“Art appears when what is made feels as if there is a profound misunderstanding at the heart of what it is, as if it were made with the wrong use in mind, or the wrong idea about what it is capable of, or simply the wrong set of assumptions about what it means to fully function in the world. A work works by not working at all. By not obeying the law of any system or authority external to the process of its own making, a work emphatically expresses its own right to exist for itself and in itself, and questions — by merely existing — the rule of law that works to bind all to semblance of the common good. Art is a lawless proposition.” Do you agree with Chan’s definition of art? Do you think this can be extended to design as well?
What strikes as interesting from Chan’s definition of art is that art works with no governance, except for its own self as art. Successful art is when art itself is “not working.” Art should deconstruct our daily commonalities, norms, conformities. The artist is working with inner laws or “inner tendencies,” where these constraints activate the core of an artist. Designers functions on a similar level; constraints for the designer are more unbinding than working with absolute freedom. In design, there is a particularity when designing with constraints, running on its own set of rules. In many ways, this is lawless in itself. For a designer to curate a specific set of “inner tendencies,” the design then leaves room for its audience or user to navigate within his or her own set of inner tendencies. This portrays a sense of democracy. However, whether the design is successful or unsuccessful, that is open to interpretation. In correlation to Paul’s definition and how it may extend to design, Jack Balkin and Dan Michaelson’s interview, Balkin concludes with, “So when you apprehend Google, the page, what you see before you is a clean page that appears to put you in the driver’s seat. It creates the image of your empowerment. It’s not just a question of incentives. It’s a question of what the Google page means to you.”
What is your personal working definition of “design”? (By “working” I mean for you currently and it is okay if this definition is aspirational.) You can reference the articles, and you can bring your own references if desired.
“There are a thousand mannerisms in typography that are as impudent and arbitrary as putting port in tumblers of red or green glass!”
“Now the man who first chose glass instead of clay or metal to hold his wine was a ‘modernist’ in the sense in which I am going to use that term. That is, the first thing he asked of his particular object was not ‘How should it look?’ but ‘What must it do?’ and to that extent all good typography is modernist.”
“Talking, broadcasting, writing and printing are all quite literally forms of thought transference, and it is the ability and eagerness to transfer and receive the contents of the mind that is almost alone responsible for human civilization.”
“The book typography has the job of erecting a window between the reader inside the room and that landscape which is the author’s words.”
“And if what I have said is true of book printing, even of the most exquisite limited editions, it is fifty-times more obvious in advertising, where the one and only justification for the pruchase of space is that you are conveying a message—that you are implanting a desire, straight into the mind of the reader.”
“Get attention as you will by your headline, and make any pretty type pictures you like if you are sure that the copy is useless as a means of selling goods; but if you are happy enough to have really good copy to work with, I beg you to remember that thousands of people pay hard-earned money for the privilege of reading quietly set book-pages, and that only your wildest ingenuity can stop people from reading a really interesting text.”
“We no longer have any desire for design that is driven by need.”
“Design is added value. En masse, designers throw themselves into desires instead of needs.”
“Design only generates longing. The problem is the problem of luxury.”
“Today, an ‘important graphic design’ is one generated by the designer himself, a commentary in the margins of visual culture….It always concerns designs that have removed themselves from the usual commission structure and its fixed role definitions. The designer does not solve the other person’s problems, but becomes him own author.”
“In contrast to the ‘total design’ of the past is now the dispirited mandate of the ‘look and feel’ - a term that catches designers in the web of endless manipulating of the dimensions of form, colour and feeling.”
“The true investment is the investment in design itself, as a discipline that conducts research and generates knowledge - knowledge that makes it possible to seriously participate in discussions that are not about design.”
“….’The first attitude involves a commitment to design as a problem-solving activity, capable of formulating, in physical terms, solutions to problems encountered in the natural and socio-cultural milieu. The opposite attitude, which we may call one of counter-design, choose instead to emphasize the need for a renewal of philosophical discourse and for social and political involvement as a way of bringing about structural changes in our society.’”
