Spaceship Earth

On the subject of design responsibility, I would like to note two important designers who dedicated their careers to social and environmental accountability inside the system we call planet Earth – Buckminster Fuller and Victor Papanek. Both men were pioneers in their worldviews and opinions on the need for a reevaluation of our ideology in the design world.

Buckminster Fuller’s holistic understanding of the world was apparent in his 1969 publication, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, in which he stressed the obviousness of our limited resources (particularly fossil fuels) and the nature of our planet as a system in which we are all passengers and our every action is of consequence to us. He patented the “geodesic dome,” a concept put into creation all over the world as a sort of model of Earth’s systemic nature. A famous example is the Montreal Biosphere, for which internal temperatures could originally be controlled. Fuller’s understanding of systemic thinking was revolutionary.

Victor Papanek stated in his 1971 book, Design for the Real World that “by creating whole species of permanent garbage to clutter up the landscape, and by choosing materials and processes that pollute the air we breath, designers have become a dangerous breed.” True indeed, Victor. His dissatisfaction with industrial design's priorities is a voice of reason in an otherwise unrealistic and unsustainable zeitgeist. He designed many useful objects easily affordable by the most impoverished people in the world, such as a radio made out of tin cans and a candle intended for production in the poorest nations on Earth.

If we take a page out of Fuller's or Papanek's manifestoes and apply it to our own future designs, the world will be a much more sustainable system in the future.

The Biosphere's home page: http://biosphere.ec.gc.ca/

Papanek quote from http://www.treehugger.com/files/2005/01/victor_papanek.php

Nathan Shedroff

Nathan Shedroff gave a very clean and well-presented lecture at UC Davis last Wednesday on the subject of sustainable design. He provided a very accessible slogan for sustainability as a rule of thumb: “Don’t design things today that make tomorrow worse.” And if that didn’t convince you on the importance of sustainability, he tacked on “…for your kids.” He outlined sustainability as being both a business model and a design issue, the inseparability of these two fields was something he could not stress more. In the wake of the Great Recession, he noted, we have a unique opportunity to make sustainability the focus of reconstruction. On this note, he emphasized not only the “green” side of sustainability, but also the financial and social aspects of it. We must not only aim to design for a greener future but a more economically and culturally realistic world, in which responsibility for our actions must be taken in everything we create. This means thinking about the consequences of our manipulations of the world around us have on the rest of that world, or “systems thinking.” This also means working as designers in many disciplines. He stressed the ability of good designers to point out better ways to do things in any field. As we are all part of one global community, we must take into account that fact when designing. I think this is a good way to approach sustainability when handling corporate shot-callers who may not respond to just “green” arguments.

The Helvetica Debate

Gary Hustwit’s first film, Helvetica, addresses the most common typeface in our civilization. Praised by many, hated by many others, it is an omnipresent aspect of urban life in western society.

Paula Scher described the font jokingly as a bit “fascistic” and herself as “morally opposed to Helvetica […and that] if you used Helvetica it meant that you were in favor of the Vietnam War.” This illustrates clearly that designer’s interpretation of Helvetica’s Modernist aesthetic. In other words, uniformity and rationality are the tools of an oppressive society bent on erasing all human diversity.

At the same time, the font appeals to many as a solid but open-ended vehicle for any meaning. At the time of its introduction in the 1950s, Modernist simplicity was overwhelmingly the name of the game. As Mike Parker stated, “it was exactly what the designers were looking for […] I don’t think there’s been such a hot thing since as the figure-ground relationship properly executed,” meaning Helvetica was the summit of the path taken by the designers looking for a solid, universal sans-serif font that embodied all the tenants of Modern design – a sweeping under the rug of traditional forms, and the birth of a style transcending culture and nationality.

Really what a debate on Helvetica comes down to is a debate on your feelings about Modernism itself.

Objectified

Gary Hustwit’s film, Objectified has a way of illustrating the state of contemporary industrial design that both shows and tells. It included interviews with prominent designers like Karim Rashid (there were a couple of laughs and snickers in the theatre when he and his embellished pink outfit first appeared on the screen) and Dieter Rams juxtaposed with filmic representations of what was being discussed. For example, when Rams was addressing the current state of Apple as being the big design company of the day, and their unparalleled accessibility in interface with their customers, the movie showed consumers browsing through those sterile futuristic Apple stores, interacting with the computers in almost natural and intuitive ways. You could see the way the company had achieved such a successful interface by Hustwit showing it and Rams telling it.

The movie also showed how individual designers work, for instance the dynamic relationship and subsequent design processes of Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec was a topic of dialogue. This often helped shed light on designers’ products and how the final products are accomplished.

