Love/Hate

Johnny, what do you mean by “hate based visual systems.” Advertising? It seems to have been a staple of Graphic Design discussions both on and offline that Graphic Designers can’t get over ‘Modernist’ forms. What is meant by this word ‘Modernist’ seems to change frequently, but the reductive aesthetic they mainly refer to was born out of socialist idealism rather than hate (by which I can only assume you mean capitalists, since you make no specific reference to anything more specific.)

Has design really had such a troubled relationship to industry? Yes there has been dissent amongst Graphic Designers, but for the most part this has been within Graphic Design discourse. As all the examples you mention have been, with the possible exception of Barbara Kruger. Interbrand, Fitch, Pentagram, Imagination (not to mention plenty of smaller success stories) appear to be getting on rather well with their clients. Are they not Graphic Designers?

Perhaps I am splitting hairs though. Graphic Design is a catchall term for both the independent designers I assume you’re talking about and the more commercial variety. I think it is problematic to assert that “Graphic Design” has a single purpose anymore.

***

“Seemingly, graphic design has the monopoly on the capacity to entertainingly say anything it chooses to an audience who, at the continuing behest of industry, are educated in all its nuances and references, and who are willing to play its visual games.”

What do you mean by this? Do you mean Graphic Designers are the only people who can talk to their own audience?

Perhaps the reason for the lack of change in visual language is simply that an ideological shift has not taken place, merely an expansion in the scope of work for Designers. Organisers of anti-capitalist protests proudly claim that their events are attended by people with a great variety of political persuasions. Detractors merely observe that there is no common ideology.

I think the more interesting question is “Do we still expect such a direct relationship between our visual forms and our ideology?”

***

“So far, social reform through design must surely be, globally, the most pitiful and unsuccessful of graphic projects.”
Isn’t this because, in recent memory, Graphic Designers have rarely stepped beyond social criticism or occasionally journalism (a growing field.)

To take a wider view of Design, I would argue that there have been some great success stories along these lines. Look at the fantastic work of Red at the Design Council. I went to school next to the Kingsdale school which was one of their flagship projects.

To answer your final question, we don’t all have the same enemy as you. Any lack of social change, it isn’t a fault of Design as a medium, but one of the ideology (or lack thereof.)

/Nick Evans 04/04/2006

I do seem to remember that in the pages of his book ‘The Swastika: symbol beyond redemption’, Steven Heller condemned sensational swastikas on film posters and book covers – then the designer had gone and splashed one across the cover. I suppose a designer doesn’t read the copy – but doesn’t the writer approve the cover? I always wanted to ask him about that and what discussions must have lead to that particular decision… A curious incident of the paradoxical lexicon of design and the way it gets used?

/Anonymous 16/04/2006

It seems to me that the raw materials are loaded –but not ‘naturally so’. Ideology works when something has become so embedded that it comes to feel like ‘common sense’. Common sense is perhaps described as being ideas or concepts that enough of us believe, or that we have been drip-fed enough, that they don’t seem to need to be questioned anymore. They then pass for what we think of as ‘natural’ but are of course constructed ideas – or designs. The idea of a ‘natural design’ seems to be a contradiction in terms to me, if we take design to be things that are ‘worked on’.

/John Turner 16/04/2006

I think it takes a visionary shift to move beyond the forms we have worked within for so long – or at least a paradigm shift and I don’t think graphic design is there yet – I think this is what Nick is saying too when he says that an ideological shift has not taken place.

Firstly, we are stuck in this corporate/consumerist paradigm for graphic design – and so inevitably any form of dissent kicks off against that which inevitably seems to involve evoking the (graphic language of the) ‘enemy’ in order to move against it…

As a conscious practice ‘graphic re-appropriation’ has been a favoured technique of designers from the mid-sixties (the Situationist International and their theoretical engagement with ‘detournment’) through all the people Johnny mentions to today. To me the idea today of ‘over-turning’ graphic language suggests that we are still clinging to old binary oppositions -socialism/capitalism, good design/bad design – and it is telling that Johnny’s starter blog evokes the best of all – love/hate. When John Heartfield was re-working Nazi propaganda in the 30’s or the Situationists were taking the consumer Spectacle to task in the 60’s this made some sense because those kind of binaries were of their time (of the modern era if you like) – and there was a belief that ‘bad’ graphic language could be re-worked for the good… Guy Debord, in Society of the Spectacle (1967) was far sighted enough though to see that although “Ultimately any sign is susceptible to conversion into something else, even its opposite” this also meant that this very kind of oppositional appropriation would be re-couperated to serve the ends of spectacular society itself.

