The Designer Is Dead, Long Live the Designer
Written by Roger Whitehouse
Originally published in Communication Arts July Illustration Annual 2002
Many years ago in a city far, far away-London, actually, in the winter of 1959-I made my way home from my studio at the Architectural Association in Bedford Square where I had worked late into the night on a student project. While passing through the swirling fog into Soho Square, past doorways where leather-miniskirted ladies dispensed sultry winks and double-entendred invitations, my attention was drawn to a basement store. Two young men stood in an isolated pool of light animatedly discussing a pale blue sheet of paper that was covered with row after row of characters from the alphabet. My attention was riveted. In those days, the sight of typographic characters liberated from the forbidden sanctuary of the printshop was even more tempting than Soho's more lascivious delights.
I discovered that these two men, Fred Mackenzie and Di Davies, (not mentioned in any formal histories) held in their hands one of the apocalyptic developments that would play its part in the transformation of the practice of graphic design. They had just invented and patented Letraset, in those days a quaint process which involved characters screened onto a glue-covered sheet of paper creating transfers which when cut out, dropped into warm water, and placed on the under surface of a tiny silk screen, could be positioned over a piece of artwork to be popped down into place with the poke of a finger. Anyone's finger.
In the months to come, the innocent looking sheets began to appear first in design studios and then, horror of horrors, as the process evolved into the more familiar rub-down format, on the desks of secretaries and clerks and political activists and pensioners and schoolchildren and even the ladies in Soho Square. The more exotic the typeface (and this was the dawn of the 1960s), the more delighted these new typographers became. Spacing was totally random, and the fashion of aligning the descenders of "g"s and "y"s and so on, on the same wavering approximation of a baseline on which the rest of the characters sat, became habitual. As the shredded sheets became depleted of certain characters, first inverted "d"s replaced "p"s, then capitals replaced lower case letters in the middle of words, and last and best of all, letters of different sizes from entirely different alphabets were imported to finish the job off.
Graphic designers everywhere tut-tutted and raised their eyebrows in superior disdain, but very few suspected that what they were observing were the seeds of their downfall. For years they had been the guardians of a secret realm; they were among the few cognoscenti who possessed the magic to turn handwritten words or typewritten manuscript into actual printed type. And it was this miraculous metamorphosis, revered as though it were akin to alchemy, that most mystified and impressed clients-together with all the tangential references to kerning, ligatures, picas and the rest of the arcane gobbledegook which enabled designers to sustain their mystique. But now the genie was squeezing out of the bottle. Typography was becoming a democratic endeavor, available for any Tom, Dick or Harriet to explore.
It turned out not to be such a severe threat at the time. After an initial flirtation with a sheet of rub-down Blippo Bold, most of these new typographers got bored and decided to let the graphic designers and printers wrestle with the stuff instead. But a subtle change was in fact taking place. A few of these new interlopers who were Êsthetically astute enough began to make some graphic headway, unhindered by the conventions that restrained the traditional typographers, and together with the new liberation of the emerging '60s, began to create funky mischievous graphics of varying levels of sophistication which were photocopied and sent through the mail or taped to light poles and vacant storefronts everywhere.
This might all have passed unnoticed or at least have had little influence on the natural order of things were it not for the widespread arrival of offset lithography. In the very early twentieth century, those graphic designers who wanted to shake things up a bit, such as the Futurists, were still hamstrung by having to commandeer a printshop, and, with the owner presumably gagged and tied to a stool, jam type of all sizes at wacky angles into a form to be printed in the conventional manner, resulting in something which-while absolutely wonderful-strongly resembled a dysfunctional type specimen book. However, these early typographic revolutionaries were kept safely under control by the sheer complications involved-which remained beyond the patience of most decent God-fearing folk. It was not until offset lithography came to flower in the post-war years, that this kind of experimentation became not only possible, but a breeze, by making feasible the printing of anything that could be drawn or pasted together on a sheet of paper.
