Illustrators, rather like women in the Bible…

A while back, I was made aware that I defined Illustration and its relationship with other creative disciplines in terms of territory rather than content. I didn’t mean to, but I do feel aggrieved that my colleagues in typography and graphic design seem to have gained some high ground, as if an understanding of grids and typesetting gives you a quasi-religious insight into design life.

I cannot help but pray myself when I hear graphic designers and typographers affirm that ‘ type is language’. I don’t disagree but we went way past the point of type illuminating language some time ago - obscuring yes, illuminating, no. I suspect this is all part of designers and typographers seeking intellectual validation via comparison with linguistics and semiotics. Reading Barthes, Saussure etc. means you are intellectually rigorous, analytical, highly intelligent - almost like those most serious of people: Scientists.

Illustrators, rather like women in the Bible after the garden of Eden incident, start from a position that is prejudiced. We are taught from an early age that true maturity is reached when we stop looking at picture books and move to text-only books. What concerns me most of all though is that, given this new ascendancy - this new intellectualism, awareness and insight - designers seem to do little to engage with the world, globally. Design seems to have turned into itself at a time when visual communication could do so much. Perhaps the typographic form of the West can’t engage globally, whereas Illustrators can.

It seems bizarre that it is in picture books that intelligent comment upon issues that matter is truly represented. I speak of the wonderful Joe Sacco and Chris Ware (these are anything but ‘comic’ books) or the work of Magnum photographers.

Illustrators, image makers, visual journalists – whatever - it is time to recover lost ground. Image making produces a language that can truly cross cultural boundaries. Many of us, without reading and writing, can understand pictures. The global community will require pictorial representation but not necessarily written - everyone knows the sign for a toilet.

I will be convinced by the new typographic and graphic design intellectualism when I see it comment upon the great wrongs of our time: Srebrenica; the child amputees of Sierra Leone and the genocide waged in Darfur. Until then, I suspect I will just have to contend with the investigation of language, new fonts and the wielding of the grid for truth and justice.

Paul Bowman

21 comments

your comment
Please don’t liberate illustrators. It’s bad enough with with all these women in design.

/anon 18/05/2005

i think that last comment speaks volumes — typo is seen as SUUUCHH a male dominated TECHNICAL skill whereas illustration because it is cerebral practice - touchy feely — it is seen as more female thing — is that why it has less VOICE in graphic design today? Illustration will always be a more contemplative discipline and this makes it a forum for thinking/debate – graphic novels and things like that. Typo always gets the banner headlines but illustration will always linger in the mind…

/christian 18/05/2005

your comment
Ironically, the toilet sign Paul Bowman uses to show the power of images over text developed directly out of twentieth century designers’ interest in the grid as a mechanism for systematically reducing design to its constituent elements, to produce the greatest effects.

This design is universal now, but it wasn’t inherently so -it’s part of a learnt language - the language of European modernism, equated by some to the projects of Empire.

Post-sixties when everything from politics to design, that operated in this mode, became untenable there was a move to more subjective positions/languages etc. In some areas of this d/evolved into self expression. Or design turning in on itself, as you rightly put it. Or designers ‘wanking in a corner’, as my old tutor used to say.

Some designers, like Jon Barnbrook, (although I hate pick on him as he’s an easy target and his work is still more interesting than most) do use graphic design to comment about the wrongs of the world but to an audience of other designers so it’s hard to imagine what actual effects their work might have in a tangible sense, other than cementing their ‘brand’ aura of being a consciencious designer.

Maybe the move from universal to personal was to miss a trick, and designers should’ve concentrated on replacing the ‘meta-narratives’ of modernism with micro ones. The graphic comics of Sacco/Ware are interesting as they use individual characters and their lives - mini-narratives - to speak about events in the wider world. Just as novels or films do.

I don’t think images, or audiences, are universal but maybe illustrators could stop wingeing for just one minute about their status as second class citizens and use their wider audience, lack of celebrity fetish (?) to investigate how narratives of urgency can be put across in new ways to new audiences.

/Gaby Shellby 18/05/2005

your comment
I think Christian’s point brings up some important stuff that is quite a controversial point and hard to say these day. But, as I see it, graphic design’s not only male-dominated because it’s technical but because it’s so burpy-farty-footbally laddish - the whole culture puts women off. I’m not sure all these ‘we’re more cerebral than you are comments will get illustrators anywhere. It hasn’t made women hugely more popular. Maybe illustrators should learn from gd women: they don’t neccessarily leave it though, if they are sensible and go all touch-feely illustratory - I’m a boss now and I see they often do it their own way which is what I think the above comment is trying to say.

