Observing design

Design Observer is a new blog written by Michael Beirut, Jessica Helfand and William Drenttel, and Rick Poynor - all influential critics and practioners of graphic design.

My undergrad degree is in graphic design, and the idea that Design Observer gives daily access to my college heroes is a shivery nineteen-year-old thrill. In fact, it's the sortof thrill that make blogs exciting in the long run. Rick Poynor, up close and personal...Rick Poynor...unplugged. Well, actually it's Rick Poynor plugged in, but you get the point.

It's a thrill that's entirely unrelated to the life I lead now, because I actually haven't read eye magazine, which Poynor founded, since late 2000. I can date it so precisely because 2000 was when I started doing so much freelance theater design and interaction design that there just weren't hours enough in the day. Instead of consuming my days, graphic design has become a useful sideline. My presentations look nicer, my business cards are more personal, and my charts are clearer than they would otherwise be. Now out of grad school, there are enough hours in the day to read eye, but I tend to forget that it even exists -- just as I tend to forget that theater magazine exists as well. The world of "design" is so large that from any one perspective, the other continents are beyond the horizon.

So it's a bit alienating to return to graphic design criticism. I vaguely remember the country. I still even speak the language, just with the vocabulary of a much younger woman. Everything is less smaller than I remembered, though, and the leaders are less god-like and more fallible.

In a post on the AIGA's Power of Design conference in Vancouver, Michael Beirut writes about a presentation on the environmental damage caused by Pantone print inks:

And what greater power than to discover forensic proof that even this seemingly harmless profession has the capacity to inflict damage, as well as to do good?

For Beirut, this is a "new certainty" for designers, following a succession of old certainties about the purpose of graphic design:

• that the role of design is to save the world through Swiss modernism
• that the role of design is self-expression for the designer
• that the role of design is to "change the world by subverting the goals of its corporate patrons"
• that the role of design is to allow designers to act as "authors" (I don't really understand how this differs from "self-expression," but perhaps the point becomes about changing the external environment, not just representing an internal one.)

Perhaps, writes Beirut, this certainty of ecological damage caused by a "seemingly harmless" profession is the "ultimate" certainty.

I have one word for Beirut: well, duh. Sorry. That was two.