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Rick Poynor, design critic and founder of the incisive British graphic-design magazine “Eye,” spoke to an audience of graphic designers in San Francisco recently, as part of the Design Lecture Series sponsored by the local AIGA and SFMOMA. He presented his audience, which looked to be mostly young designers, with a sort of “manifesto” (he made the quotes audible) about graphic design, consisting largely of paired lists of “six vices” and “six virtues.” It was a call to responsibility and intelligence, and against the complacency of uncritical thinking. Judging from the few questions and remarks from the audience at the end, I’m not sure that his thoughtful seeds fell on fertile ground.
Manifestos Then & Now
Poynor has very solid credentials, as well as a track record of critical writing in the graphic-design field. I’ve always found his way of presenting his ideas just a little too scholarly for my taste—just a little too much of the jargon of academia, even though he often turns it on itself for his own purposes—but perhaps by using that language he can reach out to people immured in the academic fortress and seduce them into noticing the rest of the world. (Yes, of course I exaggerate—but we all know the highbrow tendencies that infest the academic world and that undermine its strengths. Goading and gadflying are constantly required.)
The overblown promotional copy about Poynor in the program (which of course he can hardly be held responsible for) calls him “the messiah of message over medium.” It goes on, “In a recent manifesto, he argued that designers need to worry about meaning more than marketing, and content instead of branding.” The manifesto referred to is Poynor’s”First Things First Manifesto 2000,” the updated version of a rallying call first issued by 22 “visual communicators” in 1964. Both the original and the renewed version (33 signers in 2000) are clear attacks on commercialism, urging graphic designers to put usefulness and concern for the public weal ahead of their pocketbooks—or at least to avoid confusing the two.
In a way, Poynor’s recent talk was an elaboration of this idea. After all, as he pointed out, the uncritical blending of salesmanship and culture is the condition of our times. We could use some clear-eyed discrimination of one thing from another—both when there seemed to be an unending wave of esteem and money that graphic designers could ride forever, and now when the wave has crashed and everyone is trying to turn life rafts into surfboards and escape the wreckage.
The Vices
Poynor’s six vices are:
- Relativism
- Commerce = culture
- Noise
- Homogeneity
- Rebellion
- The Blockbuster effect
By “relativism,” he means the widespread assumption that everyone’s opinion is just as “valid” as everyone else’s, so that no value judgments are possible. He quoted an “American phrase” that he said seemed to be making great inroads in this country (I confess I hadn’t heard it before): “It’s all good.” As you might guess, Poynor doesn’t believe for a moment that every opinion is as good as the last. Open-mindedness, yes; flaccid thinking and a refusal to take stands, no.
This question poses itself in the context of our current society, which seems based on the assumption that Commerce and Culture are the same thing. How often have we heard our culture described purely in terms of what sells, what’s popular, what the divine Market has decided to value? Poynor spent quite a while on this subject, pointing to the confusion between editorial content and marketing in such “magalogs” as “Sony Style,” which sell a consumer lifestyle as a way of life. Where, he asked, is the independent point of view that we expect to find in real art, when it has been subsumed into a marketing tool?
The distinction of an “independent point of view” is a very important one. At the end of the talk, one of the audience members asked Poynor how he would deal with the inherent conflict in getting corporate sponsorship for expensive events like this series of design lectures. Poynor acknowledged that it’s always a question and that, in essence, eternal vigilance is necessary, but he also pointed out that, while he wasn’t familiar with the sponsors of his own talk, no one had tried to dictate an agenda to him or censor him in any way. At times, the influence of sponsors can be benign. The possibility for corruption (intellectual as well as monetary) is always there, but that doesn’t mean it’s always indulged in.
By “noise,” Poynor meant simply the distractions and diversions of our “information society”—where so much of the so-called information inundating us is just noise.
Poynor’s fourth vice, “homogeneity,” doesn’t strike me as such a vicious problem. Perhaps in Europe it really is possible to feel that the agenda of “good design” has been carried out to such a degree that there’s truly “too much design” in the everyday world, but that’s not part of my daily experience of living in the United States. Poynor has a declared preference for the uncertain, the unfinished, the rough-edged over the slick, and he quite rightly heaps scorn on graphic design that looks clean and sharp and finely made but says nothing. But there’s nothing about clean design that implies superficiality, and nothing about rough “non-design” that implies authenticity.
