Jun
20
PART 2 Educating a client has always been the job of the graphic designer (so, for all you designers out there, you could probably add “communication teacher” to the list of titles already proposed.) Education justifies the cost of service while it sells the client on professional opinion. My understanding of the rebranding of designers is that a name change can better describe the evolution (more on this later) of the designer and may, hopefully, be commonly understood among designers and clients alike. As much as I would love for a new change in title to get around numerous explanations of why all the white space on the page shouldn’t be filled, and really, why the type should be set smaller is really just a joke. A designer can never do away with informing his client on how the design process works regardless of the name change. Nor will it guarantee a client’s willingness to accept what a designer’s job entails, and to hold that job into great esteem. Yes, in part, this is because the tech age has brought much accessibility, pirated software, and lots of so-called experts in the field. (Designers, I’m begging you, quit your whining! Every field in arts and culture has been impacted with all the new directors, illustrators, industrial designers, writers, authors, playwrights, poets, musicians and so on who can get their hands on Adobe Creative Suite, Pro Tools, and a whole other host of “icreate” software.) But the real reason, is actually much older than that; a problem that in all its stages and players has never experienced a resolution, even to this day. It’s what Saldanha briefly touches upon in his quandary in Evolution. It is the way in which the arts and artists are perceived by the general public, as a whole.
Saldanha begins his missive in Evolution with how designers arrived at design in the first place. “ ‘Design’ once replaced the term ‘art’. The term ‘design’ communicated that the work we did was more than artistic. Now it is time to replace ‘graphic’.” And therein lies the problem. The terminology designers are identified with now actually is just another way of reducing the very foundation that design, and all of the arts, arguably, is fundamentally based on. (Tsk, tsk, tsk. Certainly I thought designers were better at solving problems than with layering one on top of the other.) Guess what designers? Instead of using “design” to inflate importance and title an emerging role in the creative realm, you oversimplified what is at the very heart of good design, namely, art, and with it, reduced your worth along with your good name, minus the hourly wage and portfolio of handsome print advertising. (Good on you!) And really does a couple of bucks and a lot of magazine tear sheets garner bragging rights?
Be relieved. I won’t peg the issue of rebranding on designers alone. After all, replacing “art” to “design” was a very intuitive and natural transition. Anyone could have made the mistake (and many of us did, and still do.) Why? Because in reducing design, and taking the arts with it, simultaneously, there became a reduction of the sense of history between both disciplines. You see, “design”, by this definition, never cultivated its own story, but rather borrowed the long-established one of “Art.” “Design” did this, in truth, because it was a relatively new idea, and thus, never experienced the history “Art” does to this day. The ensuing result from a discipline without its own foundation, is that it can only support itself as an adjective and not as a period in time. That’s why you can have “art,” the description (artistic, artful, arty) and “Art,” the period and all its prefixes (Modern, Renaissance, Minimal and so on), but design? A good argument can be made that “design,” the adjective, exists for something more streamlined, or dare I say, more graphic. But, “Design,” the period? Really, is cuneiform and propaganda posters not a reach? And what about this business of sourcing design examples through countries, (Switzerland, Germany, Russia, Italy, and so on) instead, of ahem, movements?1 Hasn’t anyone wondered that maybe if the categories we have for “Design” (with a capital “D”) fit too perfectly with one another that there is a problem with what is seen as “design?” It’s obvious why “Art” has Basquiat and Koons; time has allowed for each movement to set the stage for the next phase, or story, in art and art practice. But is it so obvious why “design” (“D”?) has Beirut and Kunz? How has time (linear or not) impressed a platform to which another generation of designers respond to in so much, that in its shared aesthetic, can be collectively defined as a period, in “Design?” (That is to say, where if any, is the “democratization of designers to solve problems?”2) If “Design” doesn’t exist, how can the “designer”? The point in which I wish to resurrect is one I think that every designer out there is equipped to take-up with anyone who challenges your worth, hesitant to compensate your service, and undermines your professional opinion. To advocate this point however, designers will have to go back, instead of forward, in their thinking, to balk at the one thing continuously plaguing designers to this day: conformity. The bending-backward, or the high-gloss (UV-coated) term, branding, officially stops here. TO BE CONTINUED….
1 Referring to “Graphic Design, A Concise History” by Richard Hollis
2 Expression used by Yves Béhar in his interview with the Judith Thurman for the 2007 New Yorker Conference.
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