Color Discord!!!

If your aim is to agitate and even upset, which is undeniably a component of punk rock, color discord is an effective tool in graphic design. The album cover for the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols uses color discord to represent the disruptive but exciting nature of their music. The contrast of bright pink and yellow induces a grotesque disparity in colors that interact neither analogously or complementary on the color wheel. This celebrated ugliness catches the eye and asserts a shock-value characteristic of punk visual art (exemplary in the fashion designs by Vivienne Westwood from the same era – who often used other methods of offense, such as controversial imagery and symbols like swastikas). Discord in this album cover is not limited to color, but typography and form are also purposely imbalanced. The majority punk visual art has been limited to black-and-white designs (because of their tendency to be reproduced with black-and-white copiers), and attempts at visual friction depend on this disharmony of lettering and savagely cut paper collage.

In the US release of the album, the values were inverted and the hues were shifted a bit on the color wheel, but the clashing discord remains the basis of design.

Giacometti's Lines

Alberto Giacometti was primarily known for his unique style of sculpture. But what I find most interesting about him are his line drawings. He often struggled for hours on end to capture the way he saw the still life subjects in front of him. Every line’s relation to one another was of utmost importance to him. He often relentlessly drew on top of previous lines until he got it just right. The result of this peculiar process was a composition that depended completely on the position and location of the artist. They weren’t drawings of any particular objects as much as they were of an entire point of view. He didn’t differentiate from object to object but saw a holism in the world around him. This is a manner of seeing which I think can be very useful when thinking about designing visuals. Do we wish to chop up the world around us, as is usually our nature when seeing, or do we aim for the more difficult way of seeing accomplished by Giacometti. This is an integral step in establishing a visual idiom before moving on to next phases of design.

Examples of Giacometti’s lines can be found here:

http://images.artnet.com/artwork_images_380_434535_alberto-giacometti.jpg

http://www.surrealists.co.uk/artistsimages/AlbertoGiacometti-Diego1953.jpg

Line: the abstract concept

In our physical universe, there can be no object with without extension in both width and height. So what we call the line is in itself an imaginary concept. But it is integral to how we think, communicate plan and design in almost any visual medium. So what we call the “line” is usually represented by very long, thin rectangles or shapes that from a distance look to have only one axis. The cavemen could be said to be the first abstract artists in part because of their use of line in figurative cave drawings. In fields like architecture the line seems not too far from a simple indicator for outcrops and protrusions in a building’s design, but when drawing things like figures, the line reveals its real abstract identity. Without realizing, we use it every day to filter through the three-dimensional world surrounding it and as a medium to try to reconstruct that world by our understanding. Enough lines can resemble anything pictorially, even the curves and often-continual forms of bodies, either through illusion, expressionistic exaggeration or symbology. The symoblogical power of the line too is an oft-overlooked facet to be celebrated here. We use the line as a sort of visual highway – it catches our eye in a way that we are accustomed not to leave its directional authority until we find an exit. This abstract symbol, the line, is incredibly important in our way of dissecting the world and re-interpreting it through visual media.

Quilting

Upon viewing the collection of African-American quilts in the Nelson Art Gallery at UC Davis, I was particularly struck by a quilt by Rosa Ellen Kincaid. Without using the more common shapes so often found in quilts (such as rectangles, diamonds, stripes, etc.), the craftswoman managed to achieve a balance and unity in an overall pattern by her choice in placing relative shapes in a seemingly intuitive manner across the blanket. A reoccurring shape that looked a bit like a simplified figure wearing a bonnet was placed repeatedly but not systematically throughout the composition. This among other rhythmic placements of shapes contributed to a sense of wholeness when viewing the quilt. A few colors followed the same trend of non-calculated rhythm. I enjoyed this technique particularly because of this inexact quality. It made it all the more human for me. But very few of these quilts could be called exact, as the process of quilt-making does not involve precision tools but rather an age-old craft inseparable from the imperfections of the human hand. I believe it is this evidence of the creators’ hand that gives quilts their charming reputation.

The Visual Chaos of a Shopping District

Upon studying the visual culture of high-density commercial districts last year, I took photos that aim to point out the chaos caused by the conflicting elements of this composition. By “this composition” I am referring to the area itself (W 11^th St, Eugene, Oregon), and the conflict I speak of is indeed one of the aesthetic aims of the various signs, symbols, and lights present there (the aforementioned elements). This conflict is essentially a lack of unity caused by the fact that each of these elements are competing with one another for the viewer’s (in this case the potential consumer’s) attention. The only reliable constant in this street’s composition is it’s linear directionality. From a driver’s perspective, the only focal point one can trust is the converging lines on road in front of them, but even this seems to be under attack by the flashing lights and eye-grabbing lights of surrounding composition. This visual chaos is a result of a lack of central control of the district and competing merchants that aim to outdo each other by grabbing the eye in ever-better ways.