But still, the potential of this new process to fully democratize graphic design was harnessed by the difficulties presented by the need for generating proper type in quantity. While headlines and even snappy little ads or flyers could be and often were put together by the use of presstype, body copy still had to be created by a strange hybrid process where it was set in metal, and final galleys or "repros" were pasted down onto boards to create mechanicals to be photographed to create plates for the offset presses. Thus, the sacred domain of designers and typographers still remained reasonably impregnable.
In the late 1980s the personal computer made its appearance. This time, we were totally fooled, welcoming this Trojan Horse with innocent delight. And why not? It made life much easier for us. We could actually, with our fancy new PostScript Laserwriters, generate type directly without the messy back and forth of galleys covered with proofreaders' marks and "move this to the right 1/100th em," and "enlarge all punctuation 12.5%." (I still hold the record for most author's alterations on a single project according to Tom Fischer of Typogram in New York, one of whose markup-infested galleys are still displayed in a frame in our office.)Best of all, using computers really impressed clients then and if anything, boosted our mystique several notches. This was not surprising, as coaxing moderately respectable type from an early Macintosh (in one of all of ten fonts) demanded a skill level possessed only by the likes of Wernher von Braun.
Sadly, we were all too busy playing with our new toys to notice that when Apple described the Macintosh as a "computer for the rest of us," they knew what they were talking about. In very short order "the rest of us"-specifically our clients-also had snazzy new computers (albeit made by another upstart company) that could also take that page of typewritten manuscript and pop it out in 12-point Helvetica. The writing was now on the wall-where it could easily be photographed and printed by offset lithography. The pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place and the final storming of our bastion began.
We all know that graphic design is much more than the ability to generate information in the form of nicely formatted typography. But that other stuff that we do, the important stuff-like having good concepts, turning ideas and information into something that sings, and employing a subtler visual rhetoric than gold foil-stamped starbursts, is not the first thing our clients worry about in a panic when they wake up at two o-clock in the morning. Instead, they go downstairs for a belt of Scotch, and in an insomniac furor, turn on their PCs, and have a go at the brochure that they had intended calling us about in the morning-just to see what all those words might actually look like in Times Roman. Then they add a picture or two, and try the odd rule here and there, and suddenly it begins to fit all the parameters that, in their minds, are required of an actual brochure. It may well be that in the clear light of dawn they have second thoughts and call us anyway, but all they need us to do now is just to "tidy it up a bit," and how much skill, fee or professional respect could that possibly demand?
If this assault on our prestige and pride were not bad enough, another change in public taste was underway that was not about to help our case. As typography slipped out of our exclusive control, liberties equal to those that Letraset had made possible twenty years before began to emerge and blossom. This time a new inelegance materialized of constantly varying type sizes, weights, styles and line lengths, with no apparent relationship to content, all peppered with dingbats and electronic clip art. The arrival of the World Wide Web added glows, starfields and stuttering animation to all this, resulting in a wild ride into a world of visual chaos that would have made even a Futurist wince. While some clients may have noticed this was not quite as classy as the sort of thing Paul Rand or Brad Thompson used to do, most of the public have simply accepted it as the current yardstick of graphic excellence. Most significantly, the number of people who can nowadays discern the difference between the good, the bad, and the downright ugly is becoming depressingly small.
Thus, in the short span of a quarter of a century, not only what we do but how we do it has lost its lustre in the public eye. Not only are we in the process of losing our reputation as visionaries and artists, but we are in danger of accepting this new role and becoming simply a bunch of visual mechanics.
