From Graphic Design Theory, edited by Helen Armstrong

Funny photo of me giving my presentation last week.
That's my index finger, in case you were wondering.
Photo: Roger Crowley

Since I came home, I have been reading Graphic Design Theory: Readings from the field, edited by Helen Armstrong and Detail in Typography by Jost Hochuli. 

In Ellen Lupton's foreword to the Armstrong book, she states that it's important for designers to stop and ask "why?" rather than being continuously caught up in the "how" of our work. Design is social--yet anonymous, and visible--yet invisible, with its own subculture. These ideas capture part of why I'm pursuing this MFA. I want to get deep into the "why" (as well as some of the "how") and understand the invisible language of design.

Helen Armstrong brings up key questions of authorship, universality of design, and social responsibility. She says that early graphic designers bowed to the authorship of the machine. The Bauhaus valued collectivity and universality, with emotional neutrality. Swiss designers furthered the notions of objectivity and neutrality with their rational, systematic grids, encouraging the designer's anonymity and the withdrawal of personality. Postmodernism challenged this universality with the idea of diversity and shifts in meaning, leading to hybridity and the mixing of skills across disciplines.

Contemporary designers, influenced by the DIY movement, produce content and brand themselves as makers. This may lead to a level of collectiveness and sharing that swings the designer's pendulum back to anonymity--a manifestation of this shift is "prosumerism," (term coined by Dmitri Siegel), the act of producing and consuming at the same time (like when designers create templates for others' use).

With regard to social responsibility, Armstrong writes that technology has prompted a sharper critical voice. Tracing major movements in graphic design, she observes the way the artist's social voice is subsumed to forces such as the machine and the corporation, then re-emerges with greater self-expression and emotion. Designers of the 1990s rebelled against consumer culture (as seen in AdBusters), and in 2000, a group of prominent designers issued the First Things First manifesto, protesting the dominance of the advertising industry. The Avant-Garde of the new millenium is characterized by the dominance of the rational mind over individual desire, incorporating a strong environmental ethos and "models that produce 'global harmony and mutual benefit." (words of Kenya Hara of MUJI)

And that's all I'm going to say about that, for now.