a layperson's guide to graphic design

7/29/2019 A Layperson's Guide to Graphic Design

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08.28.08

Adrian Shaughnessy

A Layperson's Guide to Graphic Design

This is an edited transcript of a radio broadcastby Adrian Shaughnessy aired

as part of the London-based radio station Resonance FMs Free University of

the Airwaves. Shaughnessy had 30 minutes to introduce graphic design to a

non-professional audience.

In this broadcast Im going to try and explain what graphic design is and what

graphic designers do. Im a graphic designer, and I used to dread telling

people what I did for a living. It was rare to find anyone who understood what

graphic design was, and my faltering descriptions always seemed to confuse

rather than clarify.

Considering graphic designs ubiquity in modern life, Im not sure that many

people (non-designers that is) understand much about it. Its something that

people encounter every day perhaps every minute of their waking lives

yet they hardly bother to consider the impact, either for good or bad, that it

has on their lives. Its a subject that means a great deal to the people who do

it for a living, but rarely means much to the people its aimed at.

Graphic design has been likened to a wine glass. When we drink wine we

barely notice the glass its served in. It wouldnt be true to say that we dont

care what glass we drink out of we wouldnt choose to drink a rare vintage

out of a Tupperware mug, for example but its the wine that matters, not

the vessel it comes in.

Its the same with graphic design: people absorb the messages that graphic

designers use their skill, training and ingenuity to make, yet rarely stop to

think how the message is constructed or how it affects the viewer. This seemsodd considering graphic designs ubiquity in the modern world.

Occasionally, graphic design lurches into the media spotlight, as it did recently

when theLondon 2012 logo was caught up in a media firestorm. In the U.S.,

many commentators have noted the role played by posters and illustrated

images of Barack Obama in the battle for the Democratic presidential

nomination. A documentary film about the typefaceHelvetica has proved

astonishingly successful, occupying the number 1 spot on iTunes documentary

chart. But, graphic design mostly goes unnoticed and unremarked.
http://www.fubra.com/london2012/http://www.typographia.org/1999/graphion/crystal-goblet.html%20http://resonancearchive1.org.uk/audio//Free_University/The_Free_University_of_the_Airwaves_%20A_Layperson%27s_Guide_To_Graphic_Design.mp3http://www.helveticafilm.com/http://www.fubra.com/london2012/http://www.typographia.org/1999/graphion/crystal-goblet.html%20http://resonancearchive1.org.uk/audio//Free_University/The_Free_University_of_the_Airwaves_%20A_Layperson%27s_Guide_To_Graphic_Design.mp3


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Despite being a graphic designer, I can still be surprised by designs

overwhelming prevalence in everyday life. The other day I walked into a

branch of Borders and was hit by the realization that no matter where I

looked, I saw graphic design. I saw tables covered with dozens of books, each

with a different attention-grabbing cover. The walls were plastered from floor

to ceiling with visually arresting book jackets. I was surrounded by magazine

covers, display banners, and messages of all kinds. It was like being in a cave

where every inch of wall space has been covered with symbols, letterforms,

pictures, images, and graphic marks.

I recently saw another demonstration of graphic designs ubiquity. Someone

had taken a series of photographs of busy streets and then painstakingly

removed all the logos, symbols, signs, colours, street names and road

markings. In other words, they had removed all the graphic design from these

photographs. The results were staggering. A world without graphic design is

an unrecognisable world more alien than all but the most extreme sci-fi

imaginings.

But unless you are a graphic designer, most of the graphic clutter that

surrounds us is a bit like the weather: its just there. Yes, we often have

reason to be grateful for it, such as when an efficiently designed railway

timetable gives us useful information; or when a well-designed instruction

manual helps us complete a tricky task; or when a smoothly functioning

website allows us to book tickets. Many of us treasure a favourite book jacket

or record cover for its style and aesthetic heft. We might even be pleased to

buy some soap powder because the cheerful packaging catches our eye.

But we rarely stop and look at this stuff I mean really stop and look at it in

the way that we might stop and look at a painting or a work of art. We absorb

the messages, but only rarely take time to look at how the message has been

constructed. In other words, we gulp the wine, but never look at the glass.

And theres a good reason for this: most graphic design can be categorised as

quietly good design, to use a phrase coined by the design critic Alice

Rawsthorn. This is design whether its product design, interior design or

graphic design that gets on with its job without drawing attention to itself. It

does what it sets out to do, and is neither intrusive or particularly engaging.

However, a great deal of graphic design is ephemeral and inconsequential.

