User:Ssstephen/Reading/scratching the surface
why would anyone want to read about graphic design? ... designers are usually too busy to spend time reading about their craft.
Even Aido knows we're all veeery busy. In this situation I am reading about graphic design in the early 21st century to understand where some of my own beliefs and those of my contemporaries came from. This book is a collection of essays about design written by a British man in the period of 1995–2013. What were our views ten or thirty years ago? Have they changed since then? Are there elements we have abandoned, which ones and why? How did we change our minds, did we admit we were wrong or make up a reason so it looks like it wasn't our fault? Are there any elements we've added in, did we do it reluctantly or excitedly? Are there any old dreams we still cling to?
graphic design is a secondary art form: it needs clients, content providers, and numerous other midwives before it can exist. It is an applied art, dependent on others for it's existence. And yet, in it's higher forms, it is my belief that it can be as potent and beguiling as any form of primary art.
Why are graphic designers concerned with this question of whether design is or is not art? I usually get the impression designers want to be artists and therefore want what they and their peers make to be works of art. Is the implication that design is too useful to be art? Too well paid? Not individualistic enough? What are the "higher forms" referred to in the quote above? There is a quote from Michael Rock (Fuck Content, 2009) that says stellar examples of design are those "that change the way we look at the world" for example Piet Zwart's catalogues for electrical cable. Rock also believes in the "designer as author":
we are insecure about the value of our work. We are envious of the power, social position and cachet that artists and authors seem to command. By declaring ourselves “designer/authors” we hope to garner similar respect. Our deep-seated anxiety has motivated a movement in design that values origination of content over manipulation of content.
Michael Rock (Fuck Content, 2009)
graphic design now occupies a position where it should be confident enough as a discipline to be both a vehicle for fulfilling social needs and for expressing independant thought. A discipline equal to art, not aspiring to art.
quoted from James Goggin in Iaspis forum on design and critical practice: the reader, Ericson M et al. 2009.
Why want art? Is Jamie implying design is usually only fulfilling social needs or only expressing independant thought? Which one? Does art always do both and design should too? Or design is capable of both and art is irrelevant? What does it mean to be equal to art, is it some way of measuring the moral or ethical value of the work? Is art the "most good" making?
I don't want to ban advertising
there really is a price to pay for creating the seductive tropes of modern commerce
there will always be work for designers who refuse to bother with the new ethical dimension in business... Not only has the world changed, but it will never be the way it was
Not sure what this piece about social design in 2009 is attempting to say. Social design is a financially profitable and maybe even necessary strategy. "Free market orthodoxy" is nearly dead and will never die. There is a "moral advantage in being ethical". What does it mean to gain a moral advantage through design practice? An example is given of wayfinding as social design as opposed to shampoo bottles, the subtext I assume is that consumerism is bad. But it's ok to keep designing shampoo labels and bottles and shampoo if they become "ethically sound and truthful". What is true shampoo?
I guess the term "social design" was younger in 2009 and less sure of its identity. A profit motivation was already clearly an element of engaging in work of this sort. The proximity of the financial crisis probably made the idea of wealth a little different to how it feels in 2023; maybe unachievable. Aido is clearly sceptical of the free market and banks, he mentions disillusionment, the environmental movement and cultural politics but doesn't tie these together with social design in a way that would be more obvious to us now.
the ongoing colonization of public space by media owners that has allowed radical poster art to be swept aside by acres of anodyne billboards
Mentioned in a review of Chaumont poster festival 2010.
most of the posters in the competition were advertising small cultural events
Design for culture is, or was at the time, "more art"? Is this because the designers have more opportunity to express individual ideas, or because the poster makes less money, or doesn't have to make as much sense? Is it a moral thing, are these posters less bad or even maybe design for good?
as I drooled over the technical and artistic verve on display [at the exhibition of russian constructivist posters], I couldn't help noticing that here too were the beginnings of graphic design as a tool of coercion and persuasion. Here was graphic design being used to sell something: in this case the benefits of collectivism and industrialisation
What was he drooling over, while having ethical concerns with the function of the posters? I would guess from the phrase "technical and artistic" it is related to some of the craft elements of design such as typography, print techniques, layout, etc being well executed. It may also relate to originality or creativity in composition, harmony, this is really speculative though I'm not sure. Also interesting that he said constructivists who were communists used design to "sell" collectivism and industrialisation. Design for AS is really tied up in a commercial capitalist system even when confronted with it's opposite.
"L'Oreal TV commercials" mentioned as modern propaganda, this guy really didn't like shampoo. What sort of haircut did Adrian Shaughnessy have in 2010? Was he possibly bald? I think not, I think he found both his hair and himself trapped in the lather of the shampoo industry.
When reviewing the AIGA Next conference in Denver Colorado, 2008, design critic Adrian Shaughnessy tells a joke:
The venue was shared with a beer festival, but it was easy to tell the designers from the beer fans. The beer fans were more serious.
