Graphic Design Theory?Graphic design has often looked to architecture as an
intellectual model. We long to infuse our work with the same kind
of dense theoretical knowledge and the same kind of broad ranging,
legendary critiques. But we're not architects. We're graphic
designers. Our role is less defined. We cross between print and
web, 2-D and 3-D. Our work is easier to produce and more ephemeral.
This fluidity, coupled with a discipline-wide pragmatic streak,
makes it difficult to establish a defined body of graphic design
theory.
Or does it?
Graphic designers have written about the ideas behind their work
since the inception of the profession. Consider F. T. Marinetti,
László Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer, Josef Müller-Brockman, Karl
Gerstner, Katherine McCoy, Jan van Toorn and, more recently,
Jessica Helfand, Dmitri Siegel and Kenya Hara. This body of work is
small compared to architecture and fine arts, but it is passionate
and smart.
Texts about graphic design fall under different categories of
“theory.” Some analyze the process of making. Think Bauhaus
experiments, methodologies that fall under the umbrella of
International Typographic Style, and contemporary explorations
labeled “design research.” Some texts examine the ideas behind the
visual work. Authors “read” designs or design texts and put them
into a wider historical/cultural context. And some apply outside
theoretical discourses to the field of graphic
design—deconstruction, semiotics, gender studies. Many seminal
texts, of course, blur such categorizations.
Through my research I work to emphasize the value of our own
theoretical base and inspire others to read and write more. Working
on a recent book project got me thinking about a range of issues
that face the profession today. Theory can help us address
them.
(Clockwise from left): Katherine McCoy's “See Read”
poster for Cranbrook Graduate Design, 1989, a photographic collage
of recent graduate student work overlaid by a list of possibly
opposing design values and a diagram of communication theories—a
model for how deconstruction and structuralist/poststructuralist
literary theories might be applied to graphic design's visual and
verbal processes; a spread from László Moholy-Nagy's
Malerei, Photographie, Film (Painting, Photography, Film), 1925;
and a spread from Graphic Design: The New Basics (New York:
Princeton Architectural Press, 2008), written and designed by
Ellen Lupton and Jennifer Cole Phillips, in which Lupton
explores emerging universals within the practice of graphic design,
including newly relevant concepts like transparency and
layering.
Design increasingly lives in the actions of its users
Think Flickr, Facebook, Etsy, Lulu, Threadless and the multitude
of blogs. Users approach software and the web with the expectation
of filling in their own content and shaping their own visual
identities—often with guidance from prepackaged forms. Dmitri
Siegel calls this phenomenon
“the
templated mind.” Designers are grappling with their own place
in this DIY phenomenon. Creativity is no longer the sole territory
of a separate “creative class.” Designers can lead this new
participatory culture by developing frameworks that enable others
to create; doing so, however, means allowing our once-specialized
skills to become more widespread and accessible. That transfer of
knowledge is threatening to some, liberating to others.
Technology alters our aesthetics even as we struggle against
it
Designers everywhere strive to create unique visual voices
despite the prevalence of stock photography and the monolithic hold
of Adobe Creative Suite. Simultaneously,
as noted by design and
media critic Lev Manovich, specific techniques, artistic
languages, and vocabularies previously isolated within individual
professions are being imported and exported across software
applications and professions. This new common language of hybridity
and “remixability,” through which most visual artists now work, is
unlike anything seen before. Technology has irreversibly changed
our sense of aesthetics, giving us both more power and less.
We should encourage collaboration and communal experience
What's the good of multi-touch technology if we don't want to
sit down together? Collaboration and community fuel world-changing
design solutions. Despite our connections online, many people are
experiencing a growing sense of personal isolation. How can we, as
designers, combat that isolation with projects that foster
community? Media activist Kalle Lasn has warned designers: “We have
lost our plot. Our story line. We have lost our soul.” Producing
work that fosters real connections may be one way of getting that
soul back.
We all write more today than we did 15 years ago
Blogs, emails, Twitter-we communicate with many more people
through text than through speech. If grammar imparts order and
structure to our thoughts, then this increase in writing brings
value to our society and our discipline. Design authorship, an
issue debated by influential figures like Michael Rock, Ellen
Lupton and Jessica Helfand over the course of the last decade,
foregrounded the active relationship between text and image and
between a discipline and its discourse. The expansion of written
communication makes possible thoughtful contributions to the larger
discourse of design by a wider slice of the graphic design
population.
The central metaphor of our current society is the network
Even if we don't all understand the computer codes that run the
back end of our digital age, we can comprehend the networked
structure of our day and design to meet it. Avant-garde artists at
the beginning of the last century, including F. T. Marinetti,
László Moholy-Nagy and Aleksandr Rodchenko, were adept at
activating their own networks: newspapers, magazines, lectures and
written correspondence. Recently, I heard lectures by Emily
Pilloton of
Project H and
Cameron Sinclair of
Architecture for
Humanity, two young designers who are creating opportunities,
locally and around the world, for designers to improve basic human
living conditions. The connectivity of the web is critical to their
success. Efficient networks for spreading change and prosperity are
already in place. We just have to grasp them.
Designers in the early 20th century rose to the challenges of
their societies. We too can take on the complexities of our time,
the rising millennium. Delving into our theoretical base equips us
to address critical material problems in the world and our
discipline.
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