This is mainly because the messages that graphic designers are asked to

transmit are often precisely this ephemeral and inconsequential. If we use
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/04/25/arts/DESIGN28.phphttp://www.iht.com/articles/2008/04/25/arts/DESIGN28.php


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our wine metaphor again, we might say that cheap wine comes in cheap

glasses.

The ephemeral nature of much graphic design is neatly illustrated in a telling

little scene in the Michael Mann movie, Heat, starring Robert De Niro and Al

Pacino. The De Niro character falls for a woman played by Amy Brenneman,

who he meets in a diner. He asks her what she does for a living and she tells

him that shes a graphic designer. She explains that she designs letterheads,

logotypes, CD covers and menus for restaurants. De Niro looks at her and ask

incredulously: You go to school for that? Brenneman laughs apologetically,

and says yes.

De Niros raised eyebrow semaphores what most non-designers think about

graphic design or more accurately, he reveals the value most non-

designers place on the visual clutter that swirls around us. Even for me,

speaking as a graphic designer, I find it hard to disagree with De Niros sniffy

attitude. Most graphic design is crass and formulaic. And the reason for this is

that graphic designers best customers are the businesses and commercial

enterprises who want to harness designs power to package and present the

products and services they sell.

This has made graphic design an important factor in modern business. In the

commercial market place, where so many products and services are identical,

often the only way to tell them apart is through design. But, if the only thing

graphic design is good for is helping to differentiate one brand of toothpaste

from another, then its hardly likely to be something to make the pulse run

faster.

For many observers and commentators, graphic designs embeddedness in

commercial culture makes it into one of the specious modern black arts, like

spin, hype and branding. And its undoubtedly true that most graphic design is

about selling things in a consumer society. Yet not all graphic design serves

purely commercial purposes. There are clients and designers who use

graphic design in a constructive and socially useful way.

* * *

Nor is graphic design new its been around for a while, perhaps since

Neolithic times: cave paintings were actually sophisticated pieces of info-

graphics detailing the seasonal movement of reindeer and buffalo. Or, it could

be said to have begun with the illuminated manuscripts of Medieval times. Yet,
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113277/


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it would be more accurate to say that graphic design began in 1450 when

Gutenberg perfected typographic printing, or when Caxton produced the first

English-language book a few years later. (Although its worth noting that the

Chinese had already learned how to print calligraphy as early as 1000 AD.)

The art of lettering was refined during the Renaissance, and many of the

typefaces and typographic conventions that designers still use were formed in

the hot house of Europes great artistic and cultural eruption of the 15th

century.

Graphic design became a recognizable craft with the industrial revolution and

the arrival of automated printing presses. Suddenly it was possible to mass-

produce leaflets and posters, and the era of advertising and publicity began.

Victorian playbills and turn-of-the-century posters are clearly the ancestors of

contemporary design, but it wasnt until the 1920s that graphic design became

recognizably modern.

The architect Walter Gropius, who believed in the merging of crafts and the

fine arts, founded the Bauhaus in 1919, in Germany. Gropius wanted to

revitalize design by putting an end to the imitation of old naturalistic styles,

and to allow designers to embrace the new age of mass production, and to

develop a truly modern machine aesthetic. By 1933 the Bauhuas had

succumbed to Nazi pressure and was closed, but by then it had given birth to

a modern design movement that encompassed architecture, product design

and graphic design. A new typographic style emerged which reflected the

machine aesthetic, and which was to conquer the world. One writer noted:

The story of the Bauhaus is the story of how a considerable body of

contemporary American printing and advertising came to be what it is.

By the 1960s, the new Modernist typography, variously described as

International Style or Swiss Style, had become the major stylistic force in

world graphic design, largely due to its dominance in American corporate

culture. It even found acceptance in Japan, where Modernist design was used

in the posters advertising in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.

From the 1970s onwards, graphic design invaded every aspect of modern life.

Corporations discovered the power of having a dynamic visual identity, and no

business could flourish unless it had a sexy logo and glossy graphics.

Designers sensed that their moment had come: many abandoned their

cottage industry roots and banded together into ultra-efficient, strategically-

focused design consultancies offering big business the panacea of slick,
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consumer-friendly visual communications. Designers showed how shareholder

value could be increased by the strategic and quasi-scientific application of

graphic design.

In the 1980s, graphic design became established as a vital constituent of pop

culture. Typefaces, logos, album sleeves and magazine covers all became

part of a style-obsessed youth culture. One or two graphic designers even

became known outside of the professional world.