Part and parcel with this is a change in how we are relating to each other as professionals. Twenty-five years ago, when I defected from architecture into graphic design, it was a very different profession. I was introduced to, and welcomed by, a world of legendary individuals like Massimo and Lela Vignelli, Tom Geismar and Ivan Chermayeff, and Colin Forbes, all virtuosos of both their art and their craft. I will never forget one afternoon when as a relative newcomer, I dropped in on Massimo unannounced. While I am sure he was desperately busy, he graciously took me by the arm and with his usual charm gave me a guided tour around his entire studio, storerooms included. These designers were passionate about what they did and how they did it, and were exceptionally generous in sharing what they knew, even their advice on business practices, with aspiring newcomers. At board meetings of AIGA, of which I became a director, I was aware of a rich and established culture of dedicated individuals for whom design was a lifelong passion and where all of us felt we were in the vanguard of important change. On a conscious and unconscious level it was a political as well as a creative culture, dedicated to making the world more fun, more thoughtful and more decent.
Today, the demise of the designer as an expert and visionary-because of the cheap availability of what now passes for design-has seen the introduction of a bottom line-oriented profession where designers are becoming more focused on being pragmatic businesspeople than on being idealists. I mourn the passing of the established culture-and while I see it as just the inevitable collateral damage of progress, something which we must react and respond to-we face an urgent need to redirect our profession and evolve values which work in the context of current realities.
Sadly, the effect on some design firms, particularly the larger and more prominent ones, is that in an attempt to keep the company coffers full (or to stop them emptying any further), they appear to be rapidly losing touch with the inspiration that built their reputations, becoming instead caught up in the Faustian desperation of having to concentrate on feeding the beast they have sold their souls to. The old professional camaraderie is becoming anathema to their need to compete for both projects and staff with designers who were once their creative and professional allies.
The decay of these professional values is a serious problem because it is very important that as a profession we make the public aware of the value of design, and it is only as an orchestrated group that we can do this. Our professional institutions still concentrate on preaching to the choir, with pat-ourselves-on-the-back design shows rather than promoting serious discourse about our professional predicament. A colleague recently suggested that the reason we continually give ourselves awards is because no one else will (this, and the fact that the design institutions have learned that the way to our pocketbooks is through our egos). It is not so much that the design shows are bad, they are just irrelevant.
Educating our clients will not be easy. To do so, we must first thoroughly understand what it is that we do, and what the specific values of that are, and to whom, and in what way. Unfortunately, most designers have little if any concern with this, being obsessed with "look how clever I am" stuff. We must also be wary. While the need to educate our clients is important, we must avoid the impulse to do so in an attempt to turn back the clock to the good old days. If clients no longer value us very much, it is neither a moral issue or necessarily a deficiency on their part. It is an inevitability brought about by a whole confluence of reasons, many of which we must bear the responsibility for. We must primarily think of this as our "problem," not theirs. Designer, heal thyself. After we have successfully done that, prescribing a stiff remedy for our clients may then have some validity.
What of the future? Almost certainly even more of the same. The rapid development of direct-to-plate digital printing and high-speed inkjet presses, where ever smaller runs in full color can be generated directly from anyone's computer files at ever decreasing cost, have eliminated the need for the prep work that had become the printer's stock-in-trade. The new technologies are migrating to ever smaller desktop units where both printer and printshop alike will be rendered entirely redundant for those projects which do not involve complex binding or other manufacturing demands, and it may not be long before some ingenious individual domesticates even this last preserve of their trade. Add to this the rapidly developing effectiveness of the Web to accomplish sales, distribution and fulfillment, and it is easy to see that any individual with the right entrepreneurial spirit can create an entire publishing empire from their bedroom (although they may not get much sleep).
Not that it should make us feel any better, but the same is true of the other creative professions. Anyone with a new iMac, a video camera, a copy of iMovie and the talent, can produce a broadcastable movie from start to finish, including burning and labeling the DVD, for an equipment cost of less than $3,000. For $10,000 they can do the same thing of fairly decent broadcast quality. And music, photography and most of the other "media"-based arts have seen similar reshaping of their professional environments.
