dot-font: Does Graphic Design Need Nudging?

dot-font was a collection of short articles written by editor and typographer John D. Barry (the former editor and publisher of the typographic journal U&lc) for CreativePro.  If you’d like to read more from this series, click here.

Eventually, John gathered a selection of these articles into two books, dot-font: Talking About Design and dot-font: Talking About Fonts, which are available free to download here.  You can find more from John at his website, https://johndberry.com.

Rudy VanderLans, in his editorial in “Emigre” No. 66, describes his ideal for critical writing about graphic design: “My own vision of the perfect writer is of one who can write engagingly, has a distinct personal style, gives us new insights into our profession, and writes in a way that designers (and outsiders alike) can understand, yet challenges them intellectually.”

Well, yes. That sounds about right. Unfortunately, few of the writers who contribute essays or interviews to this issue of “Emigre” live up to it, except sporadically. Is it so hard to write coherently and thoughtfully, without succumbing to rote and cant? Apparently it is.

Writers about graphic design, like writers about the arts, literature, music, architecture, or almost any kind of intellectual activity, reinvent the wheel constantly. The wheel is a fascinating thing to make, which is why we build it over and over again, but once you’ve gone through one revolution, it’s boring and repetitive to watch another one roll by. The essays in this issue (and the earlier essays they’re responding to, I suspect) are full of cries of alarm, insisting urgently that Things Must Change, and searching desperately for an orthodoxy to disavow. Some of the writers seem to think that salvation comes from the academy—that is, established academic programs—while others view the academy as the enemy.

I’m generalizing, of course. But it comes naturally; after reading through this issue, how could I not? I approached “Emigre” No. 66 with high hopes; it looked like a potentially invigorating collection of essays, with some intelligent observation of contemporary graphic design and some lively ideas about where it might go. But after finishing all the essays, I found them blending together, with too many of them simply leaving an impression of poses struck at a student/faculty cocktail party. And now I’m only one step away from doing the same thing myself. It’s dispiriting.

The Good Stuff

This kind of discouragement must be what created the slightly sour tone of Jeff Keedy’s “Dumb Ideas,” one of the more incisive pieces in the issue. I recognized the tone, because it’s one I can succumb to myself, in similar circumstances. He’s right on target with some of his short rants, especially against his final “dumb idea”: “What is needed in design is a new…” The fact that some of the “dumb ideas” are mutually contradictory statements makes it clear that what he’s really annoyed by is simpleminded, one-track thinking.

The best article is Lorraine Wild’s “Castles Made of Sand,” which is a response to Rick Poynor’s recent book, “No More Rules: Graphic Design and Postmodernism.” (Another essay in this issue, “Postmodern Postmortem” by Sam Potts, is also a response to Poynor’s book.) The reason it’s good is that Wild engages her subject personally and directly, writing from her own experience and showing how ideas grow out of events in people’s lives, not out of some nebulous breeding ground of theory and Platonic ideals. Wild criticizes Poynor for not giving enough context, for not taking into account everything else that was going on in the world during the time he’s talking about (the 1980s and 1990s); since I have yet to read Poynor’s book, I can’t judge whether Wild’s criticism of it is justified, but it’s a reasonable thing to ask for.

In recounting some of her own reactions to graphic design in the early ’80s, Wild expresses something that seems to exercise most of the writers in this issue: the frustration of being offered modernism as a fait accompli, an answer to all the questions you haven’t even asked yet. “Could you be forgiven, perhaps, for beginning to suspect that what you were being taught was not actually modernism at all, but habit? Or bizarre fraternity rituals?”

The argument with modernism is very much like the argument the modernists had with their own predecessors: we’re young, we’re new, we want to change the world, and to do so, we’ve got to smash whatever came before. And now the same skeptical eye is being turned on modernism’s successor, postmodernism. It happens with every status quo; there’s always a bunch of young would-be revolutionaries who want to overturn it. They look at what’s being produced and say, quite rightly, “Most of this is junk!” But most of what’s produced in any field, new or old, is junk. Revolutionary idealism doesn’t guarantee better work; neither does adherence to accepted rules.

The Things of Everyday Design

Since graphic design is the visual organization of the elements of our environment, it makes sense that the common standard should be clear and straightforward. But it also has to be easy to implement. When the young Jan Tschichold was urging the standards of the New Typography on German printers, he wrote for the people who actually did the work, those who were responsible for the finished product; and when he later thought better of this effort, it was partly because he felt that the techniques of the New Typography were too demanding for ordinary printers to put into effect. You could almost say that people “print best what they print most”; that is, what ordinary people, whether they’re German printers in the 1920s or American office workers in the 2000s, are most likely to turn out on a piece of paper is what they’re used to doing, and seeing.

If they’re used to seeing something complicated and ornate, that’s what they’ll make, or try to make; if they’re used to seeing something simple and unadorned, they’ll aim for that. (If they’re used to Fraktur, they’ll use it; if they’re used to Helvetica, they’ll use that.) It takes great skill to practice graphic design well, whether it’s a circus poster or the most strictly gridded Swiss-style info-design.

I can’t help thinking of my friend Sam Hamill’s observation about academic poets. Sam, a very non-academic poet himself, had done his share of railing against the rote-learning and mediocrity that comes so often out of college writing workshops, but he also drew a parallel with ancient China, which produced some of the world’s greatest poets. The Chinese bureaucracy was based on an examination system that included literature as a major component; every bureaucrat was capable of composing a poem, and frequently did so. Of course most of the poems were mediocre, but they were at least formally competent. There’s something to be said, Sam pointed out, for a system that produces a reasonable level of skill and discipline on a widespread basis. Such a system won’t create genius, but none ever does; genius springs up out of whatever soil it finds, unpredictably.

Graves of Academe

In this issue of “Emigre,” some of the writers seem to think that the only alternative to graphic design as a hard-headed, money-based business is graphic design as an academic discipline. They’re confusing critical writing with academic writing, and complexity with substance. The best critics are direct and clear; they also delve deep, but their digging implement is an incisive mind, not a finely honed theory.

Even Rudy VanderLans falls into this trap, as he compares the off-the-cuff writing on graphic-design weblogs with the dense prose of the academy. “Academic writing tends to be more difficult to read, as it tackles complex ideas, or looks at seemingly simple ideas and shows us that they’re not. In terms of writing, it stands at the polar opposite of blog chatter.” But complex language does not guarantee complex ideas; sometimes it obscures them.

The dialog can, and should, go on. Graphic design has an effect on the world, and it’s a useful way of thinking about the stew of information that we live in. There is absolutely no point in dealing with graphic design in isolation, whether you’re studying it or practicing it. Empty theorizing is as deadening to the soul as a stubborn insistence that only the commercial transaction matters. I applaud “Emigre”‘s willingness to get designers talking to each other; I just wish more of them had something enlightening to say.

Forget the manifestoes, forget the barricades, forget the theories. Just use your common sense, do a good job, and aim for the stars

  • anonymous says:

    I really can’t form an opinion on this article. I have met all different types of people that do and look at many things differently. I suppose graphic design is similar with all kinds of differing mixes and perspectives. Just like folks that write content.

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