have similar lifestyles."

"Over here," Turner adds, "it's not so much that I'm an outsider as that I have one foot permanently in London. However long I live here, I'll always be harking back. And because Bruce is influenced by what's happening here, that keeps us from ending up as this little regionalized phenomenon." It doesn't hurt that the firm's San Francisco branch has snagged some major accounts-Amazon, Palm and other familiar brands-that many larger studios would covet.

But the London office is no slouch either; the firm has completed some 100 projects for Schweppes, the British beverage giant, and designed literally hundreds of product lines for Superdrug, among other major U.K. clients. "Visiting the States regularly allows me to see things from a fresh point of view," Duckworth notes. "And the same goes for David coming here. If we didn't, I don't know what we'd do." Distancing himself in another sense, Duckworth believes, is vital. "It's amazing how used you get to looking at things without actually seeing them."

The pair met while they were working for Marcello Minale, the colorful London designer whose recent, violent death shocked the British design world, before setting out on their own. The London studio was half-a-decade old and already a successful practice when Turner, pursuing the woman he eventually married, fetched up in San Francisco and decided to open for business there. He glommed on to the San Francisco office's loft-like two-story space in the then newly-- trendy South of Market district several years ago, before the dot-com explosion sent real estate values in the neighborhood skyrocketing. In the following years, the San Francisco office, riding the wave of the hi-tech miracle, has come into its own with a slew of high-profile commissions. Now the two operate as "friendly rivals," in Turner's words, in a spirit of close creative ferment.

"As a designer, you're always competing with other designers like yourselves out there in the world," Turner explains. "But you don't compete, as we do, in a way that's so absolutely one-on-one." Duckworth, Turner insists, is his severest critic. "It's much easier for me to get a job past a client than it is to get it past Bruce." The two studios maintain a creative tension that's exacerbated by the fact that they keep separate books. "It's tempting, particularly when you're a small business, to get hung up on the idea that so-and-so client's paying a lot of money, so we need to keep him happy, or whatever," Turner says. "Whereas the other office doesn't give a damn about that, because it's not showing up on their bottom line."

While probably best known for their fresh approach to packaging, Turner believes that what the firm has to offer goes far beyond mere cosmetics. "The reason a lot of our work is demonstrated in packaging is that if you haven't got it right there, it really shows, because it's such a simple distilled bare expression of the brand," he says. "A package is a great discipline, in that it has to have all the inspirational things that a brand has to have, but it also has to satisfy the practical aspects, and finally, it has to distill everything into an instant snapshot. The ad campaign can go after the central idea, but to create a package that sums up and expresses the brand, then you have to know that brand better than anybody."