Pink Flag - a bold choice in emphasis

How do graphic designers point out what it is they wish to highlight? Emphasis can be achieved through a number of strategies. In the case the album cover featured, (Wire’s Pink Flag, 1977), we see a couple of indicators that lead up to it’s ultimate emphasis on the flag. Emphasis here is achieved by imbalance and the contrasting of value and color. While it has a horizontal balance to it (other than the text), the design’s vertical orientation is focused abnormally upward, as the sky takes up most of the picture plane. This vertical imbalance leads the viewer to focus more on the top half of the image – a visual suggestion seemingly accented further by the vertically escalating flagpole (horizontally centered). As our eye moves upward up the pole we reach the zenith of emphasis, the pink flag, darker in value than the blue ground behind it, and a color seen nowhere else in the design. It faces right possibly to counter the text in the left corner. If it were not for this isolated small patch of pink, the emphasis would be the big dark plane at the bottom of the page. This design’s emphasis is focused anywhere but the center, a preference rarely so blatantly discernible as it is in this album cover.

(public domain image taken from http://www.wikipedia.org)

(Wire's website - http://www.pinkflag.com)

The Iconoclasts

I would encourage anyone who doubts the potential of visual communication to take a look at the history of the Byzantine Empire. Periods of iconoclasm in the Middle Ages demonstrated how the debate over the proper use of Eastern Orthodox religious material in visual arts exemplified the power of the icon itself. Iconoclasts destroyed visual representations of God, Jesus Christ or the saints. In their view these icons were not just pictorial representations of holy figures but false idols, as people worshiped not to God Himself, but to these painted pieces of wood.

From a design perspective, these Middle-Age icons are incredibly successful at communicating visually (whether they are innately pagan or not) because they imply more than they show. To an Eastern Orthodox worshiper at the time, worshipping to an icon was to implant the power of the Deity or saint in a picture. In my view, this means the painting is working both as an icon and a symbol (that is, it shows the religious figure’s body and at the same time signifies the figure’s spiritual power without depiction).

The iconoclasts had no problem with symbols. They often tore down iconic representations and replaced them with non-pictorial symbols like the cross. To them the symbolic aspect of religious icons was too overwhelmed by the fleshly aspect of depiction.

The fact that an image, be it icon or symbol (or both) can have the power to embody such a complex and significant concept, and exist as an instigator of social strife, testifies to the clout of successful visual communication.

Getting the most out of what's outside yourself

At this point I must point out that I do not exclude myself from the criticisms I make about designers or design students, and that what I think (my opinions, conclusions and feelings about things other than facts) is always changing. As a critic I will try my best to remain objective but since it is not mathematics or science, some bias may be unavoidable.

On that note we can proceed to the topic at hand! What we all think is constantly changing for each of us. There are thoughts and images that stick with us because they provoked something in us or reminded us of something that we found upsetting, amazing, weird, etc. How we filter through all the data we receive every day is either in what we are predisposed to find interesting or what challenges us to think otherwise. I think it’s important to recognize that we select these things above all the rest of the information being thrown at us (either by nature or by people). Once we pay attention to what catches our attention us we can talk about what “inspires” us (I can’t help loathing that word because in my mind it implies that our ideas and feelings come from some holy light being shone down upon us which subsequently releases us from all judgments). It’s each of our responsibilities as artists to listen to our intuitions, but it’s also our responsibilities as designers to keep those in check with what the client wants.

Slippage

My last post contained an image that encourages something called “slippage.” Slippage is the fissure between mind and mark in which all misunderstandings are spawned. We can’t read each other’s minds so we create forms of communication (media, languages) to convey our own thoughts to each other. But no form of communication is perfect and there will always be something lost when dedicating a thought to a medium. This is the realm of slippage. The only language I can think of that may be completely free of slippage is the binary code of computers, and I’d like to rule out any non-human communicators. Most graphic designers want to discourage slippage, as their goal is most often to deliver a particular message that is easy to understand visually. This is often done by using simplified figures, or the ties between color and emotion, or images commonly recognized by people within a culture, etc. But being free from the constraints of a real job, I can explore the potential of slippage just for intellectual amusement. I’d be interested to know what people get out of something that doesn’t try to say anything at all.