Today, Barbara Kruger forces this hand by re-couperating her own seminal anti-consumerist slogan ‘I shop therefore I am’ for the London department store Selfridges. Here, the corporate language of strong images, attendant but inter-cutting slogans with the omnipresent sans-serif of both mid-market magazines and retail outlets, finds it’s ‘natural’ home again.

Graphic re-appropriation has largely had its day as a relevant political technique, something that Adbusters seem to need to take on board if they are to re-invigorate any of the political relevance they had for a period in the early nineties. But so has this thinking in terms of binaries.

Postmodernism gave us the idea that there were no longer these binaries – only dystopia (Bladerunner, Twleve Monkeys), only consumerism with no escape (Baudrillard etc.), only capitalism (after the pulling down of the Berlin Wall and then consolidated by the collapse of the Soviet Union). You can see why graphic designers might be forgiven for having ‘come to love their oppressors’ – after Baudrillard wrote ‘America’ didn’t he decide that if there was nothing else but this, might one not as well have some fun with it – as he did in it…

Secondly, then, there can be a paradigm shift we think anew about how graphic language develops. Johnny focussed on the work ‘graphic’ but it seems to me the term ‘language’ is instructive. Suppose we think of graphic language – including that of which Johnny speaks rather negatively - like conversation; in a state of dynamic evolution. That’s not change and counter change. Or total change [and I think it’s this total change, in terms of graphic language, which I have a feeling the original blog is seeking out… but again this brings to mind another old binary- out of dystopia, the search for utopia…]. It’s the continuous and multifarious feathering and interleafing of graphic nuances which surface here and there as discreet graphic forms (which we identify as pieces of work). In these there can’t help but be traces of preceding and adjacent graphic forms but the new cultural matrix into which they have emerged also makes for something different. This isn’t a new point – postmodern theoretical notions like ‘slippage of meaning’, intertextuality and so on touch on the same idea.

I think it’s this more nuanced way of thinking about graphic language to which Nick might refer when he asks “Do we still expect such a direct relationship between our visual forms and our ideology?”

Architecture – or city building – seems to be a discipline in which this way of thinking has taken hold. Perhaps this is because it’s much easier to see a building as having a life, changing over time, and with use – the everyday occurrence of extensions building onto older structures, in ‘dialogue’ with them…

Nick mentions the Kingsdale School http://www.icon-magazine.co.uk/issues/015/kingsdale.htm in Dulwich, South London and that’s a good example of what I’m thinking about. At first it’s easy to see it as a totally new architectural concept of a school that leaves behind the institutional forms and language of old. But no demolition of the old building here – the architect de Rijke Marsh Morgan has kept the old building but ‘exploited’ it – with, amongst other things, a teflon-coated plastic ‘skin’ suspended over the school area. This isn’t the place to describe it further, but it is one of the most radical projects in contemporary British architecture yet it draws on some of the of principles of a modernist language that has been seen by so many architects and designers as oppressive. The building is a hybrid, negotiating between languages, forms, client, users.

Here, the modern/postmodern or oppressive/liberating visual language binary isn’t very useful. And perhaps nor is breaking is down the relationship into love/hate or that old cliché we use about school ‘love to hate’…

/Gaby 16/04/2006

“Why are Jamie Reid, Aleksander Macasev and Steven Heller - three very diverse examples of designers and art directors - all deeply attracted to the swastika and/or other fascist imagery? Is their fascination and repeated return to fascist iconography paradoxical, given designs initiatives for social progress, or, given that Hitler himself is said to have ‘personally’ designed the NSDAP swastika logo-form, is their interest very simply an example of professional admiration?”