Today, graphic design has gone super nova. As weve already noted, it has

invaded every aspect of life from the cultural to the political. But with this

ubiquity has also come a sort of redundancy. The more there is, the less its

valued.

* * *

The Encyclopaedia Britannica has this to say on the subject:

. . . graphic design is the art and profession of selecting and arranging visual

elements such as typography, images, symbols, and colors to convey a

message to an audience. Sometimes graphic design is called visual

communications, a term that emphasizes its function of giving form e.g.,

the design of a book, advertisement, logo, or Web site to information. An

important part of the designers task is to combine visual and verbal elements

into an ordered and effective whole. Graphic design is therefore a

collaborative discipline: writers produce words and photographers and

illustrators create images that the designer incorporates into a complete visual

communication.

For most people, thats a perfectly satisfactory definition. And yet, even here,

we can quibble. The last sentence states that Graphic design is therefore a

collaborative discipline: writers produce words and photographers and

illustrators create images that the designer incorporates into a complete visual

communication.

It is certainly true that most graphic design is collaborative in the sense that

designers are supplied with content by writers, photographers and illustrators.

And its for this reason that graphic designers are rarely credited with

anything beyond the transmission of their clients messages. It is widely

believed that graphic designers have no authorial voice. Graphic designers

make the glass, not the wine.


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Yet this is not always true. In fact, there are graphic designers who write their

own texts, take their own photographs, create their own illustrations and

publish their own websites, blogs, books and posters. Pointing this out may

seem like nit-picking, because admittedly its only a tiny percentage of

designers who do it. But it means that designers can have an authorial voice,

and not all designers are the opinion-less servants of their paymasters.

Another definition of graphic design comes from the American designer and

writer Jessica Helfand:

Graphic design is a visual language uniting harmony and balance, color and

light, scale and tension, form and content. But it is also an idiomatic language,

a language of cues and puns and symbols and allusions, of cultural references

and perceptual inferences that challenge both the intellect and the eye.

Helfands version introduces the notion that graphic design is a language,

and clearly, if graphic designers are going to learn to speak this language,

with its cues and puns and symbols and allusions , they are going to have

to be reasonably smart people or at least people who have inquiring,

culturally aware and semioticaly perceptive minds. In other words, they are

going to have to be educated.

Any definition of graphic design would be inadequate if it failed to take into

account the training and technical knowledge required to make a graphic

designer. There are rules that govern typography, the structuring of

information, and the technical aspects of publishing. And these can take years

to learn, and places huge importance on the formal education of designers.

There is also a professional dimension to design: designers have to know

about copyright, intellectual property, and contracts; they have to have

negotiating skills, presentation skills; and they have to be able to write

proposals, and a host of other business world requirements.

Designers also have to become technically adept at producing their work.

They have to learn software programs, image manipulation, printing

techniques, colour theory, web programming and the delivery of information

on multiple platforms.

* * *
http://www.winterhouse.com/#


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Not only this, but there are many types of graphic design. Lets just take a

moment to list some of the types of graphic design that exist:

There is information graphics, which is concerned with hard cold facts such as

timetables and the visualization of data and statistics. There is digital design,

which is concerned with the presentation of information on electronic

platforms such as the internet, mobile phones and data-display screens. There

is graphic design for television, and of course graphic design for all kinds of

printed matter everything from billboards to books; from brochures to

brand identities; from bubble gum wrappers to bus tickets.

Most graphic design is two-dimensional, but there are graphic designers who

work in 3-dimensions. They design installations, murals, exhibitions and

display units for shops. There is typographic design, which is concerned with

the way textual information is displayed. There are designers who design

typefaces. There are designers who work as art directors and direct

photographers, illustrators and typographers to make visual communication in

the way that film directors direct a film crew to make a movie. There are

designers who only retouch photographs. There are even graphic designers

who design the little icons that we find in our computer operating systems.

(Well, you didnt think they designed themselves, did you?)

Finally, no description of modern graphic design would be complete without

reference to the moral and ethical dimension. In fact, moral and ethical

decisions confront designers every day. If a corporation that made landmines

asks a designer to create a website for them, most designers will say no. This

is a simple moral question that few designers would need to wrestle with. But

what about the cool clothing company that has questionable third-world labour

policies would the average designer say no to them?

Questions of morality and ethics often manifest themselves in an urge

amongst graphic designers to use their skills to do good raising awareness

of charitable, social and green causes, for example. There is a long tradition

of graphic design being used to aid protest movements. Think of the role of

the Peace Symbol in the various anti-war and peace movements that have

existed since the 1960s. Some designers use their skills to further their

religious beliefs; others are engaged in research to aid readability amongst

the visually impaired, or investigating new ways of communicating with non-

literate audiences.