The first thing graphic designers are challenged to do is to distinguish themselves again, perhaps by developing new Êsthetics based more upon the raw energy of concept and message, than just relying on elegantly kerned type. While energy of concept and message were what our mentors, like Massimo, were very adept at in a polite and polished way, whippersnapper designers, like Stefan Sagmeister, have shown us how this can work in a more visceral way, in his case with arresting and often disturbing images (frequently miscellaneous body parts) surrounded by handwritten copy. You can still have that elegant Vignelli kerning if you want to, but take a look at the latest version of Adobe InDesign and while you drool on the keyboard watch it, with none of your hard-earned expertise, take a page of type, re-rag it from top to bottom, apply optical kerning, hang any punctuation and automatically insert ligatures-probably even better than you can.
Beyond all this is the further challenge to take control of the projects we work on by becoming more entrepreneurial and instead of giving our ideas away for the financial benefit of others, to retain control and ownership of what we do and exploit and earn from it directly. In a climate where we are being continually devalued, taking charge of our own fate also has the potential to garner back some of the stature and respect we are losing-not just to soothe bruised egos, but to enjoy the freedom to be heard and express ourselves.
Tibor Kalman was a notable pioneer of both of these avenues of opportunity. I remember several years ago being with Tibor at a very exclusive club on Manhattan's Upper East Side where we had been invited to a rather posh fundraiser. On being confronted with a large chafing dish full of french fries, he stuffed handfuls of them into every pocket. He then proceeded around the room and after insinuating himself into each little bejeweled and evening-gowned huddle of guests, suddenly pulled fries out of one pocket or another and proffered them with such determined innocence that the amazed guests took them and munched away in stunned silence. This was a perfect metaphor for what Tibor did with design, ignoring the hygiene of elegant typography and relying instead on the raw energy of concept. Of course it was not that what his firm M&Co ended up with was in any way design-deficient, it just invented its own laws of Êsthetics as it went along. This, plus the utter conviction of everything it did was the key to its success. The other path that is open to us is that of design entrepreneur, also well trodden by Tibor, who like some magician at a kids' party, pulled a seemingly inexhaustible progression of watches and paperweights and clocks, and all kinds of neat stuff that he had designed and had manufactured, out of thin air.
The challenge now to the profession, particularly for the schools, is to develop a generation of designers more heavily focused on taking the lead in the development of projects rather than on just providing design services; designers who have a first-class cultural education, are savvy, and are entrepreneurial; more able to develop concepts for products for which there is a market, and to make their money by holding on to the rights of those properties. There will still be a decent market for service design, particularly for higher end corporate and institutional print and Web work, but the level of taste is diminishing, and designers are being perceived as much lesser players and will have much less control than they may be comfortable with. Within conventional design, the new technologies will hopefully give designers more time to focus on a more unique and forceful Êsthetic than can simply be achieved by activating a pull-down menu.
While traditional skills will still be needed, it is the design entrepreneur that will have the best chance of using them to create beautifully-produced and designed products. In the current climate clients are becoming less and less interested in paying for good design. It is only when the designer is determining how the resources will be spent that design will be properly prioritized. Maybe in time we may even be able to shake off the current execrable level of accepted graphic taste from our boots and raise everyone's expectations to demand good design as a matter of course. On a recent trip, I picked up a copy of Steve Martin's novella Shopgirl at the airport. This beautifully written, designed and produced little trade paperback (not some extravagantly-priced specialist art publication) was such a pleasure to look at, hold and read, that it restored my faith that one day little gems like this may become the norm rather than the very rare exception. But it may well be that we, the designers, are the ones that will need to be in the driving seat. We have the talent, we have the skills, (maybe we will have to steal the money), what we need now is the will to bury the traditional ways in which we have operated, and to reinvent ourselves and reestablish our professional values.
The designer is dead. Long live the designer.
Editor's note: Many of the finest Design Issues essays are available in the book of the same name which has been compiled by DK Holland, the editor of this column, and co-published by Communication Arts and Allworth Press. To purchase the book, visit www.allworth.com.
