Jun
17
Designers worried about industry nomenclature? How about Babbitt?
Last year, an article in Design Edge (DE) really upset me. The article made a case (I’m over-simplifying here) that graphic designers are not artists. I wrote a big rant about my point of contention (oh yes they are, and why is their a need to distinguish that point anyway?) and thought to get it published, but I was too wordy for Design Edge, (understandably; my piece was about four times the word length of DE’s original article) and didn’t know where else to put my view into print.
So, for you lucky readers who have discovered my blog, I’m posting my response to what I thought was an absurd issue to be hung up on. I’m publishing the article in parts, as it is long, so as not to overwhelm the reader. (How I feel with online articles from The New Yorker.) I’d love to know your thoughts, after your review.
PART 1 Design Edge has proven to be a strong, forward-thinking publication containing interesting and vital industry news. However, the May/June 2007 issue, to me, had resorted to some backward beliefs I thought designers, and the design community at large, had abandoned. I was wrong. Editor Ann Meredith Brown’s letter, about designers and an identity crisis, and the following article by Winnie Czulinski, “Rebranding Designers,” is what changed my point of view. The article? Designers worried about what to call themselves (and thus how they will be received in society.) The debate, it seems, has attracted many new players in the design community, repeating longstanding arguments, and resulting in needless confusion and compromise. I hope in my response, to how rebranding will only degrade and isolate designers and the design industry, that I can also demonstrate, why this argument is an issue to begin with–and how by treating the problem–offer a solution that could satisfy, designers, and society as a whole.
Although I am not deeply familiar with Errol Saldanha’s point of view, as expressed in Czulinski’s article, I did research his site, www.beyondgraphic.org, to see where the foundation was in his argument about designers and name change. In an essay he had posted in 2003, Saldanha has broken up his reasoning on why “graphic designer” should be changed to “communication designer” in separate categories: Identity, Value, Respect, Ability, Evolution, and Action. The categories seem to encapsulate the many smaller issues embedded in graphic design and graphic designers, such as the designers growing responsibilities, ethics, services and the more hard to place concerns relating to the thought, education and skill involved in fulfilling design work. In fact, most of Czulinski’s article reflects that other organizations and individuals, for example, like AIGA and Professional Society of Communication Design Inc. President Catherine Morley, to some extent (so far as the article details) share Saldanha’s view. Czulinski, has done an excellent overview of the argument and call for change but has neglected the very thing I think that has allowed this argument to truly resurface: outside pressure to reinvent designers and the industry of design according to the market, namely clients, and the times, the Information Age.
Truthfully, Saldanha’s opinions are not based on the designers idea of what they should be, as he’d like us to believe. Rather, it is a reaction to on how designers are perceived outside of the community. Calling each other “designers,” in a professional community, is not a terrible thing. In fact, it’s an understanding of what the person does and the likelihood of how he goes about doing it. Even a designer’s “misunderstoodness” among other designers from the likes of those outside the protection of agency doors is understood. The name, among the design community, really, is fine. The matter is that like Saldanha, AIGA, Morley, and those professionals both working within and out of an agency is that they are having problems not only selling their services, but then having to justify it to their clients. TO BE CONTINUED….
IMAGE | Theo van Doesburg | Counter-Composition VI | 1925, oil on canvas, 50.0 x 50.0 cm | Tate Gallery, London.
Comments
More, please… I’ll be following this one. This same debate has been going on for some time in the craft world. “Craft”? “Art”? Am I also an “artist” if my medium is “craft”? And what exactly is the difference? (And on it goes…)
Johanna, I would love to know any reads in the craft world about this issue. I don’t know why there’s an insistence to, not so much break down the visual arts, but rather, isolate them from one another. Mind boggling. (Imagine the Renaissance without the crossover. Unbelievable!)