More on the Ambiguous

Without having any real content to draw from recently (as a result of having no classes or design jobs over the summer), I’ve been interested in images that don’t say anything specific but may imply a connotation. The image above is the cover for a book I recently bound that I plan on filling in the future. I didn’t have any message to convey but my interest in foreign type forms and the emphasis given on letters as a descendant of pictorial representation in Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics led to the use of Russian fonts. The reason I’m mentioning my own work is to convey an aspect of graphic design that I’ve been thinking about recently. The communication not of distinct messages but of ambiguous images can lead to any number of interpretations. Somebody might be reminded of military camouflage, while someone else may immediately think of a cow or an ice cream wrapper. Ferdinand de Saussure would note the relationship between signifier and what is signified, that is, whatever the viewer sees is affected by what they already think, and whatever the creator sees is affected by their own predispositions. I’m sure someone who could read Russian would point out that the letters I placed together have no meaning whatsoever, while someone else may wonder what they mean.

Exhibitions

Last week I attended three exhibits in Davis - the UC Davis Design Museum’s Typographic Exploration in Hangul; Hart Hall’s display of works by Florentino Laime Mantilla and Salvador Dali; and the Pence Gallery in downtown Davis. Two of these exhibits were entirely comprised of local artists and designers. The typography display in the Design Museum was of particular interest to me because of its cogency even in another language. Entirely in the Korean script of Hangul, the precise meaning of any of the texts escaped me. But the arrangement of the type forms, alongside short descriptions of the works shed light on an abridged notion of what the scripts held. For example, Phil Choo’s Ileona depicted a three-dimensional representation of a script whose title translated in English means “stand up,” emphasizing some of the characters by seemingly have them standing vertically alongside a mass of characters lying flat. Obviously most of the message was lost on me because of the language barrier, but the graphic design alone brought me a small understanding of the overall message. This exhibit was also of interest for me because of my inability to read the script. I have previously been enamored by design work in foreign languages, such as the poster designs of Russian constructivists like El Lissitzky. With the text incomprehensible, it can give rise to a more diverse number of interpretations. I especially like the Russian and Vietnamese languages for this purpose because they share some, but not all, of their letterforms with the Roman alphabet. The ambiguity is, in my opinion, of great interest.

Is design’s popularity detrimental to the discipline?

Design in recent years has become more and more present in popular culture. This has elevated the study’s perception to a superstar status. But does an increase in stylistic popularity water down the field’s effectiveness? Studying graphic design in particular has become commonplace in America, and alongside that perception a growingly homogenous idea of what the study is has been manifested. This is in part due to its current status as being “cool.” What happens when something becomes cool? In his 2007 publication, The Etymology of Design: Pre-Socratic Perspective, Kostas Terzidis argued that “‘coolness,’ fashion, style, the unapologetically fashionable, desirable, and ephemeral are not about the new, but instead are deceptive, obfuscating methods of establishing and authority on art, architecture and design without offering the means to truly lead towards novelty.” This implies that the trendy nature of current design inhibits real innovation. If everybody wants to be like Shepard Fairey, we are left with a field plagued with imitators of an aesthetic becoming increasingly tired and contrived. Making a portrait of yourself that looks just like Barack Obama’s campaign posters does not make you a graphic designer. It merely imitates a temporary style delivered to you by the mass media. Imitation may be a good place to start as a designer, but to be successful (perhaps not monetarily) one must move into more experimental grounds.

Why is graphic design so popular these days?

There was once a time when the term “graphic design” was not commonplace at the family dinner table. Now one can take classes in design at community colleges across the country. So what changed? Why is it so trendy to study graphic design in particular? Is it fair to say that western culture has become decreasingly literary as a whole, while at the same time more accepting of the use of images to communicate? Many signs point to that assumption. Newspapers and magazines nowadays have an overwhelmingly higher percentage of pictures than those from fifty years ago. Mass media saturation must be an essential player in changing the average American’s psychology. Technology has always changed the way people communicate. Just as the advent of printing drove the written word away from pictorial resemblance, the upsurge of new media in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has made us accustomed to visual implications, rather than the audio-based phonic nature of the English alphabet. As a natural result of this cultural shift, the demand for visual communicators has gone up. The number of applications for graphic design has increased in the information age, and subsequently the number of schools offering the study has gone up. In response to this, many college-age students think making visuals will be easy, (which very well may be a vestige of printing-age society’s tendency to demote picture-making to mere child’s play). This new perception of graphic design has led to its popularity, but at the same time may dilute its potency if too many people go into the field for the wrong reasons.