'ark' the rca journal
1950 to 1978

ARK was a style and design journal created by Royal College of Art (RCA) students, mostly from the School of Graphic Design. At its best, it was described as “raw, vigorous, experimental, often crude and often very funny, sparky and bright.”  In the first few issues it celebrated the craze for Victorian-style popular culture, an interest linked to the RCA’s involvement in the 1951 Festival of Britain. Thankfully, ARK was eventually dragged away from its nostalgic obsessions by an unconventional art editor, Len Deighton. Arriving at the RCA from Saint Martin’s College of Art, he was appalled by the archaic attitudes and snobbish anti-commercialism of the RCA. He recalls: “I was a working-class guy with a family and I needed to get a job. I didn’t want to hear about genteel Victorian book illustration as a way of earning a living.” As art editor of ARK 10 (spring 1954), he gave the magazine its first US-oriented pop article on comic books.

From there ARK gradually transformed into a lively, trendsetting journal by publishing articles on contemporary Hollywood, television design, pop music, British and Italian motorbikes, American kitchen design or pop music, without any sense that this was low brow. The student editors and contributors played around with typefaces and layouts being influenced by the Dadaists. The cover for ARK 25 (spring 1960), infuriated the more conventional tutors at RCA with its combination of ‘permissive’ sexuality (in the form of Brigitte Bardot) and deliberate typographical errors.

By 1959 a course in film and television design was established within the Graphic Design School, attracting a succession of ARK art editors including Ridley Scott. The content of ARK also relied heavily on the informal exchange of ideas between students at the RCA’s Painting School. By 1962 the presence of David Hockney, Derek Boshier, Peter Phillips, R.B. Kitaj and Patrick Caulfield resulted in a distinct style of Pop Art-influenced graphic design such as the ARK 32 (summer 1962) edition, which included an article on the new RCA “Pop Art”.

By the mid-1960s its historical moment had passed and it suffered a slow decline in circulation. Its last ever edition (ARK 54) in 1978 used a cover design with an illustration of Jordan Mooney called Jordan - The Modern Woman by Lawrence Mynott. Inside Zandra Rhodes wrote a commentary and Derek Jarman’s piece Art and Corruption was featured along with the new punk movement and Adam and the Ants.

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