* * *
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Despite the diversity of design practices and the plurality of modern visual

communications, I think there are only two sorts of graphic designers.

This split is fundamental to understanding graphic design. There are many

different ways of defining the split, and there are, of course, huge areas of

overlap. Massimo Vignelli, an Italian born graphic designer who has lived and

worked in New York for most of his life, and who is responsible for much

elegant and refined work, defined the split with his customary precision:

One is rooted in history and semiotics and problem solving. The other is

more rooted in the liberal arts painting, figurative arts, advertising, trends,

and fashions. These are really two different avenues . . . one side is the

structured side, the other is the emotional side.

Vignelli nails it for me. He succinctly describes the two approaches to graphic

design the structured and the emotional. He also uses a phrase Ive

avoided up until now problem solving. For many designers, problem

solving is what they do. A client brings them a problem and they use their

skills as a graphic designer to solve the problem visually. This notion of being

a problem solver suits the mentality of many designers who are naturally

analytical and objective: to be a good graphic designer, you have to be able

to see things from the viewpoint of the intended user.

But as Massimo Vignelli noted, theres another sort of graphic designer as

well. So far, I havent mentioned the A word Art.

None of the graphic designers I know consider themselves artists. It is

certainly common for designers to like art and have a keen eye for it, and it is

also common for designers to envy the apparent freedom of artists.

Most recognise the fundamental difference between artists and designers:

artists create work that comes from an inner impulse. Or to put it another

way, they write their own briefs. Graphic designers, on the other hand,

respond to briefs supplied by others they are reactive. To go back to our

glass of wine artists supply the wine, graphic designers supply the glass.

Except its not as simple as that. There are designers who have a personal

and singular vision of how their work should materialize. They work in fashion,

music and cultural design, and while they may function like traditional

problem-solving graphic designers, they rely far more on intuition and on an
http://www.vignelli.com/


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inner aesthetic lexicon.

They tend not to view their role as problem solvers. What others see as

problems crying out for solutions, these designers see as opportunities crying

out for graphic expression. These are designers with a signature style often

backed up by aesthetic and moral convictions and clients know what they

are getting when they hire these individuals or studios.

So two types of graphic designers. One pragmatic and problem solving; the

other emotional and visionary. Of course, there are many things that unite

them: craft skills, technical know how, historical tradition, and the commercial

realities of survival in the business sphere, to name just a few.

* * *

But there is one fundamental characteristic that both types of designer share

a quest for a sense of authorship.

This quest for authorship is a stubborn little urge in nearly all designers that

never quite reconciles itself to being suppressed. Even the most pragmatic

and service-minded designers want to do things their way, and to claim some

sort of personal stamp on their work.

To understand this stubborn little impulse we need to look at why people

become graphic designers in the first place. It usually happens when we

discover an aptitude for creativity or drawing, or when we discover that we

have an aesthetic sensibility. This sensibility is raw and unformed in our early

years, but over time it becomes more sophisticated, and we discover that we

have convictions about shape, color and form. This discovery also provides

the first taste of authorship.

This is not authorship on the same scale as a great novelist, for instance, but

it is an impulse to make a mark, even if is in the service of problem solving

on behalf of clients. As designers we are inclined to solve the problems of our

clients, but we want to do it in our own way and in our own voice.

Of course, this takes us to the essential paradox at the heart of all types of

design: the urge for a personal authorial voice is considered to be antithetical

to rational objective design. To be truly objective, the designer needs to

remove all personal feelings from the equation and zero-in on a rational

solution or so we are told.


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Yet there never was great design of any kind that forced the designer to

eradicate his or her own voice, and all great design, the stuff that matters,

has a strong personal signature which doesnt impede functionality. Designers

may not be artists, but they still want to metaphorically and literally sign

the work they do.

* * *

I want to end with an observation that says something about graphic designs

place in the modern world.

Design is now one of the most popular subjects for study in UK universities.

There are 160,000 people studying Creative Arts and Design. (There are only

140,000 people studying Engineering and Technology.) This seems astonishing

to me. But it also tells me something about the culture we live in. In our

industrialized, corporatized, technologically sophisticated society, people fear

becoming faceless cogs, just as much as they did during the industrial

revolution. They crave the ability to make things, to make a mark that they

can call their own. What better way to do this than to become a graphic

designer?

Thats worth toasting with a glass of decent wine, surely? In a beautifully

designed glass, of course.

a layperson's guide to graphic design

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