-I’m not sure that Heller is ‘deeply attracted to the swastika’ in the way that the above sentance suggests. It’s surely too simple to suggest tackling the stuctures, language, representations or actual experiences of hate are therefore ‘attracted to them’. Jamie Reid is a better example as he uses/or has used the design of the swastika as a vehicle for his own communication. I don’t think Heller has done this in his writing - his aim was in his writing surely to try and dissect how it works as a vehicle for communication (and I’m sure he didn’t design the book cover himself).

/James Derby 26/04/2006

I returned to Limited Language for the first time this morning in order to see how my initial thoughts had been interpreted, unpicked and challenged.

Sadly, it strikes me that there is a breadth to the original argument which, with the exception of the brief contributions of John and ‘Anonymous’, is being comprehensively avoided. What is immediately apparent from the responses so far is just how readily some individuals will blindly defend just about anything precisely and purely because they themselves are involved in it.

Remarkably, and almost as if purposefully to prove my point, in three paragraphs of self-justification Nick does so by invoking “Interbrand, Fitch, Pentagram” and “Imagination”. This is both parochial and depressing in any number of ways. Nick notes that they “appear to be getting on rather well with their clients”. Resisting the temptation to employ a “go figure”, one could draw Nicks attention to the fact that Interbrand, Fitch, Pentagram and Imagination are not overly known for working ‘free from commercial restraint’. Having worked for one of the above companies myself, I feel really rather qualified to say that the slavish indulgence of Ford’s every whim hardly marks Imagination out as a company pre-occupied with ‘autonomous self-expression’.

It seems Nick is failing, in a somewhat wholesale fashion, to understand both the current state and the future potential of the ‘discipline’ we are discussing. Nick hopes and in the same sentence fails in his bid “to take a wider view of Design”, arguing “that there have been some great success stories along these lines. Look at the fantastic work of Red at the Design Council”. It transpires that Nick “went to school next to the Kingsdale school which was one of their flagship projects.” Indeed.

Both Nick and Gaby seek to justify their introspection in the face of vast and global social concerns by citing a solitary school in leafy Dulwich. In taking such a ‘wide view’ of design, Nick myopically highlights the exact problem. Many designers are so fascinated by their own small gestures and minutiae, and therefore self-supporting and self-servingly obliged to be interested in the exclusively small gestures and trivia of others, that any general consensus on wide and effective change is unlikely. Gaby, meanwhile, is quietly excited by the schools teflon-coated plastic ‘skin’. Quite so. Imagine that. One can only wonder why global social reform through design has not been a roaring success when we have teflon on one school building in South London.

Fortunately, James weighed in, although somewhat indecisively, being unsure ‘that Heller is deeply attracted to the swastika’. Well James, he professes to be so in his book on the subject, despite his Jewish origins and the horrific wartime experiences of his family at the hands of the Nazis. In fact, you might want to do a little research on the subject. Heller has and can articulate this far better than I ever could. His writings on the subject are very interesting indeed. To quote him: “The swastika holds a special fascination for graphic designers, like myself, who work with trademarks and logos all the time…” Jamie Reid is not a “better example”. He is just ‘another’ example. Macasev another again. Arguably, so am I. As a small child quite unaware of the connotations of the NSDAP swastika, Heller liked to run around his apartment draped in just such a flag that had been sent back as a trophy from the war in Europe. That seems fairly emphatic then James. He is both appalled and seduced by the swastika. Its cultural history he finds abhorrent, but its graphic efficacy he finds seductive. You might want to read ‘The Swastika: Symbol Beyond Redemption?’ by Steven Heller and Jeff Roth.

Sadly, I am left with the impression that had Nick, James, and to an extent Gaby, been aboard the Titanic as said liner began its descent into icy Atlantic waters, rather than manning the lifeboats and ensuring that as many passengers as possible reach safety, they would instead have been engaged in pondering the aesthetics of cabin décor, each others navels and the drumming up of a fourth for bridge.