Originally published in Communication Arts July Illustration Annual 2002
Many years ago in a city far, far away-London, actually, in the winter of 1959-I made my way home from my studio at the Architectural Association in Bedford Square where I had worked late into the night on a student project. While passing through the swirling fog into Soho Square, past doorways where leather-miniskirted ladies dispensed sultry winks and double-entendred invitations, my attention was drawn to a basement store. Two young men stood in an isolated pool of light animatedly discussing a pale blue sheet of paper that was covered with row after row of characters from the alphabet. My attention was riveted. In those days, the sight of typographic characters liberated from the forbidden sanctuary of the printshop was even more tempting than Soho's more lascivious delights.
I discovered that these two men, Fred Mackenzie and Di Davies, (not mentioned in any formal histories) held in their hands one of the apocalyptic developments that would play its part in the transformation of the practice of graphic design. They had just invented and patented Letraset, in those days a quaint process which involved characters screened onto a glue-covered sheet of paper creating transfers which when cut out, dropped into warm water, and placed on the under surface of a tiny silk screen, could be positioned over a piece of artwork to be popped down into place with the poke of a finger. Anyone's finger.
In the months to come, the innocent looking sheets began to appear first in design studios and then, horror of horrors, as the process evolved into the more familiar rub-down format, on the desks of secretaries and clerks and political activists and pensioners and schoolchildren and even the ladies in Soho Square. The more exotic the typeface (and this was the dawn of the 1960s), the more delighted these new typographers became. Spacing was totally random, and the fashion of aligning the descenders of "g"s and "y"s and so on, on the same wavering approximation of a baseline on which the rest of the characters sat, became habitual. As the shredded sheets became depleted of certain characters, first inverted "d"s replaced "p"s, then capitals replaced lower case letters in the middle of words, and last and best of all, letters of different sizes from entirely different alphabets were imported to finish the job off.
Graphic designers everywhere tut-tutted and raised their eyebrows in superior disdain, but very few suspected that what they were observing were the seeds of their downfall. For years they had been the guardians of a secret realm; they were among the few cognoscenti who possessed the magic to turn handwritten words or typewritten manuscript into actual printed type. And it was this miraculous metamorphosis, revered as though it were akin to alchemy, that most mystified and impressed clients-together with all the tangential references to kerning, ligatures, picas and the rest of the arcane gobbledegook which enabled designers to sustain their mystique. But now the genie was squeezing out of the bottle. Typography was becoming a democratic endeavor, available for any Tom, Dick or Harriet to explore.
It turned out not to be such a severe threat at the time. After an initial flirtation with a sheet of rub-down Blippo Bold, most of these new typographers got bored and decided to let the graphic designers and printers wrestle with the stuff instead. But a subtle change was in fact taking place. A few of these new interlopers who were Êsthetically astute enough began to make some graphic headway, unhindered by the conventions that restrained the traditional typographers, and together with the new liberation of the emerging '60s, began to create funky mischievous graphics of varying levels of sophistication which were photocopied and sent through the mail or taped to light poles and vacant storefronts everywhere.
This might all have passed unnoticed or at least have had little influence on the natural order of things were it not for the widespread arrival of offset lithography. In the very early twentieth century, those graphic designers who wanted to shake things up a bit, such as the Futurists, were still hamstrung by having to commandeer a printshop, and, with the owner presumably gagged and tied to a stool, jam type of all sizes at wacky angles into a form to be printed in the conventional manner, resulting in something which-while absolutely wonderful-strongly resembled a dysfunctional type specimen book. However, these early typographic revolutionaries were kept safely under control by the sheer complications involved-which remained beyond the patience of most decent God-fearing folk. It was not until offset lithography came to flower in the post-war years, that this kind of experimentation became not only possible, but a breeze, by making feasible the printing of anything that could be drawn or pasted together on a sheet of paper.