/John 18/05/2005

your comment
I’m not sure if this strand thinks it’s more important to tackle the illustrators as second class citizens part of the discussion or the need need to say something important obout issues going on the world part? Linkin the plight of illustrators to feminsist struggles in the past brings the two together and makes it seem as if that IS saying something important. However, if the desire of illustrators is simply to get some of the cudos of designers and the attendant banner headlines, then these seem like totally paradoxial calls to action.

/Anna Leighton 18/05/2005

Under present circumstances it is considered a great danger to give in to the ’spectacular forces’ of importance. Seemingly vicious things and whiskey, rock n roll understood guns.
Beautifully negative, the aesthetic plans seemed pointless. I have threatened adults, the hardest of publishers, belonged over wine, difficult and political. When a female killed himself we sat close.
-what a charming suicide! cried the great cognac audience.
the wish was to punish and the great cognac audience had to do some serious work.
-Stab and ask. who invited January? war and mouth, the sister of loss.
Consistent self hatred and the smattering of ammunition, ritual parental loving. Shot gun mayhem under clinical circumstances accusing the icon of hopelessness.
beautifully negative, we deserted from adulthood, it was the impressive establishment of freedom combined with reckless motives that made for real adventures.

/Daniel Götesson 19/05/2005

A week is a long time in a blog!! I was never trying to say it was all reduced to an argument on gender – but maybe that is my mistake I was not clear enough or maybe I was hitting myself with my own hammer. But illustration thinks differently, it, by definition, I think works like a musician, on many levels at once; emotion, aesthetic, technical, rhythmic etc. I do not always see this in ‘traditional’ or modern typography… maybe, after reading the last blog entry, illustration is a way of thinking – full of visual metaphor. In one of the other blogs on this site a guy suggests bring back text and maybe, not wanting to be too w** over it, illustration does this? And Anna is right the whole power thing is a dead horse and will only stop things from happening or moving forward

/christian 21/05/2005

Christian - how does illustration “bring back text?”

/Anna Leighton 22/05/2005

When I talked of illustration bringing back text I was under the influence of a quote I read recently, it was made by the artist Ed Ruscha where he says he sees words as ‘still-lifes’ and I thought this made it simple to understand how text works as image. Maybe I have not glued the idea together properly yet but I do believe illustration makes the word or text thicker, more touchable and it also brings a new BIGGER or broader meaning from the dictionary definition. BUT I do not want it to be them and us but I think illustration CAPTURES words rather than chisel them out of stone or pixels.

/Christian 23/05/2005

your comment:
Christian
I don’t understand - Ed Rusha produces paintings and prints etc of words, ie: images of words,
consequently his remarks about “words seeming like still lifes” makes sense (literally) in the
context of his own work but how does it have any relevance to illustration in a wider sense? Robert
Smithson in an essay in the late 1960’s suggests that “reading is not the same as looking, unless it is”
are you suggesting there is some conflation between the experiences of “looking” and “reading”?

/john 24/05/2005

Perhaps this is unrelated, but it is my feeling there are many confusions here. Graphic design / Image-making / Visual communication, the whole lot, is a kind of vessel. It communicates ideas to an audience, the viewer.

Typo/Info design is well suited to the dissemination of a certain kind of information; numbers, facts exact information. Image making is evocative. It conveys feelings and emotions, things that are difficult to quantify. Image making in that way can find it difficult to guarantee that the viewer will glean from the work what the creator intended.

These aspects of visual communication are a means to an end. Each have there strengths and weaknesses. I have nothing against designers and illustrators creating the content but I feel that is a different thing not, exactly design. It is through this, misunderstanding, that design becomes confused and pretentious.

Scientists, Philosophers, Historians chose to communicate with words and diagrams because it is important that people truly understand what they were saying. Journalism and photo journalism show us that images are important but without words, somewhere, they don’t tell us enough to be useful for humanity. A picture of a starving child might motivate you to give money but it wont tell you where to send it.

Maybe my standards of what is worth saying are to high, but I feel those who specialize in the creation of ideas and information are the source and generally the designer / illustrator is the messenger. We find effective ways to communicate others ideas. When we produce both the idea and the vessel for its communication we become an artist. In no way do I feel that these ideas limit design, I would hope that through remembering this I can stay focused on how design can add to our world.

/Max Garfinkel 24/05/2005

i agree with you paul. i think there is definately a kwasi seriousness” about typography, not to say i dont love type. but what you are saying about the way that illustrators arn’t seen as serious i feel is very true. typographers, illlustrators and graphic designers should view these different forms of expressing oneself as somthing that isnt competitive but rather tsomething to salute.
but i for one think that you have a great point when you say that we “become adults, grown-ups” when we no longer look at pictures. However if its a competition between illustrators and typographers…. wernt the egyptians, or the wikings…. on to soemthing. they could actualy communicate through type that was image. language in most cultures did start from a pictoral point and like you said everyone nows the pic of a tiolet and what it means.

