Harmless?!, pt II [grid::brand]

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A week or so ago, in Portland, I had drinks with a few Nike designers. Nike is the biggest employer for designers in town, and they were talking up Nike as a place to look for a job. One of them was a shoe designer, and the other was a graphic designer. So I'm chatting with the graphic designer about the profession of graphic design, and specifically about the downsides. And then he says:

"But you know, graphic design is essentially harmless." (my ital.)

Which gets me back to my drastically unfinished post of a while ago, about why graphic design is not and never has been harmless. Damn it.

Graphic design - especially cool graphic design - is the pretty face of mass market capitalism. As Thomas Frank puts it, "Rebel youth culture remains the cultural mode of the corporate moment." The cooler you think your portfolio is, the more quickly it will be incorporated into an ad campaign for the overpriced, made by the underpaid, bought by the supersized. The creation of cool is never harmless - no matter how well-meaning the creators are. Nonrebellious design is not necessarily never harmful, though; think about the designers of Enron's annual reports. Or the sainted Paul Rand, who created Enron's logo in 1996. As a graphic designer, you're doomed. The more you're paid, the likelier you are to have a job selling stuff that nobody needs to people who probably can't afford it. The Enron graphic designers especially. Obviously, they're not even close to Ken Lay, but they're not quite...innocent either. Like all of us, they were just paying the rent in the best way they knew.

One traditional answer to this dilemma is to do lots of volunteer work to make up for all the annual reports and business cards. Another traditional answer is to make less money and do more work for socially responsible clients. Neither one of those addresses the second big reason why graphic design is not and never has been harmless. Damn it.

Forget the trees lost and the Pantone reds of polluted rivers. Graphic design is the native tongue of information overload, the lingua franca of the cool hunter and the lame-ass bulk mailer alike. We all like to think of graphic designers as the people who make text books or political posters or really good airport signage systems. When Steven Heller references a good-citizenship quiz created by the slightly-less-sainted-but-still-pretty-great Milton Glaser, he mentions only cases where designers create dishonest or misleading visual impressions. But most graphic designers don't do safety manuals. They design the flyers plastered on your windshield and coupons you immediately trash and sportswear packaging and sometimes, oh my God, popup ads or advertorials. In these cases, the harm is not in graphic designers' business ethics. No, it's that they took the job in first place. A huge chunk of what graphic designers do for a living is not even mostly harmless.

Believing in the essential "harmlessness" of graphic design as an industry (despite the empirical evidence to the contrary that arrives every day in our mailboxes) helps assuage any lingering art school guilt on the part of us laboring members of the creative classes. I mean, we all do have to pay the rent somehow, and I'm not joining the moral condemnation business. I've designed mass mail catalogues myself. Graphic designers can honestly tell themselves that they aren't soldiers for hire or oil company execs or mutual fund mismanagers. And at its best, graphic design does make the world better. Who wouldn't rather have a pretty glossy magazine than an ugly one, or a clear presidential ballot than a confusing one? Still, while we may like to pretend that the message we're selling is inherently more worthy of existence than other people's, whatever the message, we're already embedded reporters of the Infocalypse.

[Addendum: It's been pointed out to me that maybe the original post I'm ranting about was ironic. Okay. Maybe.]

[Addendum2: This is a part of ashleyb's grid blogging project. Hence the title.]

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Liz has a great article today on why graphic design is *not* essentially harmless. All too often, technological/graphical designers have come to believe that they are working towards the *best* interface, as though there is a universal good. They fail ... Read More

Graphic Design is NOT essentially harmless (via zephoria)... Read More

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This page contains a single entry by Liz published on December 1, 2003 11:54 AM.

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