But still, the potential of this new process to fully democratize graphic design was harnessed by the difficulties presented by the need for generating proper type in quantity. While headlines and even snappy little ads or flyers could be and often were put together by the use of presstype, body copy still had to be created by a strange hybrid process where it was set in metal, and final galleys or "repros" were pasted down onto boards to create mechanicals to be photographed to create plates for the offset presses. Thus, the sacred domain of designers and typographers still remained reasonably impregnable.
In the late 1980s the personal computer made its appearance. This time, we were totally fooled, welcoming this Trojan Horse with innocent delight. And why not? It made life much easier for us. We could actually, with our fancy new PostScript Laserwriters, generate type directly without the messy back and forth of galleys covered with proofreaders' marks and "move this to the right 1/100th em," and "enlarge all punctuation 12.5%." (I still hold the record for most author's alterations on a single project according to Tom Fischer of Typogram in New York, one of whose markup-infested galleys are still displayed in a frame in our office.)Best of all, using computers really impressed clients then and if anything, boosted our mystique several notches. This was not surprising, as coaxing moderately respectable type from an early Macintosh (in one of all of ten fonts) demanded a skill level possessed only by the likes of Wernher von Braun.
Sadly, we were all too busy playing with our new toys to notice that when Apple described the Macintosh as a "computer for the rest of us," they knew what they were talking about. In very short order "the rest of us"-specifically our clients-also had snazzy new computers (albeit made by another upstart company) that could also take that page of typewritten manuscript and pop it out in 12-point Helvetica. The writing was now on the wall-where it could easily be photographed and printed by offset lithography. The pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place and the final storming of our bastion began.
We all know that graphic design is much more than the ability to generate information in the form of nicely formatted typography. But that other stuff that we do, the important stuff-like having good concepts, turning ideas and information into something that sings, and employing a subtler visual rhetoric than gold foil-stamped starbursts, is not the first thing our clients worry about in a panic when they wake up at two o-clock in the morning. Instead, they go downstairs for a belt of Scotch, and in an insomniac furor, turn on their PCs, and have a go at the brochure that they had intended calling us about in the morning-just to see what all those words might actually look like in Times Roman. Then they add a picture or two, and try the odd rule here and there, and suddenly it begins to fit all the parameters that, in their minds, are required of an actual brochure. It may well be that in the clear light of dawn they have second thoughts and call us anyway, but all they need us to do now is just to "tidy it up a bit," and how much skill, fee or professional respect could that possibly demand?
If this assault on our prestige and pride were not bad enough, another change in public taste was underway that was not about to help our case. As typography slipped out of our exclusive control, liberties equal to those that Letraset had made possible twenty years before began to emerge and blossom. This time a new inelegance materialized of constantly varying type sizes, weights, styles and line lengths, with no apparent relationship to content, all peppered with dingbats and electronic clip art. The arrival of the World Wide Web added glows, starfields and stuttering animation to all this, resulting in a wild ride into a world of visual chaos that would have made even a Futurist wince. While some clients may have noticed this was not quite as classy as the sort of thing Paul Rand or Brad Thompson used to do, most of the public have simply accepted it as the current yardstick of graphic excellence. Most significantly, the number of people who can nowadays discern the difference between the good, the bad, and the downright ugly is becoming depressingly small.
Thus, in the short span of a quarter of a century, not only what we do but how we do it has lost its lustre in the public eye. Not only are we in the process of losing our reputation as visionaries and artists, but we are in danger of accepting this new role and becoming simply a bunch of visual mechanics.