“The designer must use this freedom, for once, not to design something else, but to redesign himself.”
“Our deep-seated anxiety has motivated a movement in design that values origination of content over manipulation of content.”
“The misconception is that without deep content, design is reduced to pure style, a bag of dubious tricks. In graphic-design circles, form-follows-function is reconfigured as form-follows-content. If content is the source of form, always preceding it and imbuing it with meaning, form without content (as if that were even possible) is some kind of empty shell.”
“The apotheosis of this notion, repeated ad nauseam (still!), is Beatrice Warde’s famous Crystal Goblet metaphor, which asserts that design (the glass) should be a transparent vessel for content (the wine). Anyone who favored the ornate or the bejeweled was a knuckle-dragging oaf. Agitators on both sides of the ideological spectrum took up the debate: minimalists embraced it as a manifesto; maximalists decreed it as aesthetic fascism. Neither camp questioned the basic, implicit premise: it’s all about the wine.”
“Designers also trade in storytelling. The elements we must master are not the content narratives but the devices of the telling: typography, line, form, color, contrast, scale, weight. We speak through our assignment, literally between the lines.”
“Work must be saying something, which is different than being about something.”
“Because the nature of the designed object is limited, individual objects are rarely substantial enough to contain fully rendered ideas. Ideas develop over many projects, spanning years. Form itself is indexical. We are intimately, physically connected to the work we produce, and it is inevitable that our work bears our stamp….The way those projects are parsed out, disassembled, reorganized and rendered reveals a philosophy, an aesthetic position, an argument and a critique.”
“This deep connection to making also positions design in a modulating role between the use and the world. By manipulating form, design reshapes that essential relationship. Form is replaced by exchange. The things we make negotiate a relationship over which we have a profound control.”
“Our content is, perpetually, Design itself.”
There is a question that has been brooding, painful, and heavily loaded to digest and to place into layman terms: “What is graphic design?” And as I continue forging my path in the field of graphic design (or maybe its better described as ‘design’ in present times), I can refer to as many historical contexts to support my ideology/philosophy, but the answer to this question still remains undecipherable. Through my search for this answer, I seem to constantly find myself in one cornerstone: purpose or intent. Though at times, the process of determining a work’s purpose suddenly becomes a slew of questions, a million of hours expending on thinking, and research that never ceases to an end—where “thinking doesn’t mean doing.” Despite the existential turmoil, a designer’s intent seems to ring the loudest in regards to a work’s mortality.
These selected quotes are starting points for me to begin research (Velden), to sift through opinions, values, facts, or ideologies to discern transparencies (Warde), and to critically analyze and further these analyses visually and methodically (Rock), irregardless whether or not I concur with these selected testimonies. By doing so, this process wrings my intrinsic values, my “inner tendencies,” and my deepest interests to the foreground. I prefer to perceive design as a public service with the help of the art of storytelling. I do not perceive an either/or proposition. I idealize it to be carry some humanitarian assistance. It is an interweaving of these factors that may transcend and continue to allude to more questions for what’s to come in the future. Christoph Niemann mentioned on his episode on Netflix’s Abstract that “art and design is meant to re-tell a common experience from a different lenses.” I felt Niemann’s philosophy could be more unpacked by Rock’s specificity, “…perhaps the content of graphic design is exactly that: an evocation of “what it feels like to be living through the present moment of civilization,” with all its “commodities, banalities and vulgarities.”….Work must be saying something, which is different than being about something.”
Rock’s conclusion seems to embody what is most prevalent now to students and designers (or in particular to my philosophies): “The trick is to find ways to speak through treatment, via a range of rhetorical devices—from the written to the visual to the operational—to make those proclamations as poignant as possible, and to return consistently to central ideas, to re-examine and re-express. In this way we build a body of work, and from that body of work emerges a singular message, maybe even what it feels like to be living now.”