/jenny a 24/05/2005

Umph.. I feel slightly under attack; John and Daniel are both saying the same thing BUT I think this leads to a dead-end an ‘impotence’ If the real question is, and you are both alluding to the same thing, am I conflating text and image vis a vis art and illustration, material v essence than I think on one plateau this is an ‘old’ fatigued argument – it is impossible to attach an individual ‘sign’ to any visual narrative/creation/commission. Once released it cannot be tied to any one subjective meaning, to any lexicon; typographical, art historical etc it enters into a realm of multiples of meaning ‘Le multiple, il faut le faire’ it was this I was alluding to, a more ‘folded’ sense of text. I used the word captured, like a wasp in a jar, it is still a wasp but is also something else, an experience?. I think this is what happens to text in Rusha, he uses the term ‘still life’ not in the generic term of ‘church hall’ amateur arts classification but the temporal realm of experience. Helene Cixous captures this phenomenon when she comments ‘to collect what Joyce called epiphanies. Moments where reality, in its most modest form, joins in a single stroke a possibility and a promise of eternity – an instant that resists death’ ~ un devenir (it is neither looking or reading?).

/Christian 25/05/2005

Hi Christian

Maybe we are on the same plateau?

I am not party to the intricacies of the arguments between typography and illustration which seem to be informing your posts but you seem to be contradicting yourself, which is why I raised the issue of the conflation of text/image.

In your last post you suggest you are alluding to a more ‘folded’ sense of text (I’m not exactly sure what you mean by folded in this context) and talk about the experience of “neither looking or seeing” but previously in this blog you seem to be drawing a fairly strict delineation of the categories of the visual and textual in relation to your description of the disciplines of typography and illustration. So for instance you describe typography as merely “technical” whereas illustration is “more contemplative” and ” full of visual metaphor” - “illustration captures, typography carves” etc. And so typography is described as a strictly artisan-like activity whereas illustration “works like a musician, on many levels at once; emotion, aesthetic, technical, rhythmic etc”.

In extension from this you seem to have selected the example of Ed Rusha because his rendering of text is “illustration-like”. In this case would you for instance make the same distinctions between Rusha’s artwork and the “typography-like” work of Lawrence Weiner as you do between the general categories of illustration and typography (i.e. is Weiner’s work just technical etc?) This is bearing in mind that both of their artworks develop out of the discourses of the 1960/70s in relation to the idea of text-as-art and the reaction against Greenbergian formalism etc (roughly conceptual art). Within this context the conflation of the textual and the visual seems preferable to a continuation of the old binary of visual/retinal versus conceptual/textual, hence “looking is not the same as reading unless it is”.

The point where I loose you I’m afraid is with the Cixous/Joyce example. Given that you say it is “neither reading or looking” how does this experience occur (roughly). Obviously initially James Joyce would have to be read and so presumably the experience transcends this initial mundane activity. Is it a thought? And if it is a thought, do you see it (the metaphor of the mind’s eye)? Or is it some type of Hegelian imageless truth. O r is it just another variation on the traditional, a-temporal, transcendental aesthetic experience: unexplainable, beyond language, beyond signification, ungraspable, ineffable - a la Greenberg/Kant (replayed in contemporary theory as the poststructuralist flicker, both an excess and loss of meaning etc) and doesn’t this inevitably end up replaying the conceptual/non-conceptual binary which is just another version of visual/textual etc etc? or is it an event? (oh shit I wish I hadn’t brought that up).

Personally I’m more interested in conflation (deterritorialisation?) and ideas of the materiality of language. Are there any typographers out there?

/John 26/05/2005

Jenny’s point that “illlustrators and graphic designers should view these different forms of expressing oneself as somthing that isnt competitive” seems to be moving towards the same goal as John’s point about being “more interested in conflation (deterritorialisation?)”. I think that chinese typography -which isn’t built up of a series of abstract typographic letters as we have in the west at all, but is a more holistic word-image concept is a good example of Jenny’s Egyptian/Viking example. There are typographers out there and many of them are looking to this kind of example. The problem for me, is when it errs on the side of typography as ‘logo’ (overdetermining/closing down the imagination in the way that soundbites do) rather than something that opens up the communicative imagination.