Poynor touched on this with his fifth vice, “rebellion.” He was acknowledging something that’s been happening since the end of the 1960s, when rebellion informed a whole segment of our culture: the “co-opting” (to use the 1970 term) of protest and rebellion into the mainstream. Thirty years ago, jeans companies were using images of the counterculture to market their product to the very people who saw themselves as rebels; today, fonts and graphic styles created as an anti-design statement are being used to sell us everything from cold remedies to cars.
The “Blockbuster effect” is nothing more than the commercial enforcement of homogeneity by huge chain stores in every neighborhood with identical, unvarying product lines. He used the Blockbuster chain of video stores as his example. (His local outlet looks just the same as one in Chattanooga or one in San Francisco. The ones in the TV commercials are the best—patronized solely by fashion models with luxurious apartments, and suffused with an ethereal glow. “My local store lacks this last feature,” he said.)
The Virtues
So what are the six virtues with which Poynor would counter these sins?
- Being critical
- History
- Smallness
- Imperfection
- Dialogue
- Refusal
Perhaps these are self-explanatory. Turning a critical eye on the world around us, including its graphic design, seems an obvious response to living in a world that’s trying to sell us something all the time. And if criticism is going to be anything more than reflexive rebellion, we have to know something of what came before this moment: therefore, “history.” (Poynor didn’t point out that there’s nothing more fascinating than finding out what went before, the campfire tales that make up history. It’s not all academic jargon and exam questions.)
“Smallness” is a reaction to the all-blanketing chains as well as to the megabuck theory that only what’s big and appeals to a mass audience is important. (Curiously, he said, people who advocate paying attention to a smaller audience are frequently dismissed as “elitist.” What could be more effectively, indeed efficiently, elitist than the tyranny of the huge?) His “smallness” could also be described as “localness,” since it’s the local, “site-specific” things that Poynor cherishes. He cited the example of Cornel Windlin, a Swiss designer in his mid-thirties who worked in London for several years and then returned to Zurich, where he makes posters and other graphic works that are tied to local events. Windlin also worries that perhaps he’s too isolated or limited in Zurich, away from the metropolis, from London or New York. Poynor suggests that while these worries are natural enough, perhaps they aren’t all that important.
I’ve already alluded to Poynor’s preference for the imperfect, the unpolished, the rough-hewn. He quoted Robert Venturi Robert Venturi’s phrase “messy vitality,” and argued that since design is something fundamental to being human, it can’t be left solely in the hands of designated practitioners. Poynor seemed to think that design professionals had taken the possibility of designing things away from the public through increasing professionalization. To me that seems like a perspective that’s only possible from inside the design profession; in the real world, I’d say that graphic design is practiced by far more people today than ever before. As a designer, I’m always trying to instill a higher level of excellence in the design that’s produced, but I’m very, very happy to see the tools of design in so many hands.
“Dialogue.” Designers, like any other citizens of our world, have to take responsibility for their effect on everyone else; neither graphic design nor any other profession exists in a vacuum. As Poynor pointed out, graphic designers claim great importance for their work, right up to the point where someone asks them to take responsibility for the effect of what they do. “We can’t have it both ways,” he said. The counter to this is “refusal”—the refusal to take on morally odious work, but also the refusal to live our whole lives as consumers. He cited the extreme example of Michael Landi, an artist in London who set up a storefront art project on Oxford Street where a team of workmen fed all of his belongings into an industrial machine that turned them into recyclable grains. Poynor didn’t suggest that anyone else ought to do this (he wasn’t about to himself), but he held it up as a fine gesture. Responding to a question from the audience, he said that the interesting thing might be to interview Landi a year later and find out whether he’d replaced all the material goods he tossed away.
The Audience
Poynor was certainly speaking to the right audience. Who could embody more precisely the group of people his questions are directed at than an AIGA crowd attending a Design Lecture across the street from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art? Judging from the questions at the end, his vice of relativism is alive and well, and the habit of critical thinking isn’t practiced among designers as carefully as one might wish. I was surprised by his saying that he thought the kind of discussion embodied by this lecture series was seldom found in design talks in the UK (where I think of the art of intelligent criticism as being more developed than here; perhaps it’s just a facility with debating techniques), but I was encouraged by the large audience. Maybe some of them will go home and find themselves arguing with him.
This article was last modified on January 8, 2023
This article was first published on May 25, 2001
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Great post!
If you want to find out about Rick Poynor’s lecture “Uncanny: Surrealism and Graphic Design”, this might be of your interest:
https://www.jotta.com/jotta/design/home/article/v2-design-articles/1536/uncanny-surrealism-and-graphic-design
Check it out!
Team jotta