Part and parcel with this is a change in how we are relating to each other as professionals. Twenty-five years ago, when I defected from architecture into graphic design, it was a very different profession. I was introduced to, and welcomed by, a world of legendary individuals like Massimo and Lela Vignelli, Tom Geismar and Ivan Chermayeff, and Colin Forbes, all virtuosos of both their art and their craft. I will never forget one afternoon when as a relative newcomer, I dropped in on Massimo unannounced. While I am sure he was desperately busy, he graciously took me by the arm and with his usual charm gave me a guided tour around his entire studio, storerooms included. These designers were passionate about what they did and how they did it, and were exceptionally generous in sharing what they knew, even their advice on business practices, with aspiring newcomers. At board meetings of AIGA, of which I became a director, I was aware of a rich and established culture of dedicated individuals for whom design was a lifelong passion and where all of us felt we were in the vanguard of important change. On a conscious and unconscious level it was a political as well as a creative culture, dedicated to making the world more fun, more thoughtful and more decent.
Today, the demise of the designer as an expert and visionary-because of the cheap availability of what now passes for design-has seen the introduction of a bottom line-oriented profession where designers are becoming more focused on being pragmatic businesspeople than on being idealists. I mourn the passing of the established culture-and while I see it as just the inevitable collateral damage of progress, something which we must react and respond to-we face an urgent need to redirect our profession and evolve values which work in the context of current realities.
Sadly, the effect on some design firms, particularly the larger and more prominent ones, is that in an attempt to keep the company coffers full (or to stop them emptying any further), they appear to be rapidly losing touch with the inspiration that built their reputations, becoming instead caught up in the Faustian desperation of having to concentrate on feeding the beast they have sold their souls to. The old professional camaraderie is becoming anathema to their need to compete for both projects and staff with designers who were once their creative and professional allies.
The decay of these professional values is a serious problem because it is very important that as a profession we make the public aware of the value of design, and it is only as an orchestrated group that we can do this. Our professional institutions still concentrate on preaching to the choir, with pat-ourselves-on-the-back design shows rather than promoting serious discourse about our professional predicament. A colleague recently suggested that the reason we continually give ourselves awards is because no one else will (this, and the fact that the design institutions have learned that the way to our pocketbooks is through our egos). It is not so much that the design shows are bad, they are just irrelevant.
Educating our clients will not be easy. To do so, we must first thoroughly understand what it is that we do, and what the specific values of that are, and to whom, and in what way. Unfortunately, most designers have little if any concern with this, being obsessed with "look how clever I am" stuff. We must also be wary. While the need to educate our clients is important, we must avoid the impulse to do so in an attempt to turn back the clock to the good old days. If clients no longer value us very much, it is neither a moral issue or necessarily a deficiency on their part. It is an inevitability brought about by a whole confluence of reasons, many of which we must bear the responsibility for. We must primarily think of this as our "problem," not theirs. Designer, heal thyself. After we have successfully done that, prescribing a stiff remedy for our clients may then have some validity.
What of the future? Almost certainly even more of the same. The rapid development of direct-to-plate digital printing and high-speed inkjet presses, where ever smaller runs in full color can be generated directly from anyone's computer files at ever decreasing cost, have eliminated the need for the prep work that had become the printer's stock-in-trade. The new technologies are migrating to ever smaller desktop units where both printer and printshop alike will be rendered entirely redundant for those projects which do not involve complex binding or other manufacturing demands, and it may not be long before some ingenious individual domesticates even this last preserve of their trade. Add to this the rapidly developing effectiveness of the Web to accomplish sales, distribution and fulfillment, and it is easy to see that any individual with the right entrepreneurial spirit can create an entire publishing empire from their bedroom (although they may not get much sleep).
Not that it should make us feel any better, but the same is true of the other creative professions. Anyone with a new iMac, a video camera, a copy of iMovie and the talent, can produce a broadcastable movie from start to finish, including burning and labeling the DVD, for an equipment cost of less than $3,000. For $10,000 they can do the same thing of fairly decent broadcast quality. And music, photography and most of the other "media"-based arts have seen similar reshaping of their professional environments.