/Greta 26/05/2005

I suspect ultimately competition for ascendancy in visual communication is puerile. I am less commenting on the woes of Illustration and Illustrators, self inflicted as they are, but more of a request to all visual communicators to address the world. We are talking of gender balance, semiotics and text image relationships and I could have sworn I mentioned child amputees in Sierra Leone. I guess I stoked the fire on some of these issues but where are our priorities. Again: SREBRENICA: EUROPE, 1995, DECLARED UN SAFE HAVEN, 7-8000 MEN AND BOYS MASSACRED.
What can we do people? I can figure out the point size, it must be sans serif on recycled stock due to the seriousness of the situation but is that enough?
Daniel Gottesson: What???????

/Paul Bowman 26/05/2005

agree with last comment, yes it is very easy to get caught up in how to communicate things to a broad audience, but that is, if i have understood things correctly, what its all about, ultimately it doesnt ****ing matter if we , all on this blog have oppinions and do nothing about it!? and again the illustration, typography, design kunundrum that has been brought up through out this discussion, we do need all of these different mediums. it’s is not always about what is the correct way to say things but who the receiver is? example: massive huge blunder a few years ago, soth africa, apartheid a massive event was put on that was going to try to get people of different cultures, financial background etc, (we are all aware of the problems in SA i assume) to come together and understand each other, one of the ways this was to be done was though music, a big great concert (which probably was seen as a very good idea, it could also be seen as stupid either way, your choice) we can all communicate through music, rythem etc etc. and now for the big mistake, this event got massive media coverage… in mags on telly posters all of cape town…. only problem, the major target group is mostly illiterate and doesn’t own TV’s. no one had bother to research this…. in hind sight, radio turned out to be pretty much the only way that they could have actually got people to come to this event. 10 people attended and this was organized by a few EU men and women and a few PR and event agencies that are no longer with us : ).
Maybe this is our real problem with design, illustration and type that we might be too caught up in doing something “fancy” designing for other designers. And to be honest i think one of the biggest problems is that people don’t necessarily want to see, hear or read the truth and what do we do about that?

/jenny 01/06/2005

I am not sure what paul is asking for; address which world? Is he asking for a return to
Imperialism? It is rather naive to talk of a global language of illustration - and even more worrying from someone who describes himself as an illustrator - i think we need to investigate how images ‘work’ before we save the world!

/paul D 02/06/2005

illustration does not imply understanding. It is about a personal wondering rather than an universal explanation. It is not about making clear, but about creating more questions. I cannot find a social responsability behind its purpose. The focus should be not on the intention to be global but on the exploration of the “microworlds” inside our heads. There is only the need to feed this properly… since there is a colossal need for THINKING…

/j(ay) carr 04/06/2005

-first i appolagise for all written mistakes, HEY, i’m foreign!!-

Paul (quote) “What can we do people? I can figure out the point size, it must be sans serif on recycled stock due to the seriousness of the situation but is that enough?”
Haha - last year there was a lecture where this designer said something like “if you want to be a designer stop being self-indulgent, it’s not fine art” - do we really need to? Is graphic design really all about being objective, choosing the space in-between words and clearness?? If you put nothing of yourself in your work than what’s teh point of being in a visual and creative area?

Carr (quote) “It is about a personal wondering rather than an universal explanation. It is not about making clear, but about creating more questions. I cannot find a social responsability behind its purpose.” - How about posters? went recently to a (american) lecture on graphic design history and one of them only on posters’ history (book: The Graphic Imperative), which are mostly illustrations and ALL political/socially aware/defiant…

/Sahra 28/11/2005

5 years late but still relevant. What Paul said is true to an extent, but to focus on a global topic that has no relevancy to western illustrators in that they are outsiders looking in is a wall for us. It’s all very well he may comment upon the illustration, but how can one comment on illustration without being an practitioner? This only gives a one sided and ignorant view that is far from being holistic and thus ill informed. This is a good suggestion, but not one that is new, illustrators ARE commenting on global issues, to assume that they aren’t must mean that one’s sample is too small to make such a sweeping generalisation. From a man that only debates illustration and isn’t practicing what he preaches, these are only ideas that when presented to anybody will land as folderol. Illustrators are addressing such issues, the fact that they aren’t forced down your neck doesn’t mean that they do no exist and just because you have not seen them in the pretentious magazines and monotonous illustration annuals doesn’t mean they are not reaching an audience that does not have you at it’s centre. Marjane Satrapi, the Hanuka Brothers, even to pick up any issue of the New Yorker to see the hundreds of illustrators commenting on global issues, not to mention the ones that don’t go to print on a weekly basis! At least if you are going to debate an issue, put something challenging and new forward otherwise you are a commentator and nothing more. You cannot save the world if the only person who sees your work is you.

/Charlie 02/06/2010

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