People talk of great, contemporary Graphic Designers…but where are they?

It would be easy to argue that graphic designers drag Graphic Design (as a loose ‘discipline’) down into continual disrepute. So eager to cynically appropriate the empty posturing of the ‘avant garde’, of ‘contemporary art’, or worse still the language of ‘now’ for the grim compromised reality of commercial ends. Daily they, or rather ‘we’, re-evaluate and redefine our own ‘ethical’ codes, capricious and mercenary to the last.

Does the very fact that the public can by and large read, if not speak, the language of graphic design (more so than any other visual language perhaps) not define its true and greater purpose? Should this language not be employed much more in the pursuit of social reform? Should it not be used to combat political / human wrongs? Should it not, very simply and en masse, start to say something of substance, rather than losing itself in its endless documentation of self referencing minutiae and trivia? Losing itself in an arena where ’subtle’ is all too often cynically employed to replace ’safe’, ‘mute’ and ‘impotent’.

People talk of great, contemporary Graphic Designers (the caps their own), but where are they? What are the criteria? I struggle to name one great contemporary graphic designer, and to do so, I have to look back sixty years or so to dada’ist John Heartfield and his Nazi counterparts, designers operating on a huge scale in a remarkable arena.

We are all aware of this world and its complex political / industrial situations. But rather than dress the following in unnecessary language that clouds the issue, I ask very plainly, does working with a large American corporation / client not make ‘one’ in some way a collaborator? Does the sole pursuit of cash not invalidate both everything we do and the endless conjecture that surrounds it? Is this ‘discipline’ really just about ‘pretty’ or ’slightly clever’? Is it by and large wallpaper with a sales agenda? Should we not be continually over-estimating what graphic design can achieve?

For today at least, for tomorrow I will doubtlessly deceive myself into believing that my own personal wealth somehow enriches this world, I would like to recognise the guilt that pervades our ‘bread and butter’ work to be very real. Are we are all guilty of one vast missed opportunity? Have we all bought just as heavily (… as heavily as our ‘unwitting’ public) into the empty branding rhetoric that we are fed, that we digest, dress down, discharge, and ultimately dissect.

I believe passionately in the potential of commercial work, but would the status we have bestowed upon it, and the critiques we generate, not ring a little more true if there were a common agenda for the employment of graphic designs ‘full’ potential?

Johnny Hardstaff

17 comments

I think that the Graphic Designer versus graphic designer nuance is very interesting because I see the term written in caps all the time and I always cringe…what sort of self-importance does this capital thinking suggest? That just to be a GD is a great thing…you can see some designers mentally insterting an ‘o’ between those two hallowed letters.

/jamie/G(o?)D 15/07/2005

The idea of placing hope in the ‘potential of commercial work’ is interesting. In the 19thC era of Philanthropy, we saw massive programmes for social reform come out of companies like Cadbury - who built the Bournville chocolate factory and urban housing of that name in Birmingham, London- and Port Sunlight in the North West of England that was built up around the Sunlight Soap factory. The latter is particularly interesting because the product’s branding and the town as a holistic live/work experiment were symbiotic. 19th C Philanthropy was of course not as ‘heroic’ as the companies’ literature or history mythically casts it, but it seems a world away from the frightening social and branding ‘imagineering’ (engineering) of Celebration, the town that Disney has built in America. I’m not sure that we should call the contemporary public (or people who have moved to Celebration) ‘unwitting’, but certainly the branding is ‘empty’ rhetoric. It’s not clear what residents should be celebrating…when they move in, they agree to abide by the Disney rules for there’s not town council, the city being run by a privately owned company. This is a town that has opted out of democracy, other than the free choice to move there, or move away. This is living by the rules of a branding manual.

We notice that the same designers and architects - who, at its inception, clamoured to create ‘landmark’ buildings, sculptures, park-scapes, signage and identity design - have not moved there. When the early 20th century garden cities were built in Britain, the one of the key figures behind them believed in their potential so much that he moved to one.

Part of the problem for designers today is that they don’t believe in their products (that they are ‘products’, not projects says it all) - and many may not have even experienced them. I met an architect who for 5 years had been working on a university in Dubai. She was going out there for the first time (!) the next week, when I said how fascinating for you to finally be allowed out there (she was low in the firm and so last in the pecking order) she said it was a bit of a fag, really. I felt quite depressed about the state of design for a while after this.