In the comments made particularly by Nick, I am optimistic in saying that I do not detect any sense of them having been made by a student. I may be wrong, but I think it unlikely that any design related student could be this narrow minded, deeply evasive and protective of / enthusiastically complicit in the maintenance of status quo. I would be exceptionally disappointed to imagine these thoughts to be the output of a limited student imagination when they read as jaded and preset and of a retrograde generation determined to eke out the little milk left in the cash cow they call the ‘creative industries’.

Gentle boat-rocking is essential in the initiation of change. If one takes the time to first understand the question being posed, then perhaps in future, one will not be quite so obviously frightened and confronted by the experience. Nick, keen to distance himself from any notion that gently challenges his rigid and conservative outlook notes that ‘we don’t all have the same enemy as you’.
That was always a given, but in this instance, absolutely Nick, absolutely.

Whether good or bad, this article was intended to provoke challenging debate, not to encourage empty, vacuous, vapid and above all else verbose chatter. However, to conclude, what my original article has inadvertently prompted is a wonderful and precise manifestation of the problem itself. We’ve heard it speak, we’ve seen its ‘reason’. We understand its scope. If that is the barrier, then that would suggest that some genuine and comprehensive reform or change in whatever manner seems appropriate is indeed achievable.

In passing, someone who is genuinely concerned with making an effective contribution beyond tokenism is Simon Downs. You might like to complete his very brief speed survey:
http://socialgraphics.speedsurvey.com

/Johnny Hardstaff 28/04/2006

…

I have long been interested, as all designers are, in signs and symbols, and their respective implications and ramifications. But more than most, I”m interested in graphics that are used to control behavior.

By way of admission, when I was very young I went to a military school in the US and was seduced by the uniforms (not, however, the ideological or disciplinary uniformity, which I actually rebelled against). The idea that if I joined this regiment I could wear that accutrement, or if I did this particular thing, I could earn that medal or other insignia, was a bigger draw than marching in straight lines (or shooting guns). I”ve carried this over into my work as a designer and my interest in design history.

What is it that makes us (the masses) find such things so appealling that people - many people - consent to be part of a uniformed mass, like Nazis, Fascists, Red Guards, Black shirts, Brown Shirts, Gold Shirts (America) and others shirts? When does it begin to infiltrate the conscious and subconscious (for example, I”ve analyzed Italian fascist school text and children”s books for an answer)?

I”ve written on lots of design themes, but I always come back to this theme. And these issues contributed to writing extensively about the Swastika in the past and current the book I”m writing for Phaidon, “Iron Fists: Branding the Totalitarian State.”

Its not that I want to be the enemy - or love thy enemy - but rather I have seemingly endless fascination with systems of power (and oppression) and how they are made manifest through our design profession. My new book covers key totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, attempting to address the mechanisms for propagating faith (as well as loyalty and submission). (i.e. I will be writing an article on official Nazi type standards in EYE 61 or 62 and the role of typographers in the party apparatus.) It addresses the totems and icons made holy by decrees and laws. It discusses who made them, where the symbolism came from, what purpose did it have, and what were the results. It talks about what seem like innocent “mascots” and “tokens” graphically designed as constant reminders of the respective ideological creed.

I must admit to a certain fetishism here. Over time I”ve obtained a lot of very rare material, which, as someone writing history I treasure because they are original documents that shed light on a dim past. But I also find them appealling because they are so damn charged. Its not that I relish engaging with demonic artifacts, but holding them in my hands forces me to experience what other might have experienced. These things - swastikas included - have power that goes beyond the rational.

BTW, about the cover of my book “The Swastika: A Symbol Beyond Redemption?” (the answer is YES!), I often tell this story: When I received the first copy from the publisher I took it to my son”s little league baseball game. While sitting in the stands for the game to start I read the freshly printed pages - but I took off the cover so no one would think I was a sympathizer. The cover is a Swastika cut in half (bottom on top of the page, and top on bottom). The designer, Mirko Ilic, wanted to show that even cut in half (or for that matter with only the colors alone) the symbol is incredibly charged. It was his statement that the Swastika was indeed unredeemable from its usurpted connotations given it by the Nazis. So, to answer the question, he not only read the book, he internalized and interpreted its content on the cover - brilliantly.