This joke is funny because in the setup where it is easy to tell them apart, the reader should assume the beer fans are drunk and therefore raucous, misbehaving or maybe just having a lot of fun. But then he unexpectedly suggests that they were in fact "more serious" than the designers. This gives the reader a problem to address: is he claiming the designers were even more outrageous that what we assumed of the beer fans, or the beer fans were in fact taking their own conference seriously? As both seem unbelievable the true funniness of the joke hits home in it's implied it's meaning: graphic designers are boring as fuck.
the high number of women attending and presenting, it felt like roughly 50/50 with perhaps a small bias towards the female side... It gave the conference a well rounded wholeness that was refreshing.
In the previous paragraph to this quote there was a list of names of speakers, seven of which were male and four female. This is roughly 64/36. But I suppose either way the percentage comes to 100 which is well rounded and whole.
yet again, graphic design skills off into the corner wearing a cap with a D on it: D for dreadful
What is the role of shame in graphic design, or the role of dread? What was it about the ideas of John Duns Scotus that caused so much dread, what is the difference between graphic design and the universe?
[designers] have become accustomed to prospering by catering for the insatiable appetite for consumption that has characterised the past few decades.
In reference to what do we do now in 2012 post financial crash.
it appears that we are entering a 'post-graphic design' era: a time when pretty much anyone can make graphic design, and when, in a networked and 'template-for-everything' world, communication can be had more cheaply and more easily than at any time in history. In the post-graphic design era, the demand and need for routine graphic design skills will inevitably diminish.
Did this happen? Can we measure how many professional and amateur graphic designers there have been at different times in history? Was there ever a time without graphic design, will there ever be again? Is there graphic design now?
the Google homepage — a brutal display of functionality. Clearly, no graphic designer has been near it.
Is this a joke or serious? I think serious. AS is in that case implying that designers make things less functional or less brutal or maybe both.
we have reached a point, in the homogenised West, where good graphic design is everywhere. The battle has been won: every business knows it needs good design.
He's being tongue in cheek about this stuff and saying he likes the brutalism of the Google homepage, but acknowledging "good design" is more pervasive. Do people really believe this other design is better than what Google offered at the time?
design has become, more often than not, a badge of mediocrity. The old modernist dream of good design standing for rationality and human values has been flipped. Today, good design is little more than a cosmetic agent, an obscuring agent
Relation of cosmetic to cosmos and chaos. Design is the cosmos that obscures the natures of realities. Can the surface be scratched, is it just more surface underneath? I still have the belief that he had in 2006 that modernism is associated with rationality and this link should be or is broken. Where did we inherit that shared belief from?
the Google [logo] has become a little beacon of insurrection, a symbol of strength in a world in which graphic designers have become the agents of conformity.
If Google just switched back to their old logo, would everything be ok again?
our storehouse of typographic wisdom will be depleted if we lose our connection with typography's glorious past. Sometimes you have to go back to go forwards.
Do graphic designers see themselves as progressive? Is this sentiment conservative? There's a difference between preserving knowledge and being conservative generally, maybe I'm being too aggressive towards this guy. But "glorious past" is a bit much.
finding a definition of graphic design that express the fullness of the subject is becoming increasingly difficult... Graphic design becomes more fragmented and less homogenised.
2011.
design must embrace and adopt the culture of it's new environment and cast off notions of artistic grandeur
Quote from Frank Peters, chair of chartered society of designers, 2010.
the mainstream design industry shook off its 'notions of artistic grandeur' thirty years ago and became hyper-professionalised.
we will always need designers who can design shampoo bottles
Is it possible to design the perfect shampoo bottle? Have we reached the end of capitalism or will there always be more shampoo bottles to design? How many more shampoo bottles do you want from me before you're happy?
Again AS is saying there is a need for designers with 'green and ethical credentials' rather than 'estate agents'. Design in his opinion should work for a higher or different moral aim than profit alone.
designers are outsiders... for example the design education system sits apart from mainstream education... design is still not fully recognised as a 'grown up' profession by government and decision makers.
Are designers really outsiders? I certainly get the impression they would like to be, and it seems to be part of the myth. Re cc interview and the quote where someone detaches the ethical decisions of their clients from working for them as a designer. Does this narrative absolve the designers sins? Also being an outsider is cool and artsy of course.
Core77.com Don Norman design thinking a useful myth
https://www.core77.com/posts/16790/design-thinking-a-useful-myth-16790
design will remain parochial and tangential to cultural life until it develops, and surrounds itself with a robust and sophisticated critical discourse
design will remain parochial and tangential
the notion of restraint has always been a favourite battle cry for graphic designers. As designers, we extol the virtues of white space and we remind ourselves that 'less is more'.
Are graphic designers in a battle? With who? Maximalists?
graphic design is by it's nature almost entirely referential... Graphic design is never allowed to be itself.