I think that it’s not only that the nature of capitalism has changed in the last hundred years that makes the ‘potential of commerce’ a very complex potential to unlock, but also that some of today’s designers seem so disengaged from their projects. The employer/client may not exactly foster that of course, as in my example above (had they sent her out in the first year, she may well have been able to generate more genuine empathy).

But, still, the design and visual identity of a new university has massive potential for re-invigorating the social/intellectual landscape…but only if you and your client believe in it passionately enough to make it more than empty rhetoric - or, make them more than the big, flashy, digitally sign-posted empty atriums of the newly re-branded universities, of which the London College of Communication is only one - which are the spatial expression of such empty branding rhetoric today.

/Katy 15/07/2005

‘Saying something of substance’ isn’t enough. The key has to be in the audience that it is addressed to, and more importantly the ability to affect change in/for them (these issues of audience and the sphere in which political action takes place dovetail into some of the ideas in John Russell’s last blog ‘Design Politics’).

Although visual communicators might be aware of whom their audience is, the discipline as a whole - or at least that of graphic design of old - is notoriously uninterested in measuring the impact of it’s work in tangible terms. If anything such a thing is sneered at as the province of market researchers and focus groups. But if we don’t take an interest in measuring tangible affects, we will remain obsessed with who did what, what they said…even if turned out to be ultimately mute/impotent.

For instance, Tibor Kalman’s colors magazine for Benetton is always cited as the Great Example of Graphic Design that was socially incisive blah blah blah. Or, at least he was/is a role model of the potential of the Great Contemporary Graphic Designer for having conceptualised Colors magazine at that time.

But who actually read that magazine? What tangible effect did it have in a way that was measurable in real social terms (rather than in terms of pushing forward the aesthetics/moral frameworks of graphic design’s potential?).

It isn’t conceivable - since people here seem to be making comparisons to architecture - that a housing project would only be measured in terms of it’s ‘ground breaking’ new concept without some attempt to actually gauge whether that effected change.

A few years ago a retail design consultancy that company that I was working for entered the industry Design Effectiveness awards. We won for this a Tesco’s food aisle initiative that involved having very large papier mâcher props relevant to each aisle lurking over them. It was abundantly clear to us at the time, as it will be to you now, that this won for no other reason than that Tesco’s market research on the user-response to their products was thorough. Basically, no one else had any research for their potentially much more interesting projects that could prove effectiveness.

Imagine the potential for visual communication if interest in audience went further than the buzz words of design being ‘inclusive’, ‘participatory’, interactive’, ‘user-friendly’…imagine if ‘design effectiveness’ was a constant judging criterion kept in mind for all visual communication - not just a ’special’ (i.e ghettoised) category in the wider design awards.

/Tony 19/07/2005

Graphic Designer’s always get it in the neck, but the amount of blogs on Limited Language showing interest in the notion of responsibility says a lot for them, don’ya think? It’s the fashion designers of today that I think should be examined. Fashion/design has nothing redeemable about it. I don’t see their industry wringing their hands and nervously fiddling with their ‘Make Poverty History’ wrist bands over this.

Graphic design’s greatest, latest weakness is that it increasingly panders to the big fashion clients because they are perceived as allowing the designer’s Authorship (cap A obligatory) to flourish freely. But at what real price?

/Ferne Williams 19/07/2005

Johnny Hardstaff’s comment that ’subtle’ is sometimes just another word for mute/impotent is a bit deceiving. Graphic Design shouts loud enough - but that’s all it does quite often. We need to change the programme not turn up the volume. The move to ‘Visual Communication’ might provide us with a much need prompt, for it implies an awareness about the issue of COMMUNICATING (which implies dialogue), rather than just speaking rhetorically - for instance the sloganeering identified in the Design Politics blog discussion and as exemplified by ‘Make Poverty History’. My first question to that would be ‘How so?’

/Katy 19/07/2005

Some interesting comments on the web site below about a need for politicization of design, for instance …”So at what point does sustainable design cease to be a “special issue”? When does it become incorporated as a fundamental part of what we do?”