/Steve Heller 28/04/2006

Mea Culpa, I confess, I’ve been bad. I have knowingly designed for the rich, the powerful and the unconcerned. I’ve worked for drug companies trying to excuse harmful products, merchant banks trying to seduce other Big Capital and on one memorable occasion designed for The Government [The Employment Service. The week before the contract ended and I was made unemployed. Oh the irony!].
I make no excuses: I did it because they – The Man – took my skills seriously. And here is the point; they noticed me and in noticing me, took my work seriously. Those in charge understand the power of design to sway people’s hearts and minds. They have no compunction in twisting a message to engage with us, a lie told beautifully holds no fear for them.
Looking back from the safe distance of a job in education I wonder how I ever got involved with the ‘Big Bads’ in the first place.
Why do those in power want our skill, why are we so frequently complicit in promoting the status quo and yet so rarely involved in the fermenting of debate? Why are we all such easy lays for the man in the suit?
I could talk about the development of the Graphic lexicon from its twin strands of commercial expediency and social activism. I could carefully trace its roots from political activism [El Lizitsky, Neurath, Tschichold and the rest] turned commercial propagandist. But this would miss the point about our relationship to symbols of power. In deploying the visual language of power we are taking a short cut to everything that makes a bunch of status obsessed primates like the human race sit up and take notice.
There is the naked attraction of close proximity to power, a visceral frisson of standing with the gods. Visiting the boardroom of a major French merchant bank, with my ‘client suit’ on and looking down into The Tower of London, sucking in the gleam of the boardroom table with it’s embedded PCs, the deep leather chairs and free biscuits: it was all so beautiful, so far removed from my life in East London that I felt like I was trespassing in Valhalla. The piling of symbols of power, one on another, was exhilarating. For that moment I was one of them.
This feeling of power is the same one we feel as children when the playground bully needs us and is nice for a change. Associating with power is a potent drug. Try it once and you are hooked. This applies as truly to the graphic language we deploy as it does to commissions we accept. To dress our work in the clothes of the oppressor is take on the mantle of power [look at the work of Tom of Finland, Nazi to Gay Icon in a single bound].
As a young designer I tried many times to work for the Angels – the ecologists, the Libertarians, the wild haired loonies at the edge – without success. The Angels seem to hold a repugnance of the language of power, the glamour of strength. By contrast ‘The Powers that Be’ almost bit my hand off in their eagerness to play. They need us to make them relevant. We paint their smiles on: fresh every morning.
Secondly, they have resources. Until recently they held all of the means of contact with the public. If we spoke out of turn, working in ways that were antithetical to their aims, they would take ours toys away. Without the presses and cameras we could be as angry and edgy as we wanted – with our photocopiers and fly posting – and no one outside of Camden would ever notice.
Well it’s damn well not like that now. The time for excuses is over. New technology has put you in the next seat to your audience. We don’t need the man with the press or the studio anymore. Let him pay us for producing candy-coated symbols of need, fear and belonging all morning, so that we can speak with our own voice in the afternoon.

/Sim Downs 02/05/2006

“look at the work of Tom of Finland, Nazi to Gay Icon in a single bound…”

I haven’t heard that name in ages! And what memories that brings back …I was in my really early teenage years and had no idea about national socialism, gay iconography let alone illustraton and graphic design. My parents had this book with his images and I used to go and look at them surruptitiously. It wasn’t that they were sexualised - you saw that everywhere and my parents weren’t fussed about that - but what made me repelled and drawn in by them was that they were so powerful. Quite intimidatingly so - but exhilerating too. Isn’t it that powerful imagery endures… so much so that to read the words ‘Tom of Finland’ made me go ‘oh my god’ like an oldie and still blush like a teenager as the images returned. I won’t put a link, because they won’t necessarily have the same power for anyone else having read that - I don’t think powerful iconography is universal or implicit, but connection and context dependent.

