GRAPHIC DESIGN THEORY?

• Graphic Design Theory?
  
  Graphic design has often looked to architecture as an
  
  intellectual model. We long to infuse our work with the same kind
  
  of dense theoretical knowledge and the same kind of broad ranging,
  
  legendary critiques. But we're not architects. We're graphic
  
  designers. Our role is less defined. We cross between print and
  
  web, 2-D and 3-D. Our work is easier to produce and more ephemeral.
  
  This fluidity, coupled with a discipline-wide pragmatic streak,
  
  makes it difficult to establish a defined body of graphic design
  
  theory.
  
  Or does it?
  
  Graphic designers have written about the ideas behind their work
  
  since the inception of the profession. Consider F. T. Marinetti,
  
  László Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer, Josef Müller-Brockman, Karl
  
  Gerstner, Katherine McCoy, Jan van Toorn and, more recently,
  
  Jessica Helfand, Dmitri Siegel and Kenya Hara. This body of work is
  
  small compared to architecture and fine arts, but it is passionate
  
  and smart.
  
  Texts about graphic design fall under different categories of
  
  “theory.” Some analyze the process of making. Think Bauhaus
  
  experiments, methodologies that fall under the umbrella of
  
  International Typographic Style, and contemporary explorations
  
  labeled “design research.” Some texts examine the ideas behind the
  
  visual work. Authors “read” designs or design texts and put them
  
  into a wider historical/cultural context. And some apply outside
  
  theoretical discourses to the field of graphic
  
  design—deconstruction, semiotics, gender studies. Many seminal
  
  texts, of course, blur such categorizations.
  
  Through my research I work to emphasize the value of our own
  
  theoretical base and inspire others to read and write more. Working
  
  on a recent book project got me thinking about a range of issues
  
  that face the profession today. Theory can help us address
  
  them.
  
  

  
  

  
  (Clockwise from left): Katherine McCoy's “See Read”
  
  poster for Cranbrook Graduate Design, 1989, a photographic collage
  
  of recent graduate student work overlaid by a list of possibly
  
  opposing design values and a diagram of communication theories—a
  
  model for how deconstruction and structuralist/poststructuralist
  
  literary theories might be applied to graphic design's visual and
  
  verbal processes; a spread from László Moholy-Nagy's
  
  Malerei, Photographie, Film (Painting, Photography, Film), 1925;
  
  and a spread from Graphic Design: The New Basics (New York:
  
  Princeton Architectural Press, 2008), written and designed by
  
  Ellen Lupton and Jennifer Cole Phillips, in which Lupton
  
  explores emerging universals within the practice of graphic design,
  
  including newly relevant concepts like transparency and
  
  layering.
  
  

  
  

  Design increasingly lives in the actions of its users

  
  Think Flickr, Facebook, Etsy, Lulu, Threadless and the multitude
  
  of blogs. Users approach software and the web with the expectation
  
  of filling in their own content and shaping their own visual
  
  identities—often with guidance from prepackaged forms. Dmitri
  
  Siegel calls this phenomenon “the
  
  templated mind.” Designers are grappling with their own place
  
  in this DIY phenomenon. Creativity is no longer the sole territory
  
  of a separate “creative class.” Designers can lead this new
  
  participatory culture by developing frameworks that enable others
  
  to create; doing so, however, means allowing our once-specialized
  
  skills to become more widespread and accessible. That transfer of
  
  knowledge is threatening to some, liberating to others.
  
  

  Technology alters our aesthetics even as we struggle against
  
  it

  
  Designers everywhere strive to create unique visual voices
  
  despite the prevalence of stock photography and the monolithic hold
  
  of Adobe Creative Suite. Simultaneously, as noted by design and
  
  media critic Lev Manovich, specific techniques, artistic
  
  languages, and vocabularies previously isolated within individual
  
  professions are being imported and exported across software
  
  applications and professions. This new common language of hybridity
  
  and “remixability,” through which most visual artists now work, is
  
  unlike anything seen before. Technology has irreversibly changed
  
  our sense of aesthetics, giving us both more power and less.
  
  

  We should encourage collaboration and communal experience

  
  What's the good of multi-touch technology if we don't want to
  
  sit down together? Collaboration and community fuel world-changing
  
  design solutions. Despite our connections online, many people are
  
  experiencing a growing sense of personal isolation. How can we, as
  
  designers, combat that isolation with projects that foster
  
  community? Media activist Kalle Lasn has warned designers: “We have
  
  lost our plot. Our story line. We have lost our soul.” Producing
  
  work that fosters real connections may be one way of getting that
  
  soul back.
  
  

  We all write more today than we did 15 years ago

  
  Blogs, emails, Twitter-we communicate with many more people
  
  through text than through speech. If grammar imparts order and
  
  structure to our thoughts, then this increase in writing brings
  
  value to our society and our discipline. Design authorship, an
  
  issue debated by influential figures like Michael Rock, Ellen
  
  Lupton and Jessica Helfand over the course of the last decade,
  
  foregrounded the active relationship between text and image and
  
  between a discipline and its discourse. The expansion of written
  
  communication makes possible thoughtful contributions to the larger
  
  discourse of design by a wider slice of the graphic design
  
  population.
  
  

  The central metaphor of our current society is the network

  
  Even if we don't all understand the computer codes that run the
  
  back end of our digital age, we can comprehend the networked
  
  structure of our day and design to meet it. Avant-garde artists at
  
  the beginning of the last century, including F. T. Marinetti,
  
  László Moholy-Nagy and Aleksandr Rodchenko, were adept at
  
  activating their own networks: newspapers, magazines, lectures and
  
  written correspondence. Recently, I heard lectures by Emily
  
  Pilloton of Project H and
  
  Cameron Sinclair of Architecture for
  
  Humanity, two young designers who are creating opportunities,
  
  locally and around the world, for designers to improve basic human
  
  living conditions. The connectivity of the web is critical to their
  
  success. Efficient networks for spreading change and prosperity are
  
  already in place. We just have to grasp them.
  
  Designers in the early 20th century rose to the challenges of
  
  their societies. We too can take on the complexities of our time,
  
  the rising millennium. Delving into our theoretical base equips us
  
  to address critical material problems in the world and our
  
  discipline.