Sustainability -which is to do with eco-awareness- seems to be one issue that needs consideration, but it seems to be only one part of the broader call for awareness that the slow design movement, talked about in the archives for June. The slow design idea also seems to be more radical than the normal issue-based form of political activism that we see in visual communication -here a ‘political issue’ becomes a hot topic of debate for a while and then dissolves from the limelight - issues that are infact intricately intertwined become atomised in this mode.

I’ve noticed that the eco-idea also sometimes seems to be marginalised into a one-dimensional ‘issue’ to shout about on occasion.

The slow movement might seem to be just another buzzword for the moment, it calls for the opposite of that kind of atomised politicisation - “The process of slow design is comprehensive, holistic, inclusive, reflective and considered”…so while it embraces sustainability, it also sees this as interlinked with the need for design to celebrate slowness, diversity and pluralism…encouraging a long view…dealing with the ‘continuous present’ (a term coined in the 1950s by Bruce Goff, the American architect who noted that history is past and the future hasn’t arrived but that the ‘continuous present’ is always with us).

/Tony 21/07/2005

Looking at the posts over the last couple of weeks the position of politics or social awareness is clearly a concern for many practitioners in [graphic] design – the role of art somehow seems less complicated – the engagement between art and commerce is quiet often second hand, detached – mediated through galleries and the machinery of a historically sophisticated art world. The position of the Graphic Designer, as this post points out, is a more demarcated role, with a literal link with Commerce (quiet often seen with negative connotations) - part of being involved with a craft is getting your hands dirty and for graphic design this now comes from the bowels of commerce rather than the platens of the printing press .

Johnny Hardstaffs points to the ubiquity of graphic language and its potential use for the social good but, it could be argued it is art which defines the [visual] language and design is always a vernacular of it(pop art had little to do with popular culture and everything to do with art! ). It is in this vernacular that Graphic Designers and graphic design operate. Given this position, political action is limited but not impossible.

I think designers, often as cooperatives, have a political, or at least a social role, in popping the balloon of so much of today’s visual hyperbole – a visual rhetoric once masked by the term hyper-realty, simulacrum etc has today, in the West, lost much of its power of persuasion. But by it’s dominance and pure volume has some kind of influence, NOT a belief system, in our day to day lives – it is like being in the sun all day, when you come inside everything has a peculiar hue but you still recognise everything for what it is – often it is cultural jamming which acts as a pin against this inflated presence . A good example of this is the project by the cooperative ‘red antenna’ in their ‘project moustache’ they take the lead from Duchamp’s Dadaist attack on art by refocusing the hair-lines upon contemporary visual culture – lead by, but not exclusive to, advertising.

I am well aware that cultural jamming is passé but this needs to be reconsidered – just as Heartfield was best equipped to turn the dadaist aesthetic against the considerable power of Hitler’s advertising/propaganda - often by simply attacking it in its own visual language.

A good essay on the more traditional relationship between politics and graphic design is Graphic Design as Weapon of Territorial Terror by Steven McCarthy posted on the Speak Up site… The dual role of graphic design can seen in its use by, and against, the Black Panther Movement – see the work of Emory Douglas and The Black Panther Newspaper here and the notorious FBI Black Panther coloring book here…

/Paul D 22/07/2005

“I live in a world in which I’m forgetting how to be intuitive, instinctive, artistic or natural…” forgetting the problematics of the terms artistic and natural, this quote from Neville Brody in some way captures the dilemma of design and (social) politics which are being grappled with here – I think the john Russell post made it clear that naming a font after a bomb, or signing a declaration to be ‘good’ – is not being political. At best it is a kind of liberal exhibitionism ‘ look I am wearing today’s badge – I am on your side’

I think the position of designer and client, unless the client is a complete shit, needs to be forgotten – we can never move on if we always saddle ourselves with the albatross of capitalism – we (in the west) live in a capitalist system – get over it…

But, engaging people with a more tactile intuitive, instinctive world, by not following the simplistic interpretation of Marxism and a us and them stance, would seem to me to be a valuable socio-political act on behalf of design. Ok, so I am scratching my head to think of an example – but it is out there…