/Elise Rhinegold 07/05/2006

You seem to be claiming that the move towards personal expression via design is the liberation of the designer. Yet, would that not make the designer an artist?

By design, we graphic or visual communication designers translate the focus and message of clients — entities — into language and symbols, using all visual elements at our disposal, that we are knowledgable of, in order to refine the message and essence of that entity. As their message and the service they provide is at the heart of their brand, we could say that it is our job to refine and solve one problem: Who is the client?

A designer is essentially a part of a larger social machine. Working with small- and medium-size companies, I see how often the personality of the proprietor(s) can get in the way of the business truly being “all that it can be.” As such, the business suffers at the will of the business owner.

In larger companies or in businesses willing to acknowledge the right of the customer in getting the most out of the business, this (in a perfect world) reduces the members of the company to their component roles: and the designer is the one that acts, in a way, as part of that company’s soul. It refines itself, questions and tries to perfect itself, and finds ways to express itself in a manner that gives it purpose.

Sorta like that quote from V for Vendetta, the idea thay you can kill a person, but you ideas are bullet-proof.

You may dismiss many companies nowadays for their lack of focus, but the more refined a company is in all aspects of how it handles and portrays itself to its customers, the more “bullet-proof” it becomes. It is no longer a group of people working together, it becomes more. Just as V arguably became more than just an ordinary man in the graphic novel/film.

A designer is part of that focus, no matter what sort of design s/he specialises in.

To turn that talent inward is to act artistically unto the world. It satiates the ego and is a form of personal expression. That is art. Not design.

/Fell 29/05/2006

I’m very curious about the statement with which you start the piece: “As we know, the very purpose of graphic design is shifting heavily towards a future defined as a vocal medium of personal expression and authorship.” As who knows? Is this a certainty? Indeed, is it really happening?

What does seem to be taking place is that the media and technologies of graphic communication are becoming more and more accessible: in Western societies more or less anyone who wants to can have a blog, a website, can put up their digital images on flikr, can make full colour posters and leaflets on their bubblejet printer. We could say that the very purpose of these media and technologies is to put publishing in the hands of the many - if we allow ourselves to anthropomorphize for a moment, and attribute purpose to something as abstract as media and technology.

This isn’t the same thing at all as “graphic design is shifting heavily towards a future defined as a vocal medium of personal expression and authorship”. Graphic design is a profession, a job, and I see no evidence of a business model that is going to make it possible for designers to support themselves from vocal acts of personal expression and authorship. If anything, this is a ’supply-side’ phenomenon - designers might feel they have a lot to say, but does anyone want to hear? I’m not even convinced that designers want to hear what other designers have to say, let alone anyone else. And of course the nature of all this new media and technologies is that while everyone can become a publisher, *no one* has to be a reader…

And this, for me, is what lies behind “designers consistently and obsessively invoking the visual political language systems of their former censors, their former oppressors, their former inhibitors” (if one wants to use strong - exaggerated - nouns like these to describe the feeding hands that graphic designers always seem to be biting…) Commerce pays for designers to pump out its messages, top-down, one to many, over-blown and not admitting of any hesitation - and the volume and frequency of these messages gets people to pay attention. The designers you’re referring to don’t seem to want to be part of a self-organising community of voices, celebrating a diversity of points of view and encouraging participation and sharing. They want to tell it how they see it - to be ‘brands’, celebrities, stars - and to get people to pay attention to them. British Arts School education has long encouraged this kind of thing, both by its encouragement of individualism and celebrity, and by the models it teaches
of ‘declamatory design’. I have to say I see this more as a historical legacy than as a portent of the future - there may be lots of people who want to do it, but who actually cares? Where is the market?

james

/james souttar 31/05/2006

In November 2009 we released the book ‘Limited Language: Rewriting Design: Responding to a feedback culture’ which re-engaged with this original post.

For more on the book as a whole: http://bit.ly/bookcomments

//

/Colin + Monika 15/11/2009

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