Most observers probably would not have known it, but the designer of the sleeve for U2's Zooropa album - the one with the little babyface/spaceman drawing, the European stars and what looked like the signal Channel 5 viewers currently receive - was a DIT graduate. Brian Williams finished at the DIT's school of art and design in 1991 and is now a partner with Dublin design consultancy Dynamo. He worked on Zooropa while with Averill Brophy Associates and recalls that the concept was "constantly developing" while the band toured Achtung Baby - to the extent that about 70 covers were done, including covers for Dog and Bug, as the album was called at various points.
"The one thing that came out of it was the stars," recalls Williams. "Another guy had done the babyface and then it developed into this `cyber-tv' look." Eventually, and almost at the last minute, the European/ deconstructivist theme emerged.
William's Zooropa cover is one of the images which make up the Spectrum exhibition, which starts in the RHA Gallagher Gallery in Dublin on Thursday. Spectrum is a celebration of the work undertaken by staff, students and graduates of the DIT, including fine art, music, photography, architectural and interior design, holography, laser technology, film and multimedia.
"If you asked if the DIT did this range of activities, a lot of people would say that they didn't know," says Kieran Corcoran, lecturer in the DIT's school of art and design and chairman of the Spectrum organising committee. The exhibition, he says, is a means of raising public awareness of the DIT but also of taking stock within the Institute and of bringing a range of disparate activities and people together. The word "technology" in the DIT's title can blind people to the range of activities being carried out in the institute, a range which is far greater than that which existed in, say, the NIHEs in Limerick and Dublin before university status was granted to them.
Certainly, the fact that Zooropa, arguably the backbone of one of the most influential marketing exercises in rock music, went by with almost no mention of the DIT indicates that the DIT's light may sometimes be hidden under a bushel.
"That is one of the problems," Corcoran says. "The Zooropa cover won awards, it featured in most design catalogues, but no-one knew it came from the DIT."
One of the purposes of Spectrum is to encourage the public to make the connection between the DIT and such high-profile and distinctive projects as the U2 cover, the redesigned Ritz cider (and the new Ritz TQ), the cover of Bryan MacMahon's book The Storyman and the illustrations that adorn the cover of our own E&L each week, the work of DIT graduate Cathy Dineen.
"It's a different aspect of the DIT, but it's not all that new," Corcoran says. "The school of architecture, the school of journalism - or the school of communications, as it's known now - have been there for a while, as has the school of fine art. We are trying to raise our profile in many ways. Spectrum is very visual so, in one sense, it's a way of doing that."
And one last word from Williams on that Zooropa cover. If you look carefully at the cover image, the titles of songs form one layer of the artwork. The songs include Wake Up Dead Man and Sinatra and a host of other titles which never made it to the finished album or whose titles were changed as it progressed. The layer is, in fact, made up of all the wrong titles.
"I didn't have the guts at the time to tell everybody," recalls Williams. "Eventually, I told Bono about it in the Kitchen when I was drunk. He thought it was great."
Spectrum runs in the RHA Gallagher Gallery, Ely Place (off St Stephen's Green) from December 4th to 19th.