The first thing graphic designers are challenged to do is to distinguish themselves again, perhaps by developing new Êsthetics based more upon the raw energy of concept and message, than just relying on elegantly kerned type. While energy of concept and message were what our mentors, like Massimo, were very adept at in a polite and polished way, whippersnapper designers, like Stefan Sagmeister, have shown us how this can work in a more visceral way, in his case with arresting and often disturbing images (frequently miscellaneous body parts) surrounded by handwritten copy. You can still have that elegant Vignelli kerning if you want to, but take a look at the latest version of Adobe InDesign and while you drool on the keyboard watch it, with none of your hard-earned expertise, take a page of type, re-rag it from top to bottom, apply optical kerning, hang any punctuation and automatically insert ligatures-probably even better than you can.
Beyond all this is the further challenge to take control of the projects we work on by becoming more entrepreneurial and instead of giving our ideas away for the financial benefit of others, to retain control and ownership of what we do and exploit and earn from it directly. In a climate where we are being continually devalued, taking charge of our own fate also has the potential to garner back some of the stature and respect we are losing-not just to soothe bruised egos, but to enjoy the freedom to be heard and express ourselves.
Tibor Kalman was a notable pioneer of both of these avenues of opportunity. I remember several years ago being with Tibor at a very exclusive club on Manhattan's Upper East Side where we had been invited to a rather posh fundraiser. On being confronted with a large chafing dish full of french fries, he stuffed handfuls of them into every pocket. He then proceeded around the room and after insinuating himself into each little bejeweled and evening-gowned huddle of guests, suddenly pulled fries out of one pocket or another and proffered them with such determined innocence that the amazed guests took them and munched away in stunned silence. This was a perfect metaphor for what Tibor did with design, ignoring the hygiene of elegant typography and relying instead on the raw energy of concept. Of course it was not that what his firm M&Co ended up with was in any way design-deficient, it just invented its own laws of Êsthetics as it went along. This, plus the utter conviction of everything it did was the key to its success. The other path that is open to us is that of design entrepreneur, also well trodden by Tibor, who like some magician at a kids' party, pulled a seemingly inexhaustible progression of watches and paperweights and clocks, and all kinds of neat stuff that he had designed and had manufactured, out of thin air.
The challenge now to the profession, particularly for the schools, is to develop a generation of designers more heavily focused on taking the lead in the development of projects rather than on just providing design services; designers who have a first-class cultural education, are savvy, and are entrepreneurial; more able to develop concepts for products for which there is a market, and to make their money by holding on to the rights of those properties. There will still be a decent market for service design, particularly for higher end corporate and institutional print and Web work, but the level of taste is diminishing, and designers are being perceived as much lesser players and will have much less control than they may be comfortable with. Within conventional design, the new technologies will hopefully give designers more time to focus on a more unique and forceful Êsthetic than can simply be achieved by activating a pull-down menu.
While traditional skills will still be needed, it is the design entrepreneur that will have the best chance of using them to create beautifully-produced and designed products. In the current climate clients are becoming less and less interested in paying for good design. It is only when the designer is determining how the resources will be spent that design will be properly prioritized. Maybe in time we may even be able to shake off the current execrable level of accepted graphic taste from our boots and raise everyone's expectations to demand good design as a matter of course. On a recent trip, I picked up a copy of Steve Martin's novella Shopgirl at the airport. This beautifully written, designed and produced little trade paperback (not some extravagantly-priced specialist art publication) was such a pleasure to look at, hold and read, that it restored my faith that one day little gems like this may become the norm rather than the very rare exception. But it may well be that we, the designers, are the ones that will need to be in the driving seat. We have the talent, we have the skills, (maybe we will have to steal the money), what we need now is the will to bury the traditional ways in which we have operated, and to reinvent ourselves and reestablish our professional values.
The designer is dead. Long live the designer.
Editor's note: Many of the finest Design Issues essays are available in the book of the same name which has been compiled by DK Holland, the editor of this column, and co-published by Communication Arts and Allworth Press. To purchase the book, visit www.allworth.com.
posted by Jef + Stef at 5:58 pm
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