What is Graphic Design
Newark, Quentin. 2002. What is Graphic Design?. Switzerland: RotoVision SA
"Graphic design is the most universal of all the arts"
"The father of the term 'graphic design' was an American, William Addison Dwiggins"
"In the matter of layout forget art at the start and use horse-sence. The printing designers whole duty is to make clear presentation of the message - to get the important statements forward and the minor parts placed so that they will not be overlooked. This called for an exercise in common sense and a faculty for analysis rather than for art." - William Addison Dwiggins
The initial ingredients of graphic design a century ago - "using Dwiggins' terminology: type letters, white spaces, decorations, borders and such accessories and pictures"
"Dwiggins saw graphic design as almost entirely concerned with the presentation of the artwork to be printed."
Today - "Graphic design includes typography, as well as other graphic disciplines: image-making and manipulation, the possibilities of which have broadened considerably since Dwiggins' day; logo design and identity schemes; exhibition design; packaging and so on."
Francis Meynell - 'With twenty-six soldiers of lead I have conquered the world' - "All the heights and depths and breadths of tangible and natural things - landscapes, sunsets, the scent of hay, the hum of bees, the beauty of which belongs to eyelids (and is falsely ascribed to eyes); all the immeasurable emotions and motions of the human mind, to which there seems no bound; ugly and terrible and mysterious thoughts and things, as well as beautiful - are all compassed, restrained, ordered in a trifling jumble of letters. Twenty-six signs!"
"In these two extracts we have the seed of the most fundamental tension that exists within design. [talking about the differing views of William Addison Dwiggins and Francis Maynell]. One position states that design is essentially a functional activity, with the needs of the paying client foremost. The opposing view regards design as too significant to be seen in such terms, and that it ought to be used in ways that emphasise and explore its expressive potential: function versus aesthetic possibility."
Defining something like graphic design is tricky - Christopher Prendergast, attempting to define literature, offered a warning: "A single, generalising description misses too much and is destined to do so, if it is offered as 'the' description".
Richard Hollis on describing his view of graphic design: "a kind of language with an uncertain grammar and a continuously expanding vocabulary". - "The primary role of design is identification: to say what something is, or where it came from (inn signs, banners and shields, masons' marks, publishers' and printers' symbols, company logos, packaging labels). Its second function is for information and instruction, indicating the relationship of one thing to another in direction, position and scale (maps, diagrams, directional signes). Most distinct from this is its third use, presentation and promotion (posters, advertisements), where it aims to catch the eye and make its message memorable."
A series of definitions or views on a definition of graphic design:
"Design is the child of the concept of efficiency"
Jorge Frascara
"Graphic design is the business of making or choosing marks and arranging them on a surface to convey an idea"
Richard Hollis
"…graphic design, in the end, deals with the spectator, and because it is the goal of the designer to be persuasive or at least informative, it follows that the designers problems are twofold: to anticipate the spectators reactions and to meet his own aesthetic needs."
Paul Rand
"Be niggardly with decorations, borders and such accessories. Do not pile up ornament like flowers at a funeral… Get acquainted with the shapes of the type letters themselves. They are the units out of which the structure is made - unassembled bricks and beams. Pick good ones and stick to them."
William Addison Dwiggins
"[on seeing Edward Johnson'a letterforms] I was caught unprepared. I did not know that suck beauties could exist. I was struck by lightning, as by a sort of enlightenment… and for a brief second seemed to know even as God knows."
Eric Gill
"The type which, through any arbritory warping of design of excess of 'colour', gets in the way of the mental picture to be conveyed, is bad type."
Beatrice Warde
The decisions that make up the practice of design:
'Making sense' - to simplify and clarify
'Creating difference' - to distinguish and stand out
"All design, even the newest new work, follows existing patterns, codes, shapes and genres. These patterns constitute the fabric of visual language - a language that is evolved and expanded, but, like any verbal or written utterance, all visual expression has to draw on its grammar if it is to be meaningful."
The more research I commit to discovering an order in the application of 'forms and codes' in visual language the more implausible a single collated document becomes. As in any creative pursuit there are clear sets of tools and theories but infinitely varied manners in which they may be combined. Herein lies the value of the designer, the sum of his experiences filtered by the requirements of a project into an idea that will be expanded and refined, creating a solution unique to that designer.
many ideas
ability to edit
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Shaughnessy, Adrian. 2005. How to be a graphic designer without loosing your soul. United Kingdom: Laurence Publishing Ltd
pg 145 'CRITERIA FOR GOOD WORK'
"What constitutes good work? The answer will always be subjective"
"Is the client happy? Is the job profitable? Is the project newsworthy?"
is the client happy?
if not - "By the nature of design we are obliged to make our clients happy. To fail to do this is to fail as a graphic designer."
is the job profitable? - both in a monetary and non-monetary sense.
profit can come in terms of exposure and recognition
is the project newsworthy?
"your works ability to attract attention, and, as a consequence of that attention, attract other work."
"in the current design scene nothing success like success."
"Of source, to succeed as a designer, you need to be efficient, pleasant to work with and utterly professional. But this alone will only get you so far. What really lights the blue touch paper is great work."
'Suitability for the intended audience'
"The problem about having this as an evaluation criterion is that designers rarely get to see or meet their audiences."
"We can have anecdotal evidence, and we catch glimpses of its effects from time to time, and we get feedback (especially in the interactive domain, where users can post their responses), but all this is haphazard and unscientific."
"Audience acceptance is usually covered in the reaction of our clients."
A QUESTION OF STYLE
Stefan Sagmeister "style = fart"
"What is style? In graphic design, it is the overall effect, the combination of all the particular choices of typefaces, use of space, colour and so on. The best phrase is 'miss-en-page', which translates as 'putting things on the page'.
style > "good design" > mass-market > cliche > embarrassment > "it's over" > fetish > revival > interesting > style > "good design" …
"I believe the search is driven by two factors: the need to unify the work, and the wish to infuse it with value."
"Style has a function: it limits choices. It excludes certain possibilities, and makes others follow in a chain - it creates a related set of design decisions."
"Because different styles can be applied to the same 'content' style can then be separated from the 'content'. All style is self-conscious and inorganic (it never emanates, unbidden, from the content) - it is chosen and imposed by the designer."
in choosing to utilise style the designer "wants to infuse her graphic design with an urgency, an authenticity, a contemporaneity."
"Style represents a set of concerned that can be traced back to a set of political ideas, but this relationship is very approximate at best, and disappears completely as time passes and changes the context."
'Modernisum' - "(very spartain, asymmetric layouts, sans serif type, all forms based on simple geometry) represented progressive politics, a fairer, more rational social order - universal democratic socialism."
this old power structure of those at the top controlling those at the bottom is "now being totally blown apart by the information revolution and by being truly able to network." the basis of power on which modernism was formed has changed, and so too has style.
"They [styles] become pre-programmed and once mapped out, they are no longer variable."
"Styles that are well-worn do not accept latecomers eager to bring fresh energy to new contexts."
"The idea that politics can be summoned up or signalled in style, is ultimately lazy and even futile."
pg 20
"The biggest challenge that faces a designer isn't the quest for novelty, but coming to grips with the fact hat much of what we do has little content."
Frank Philippin - "For me, the issue of clear, legible information… became an ethical one… if there is one goal in the designers approach to typography, it should be to clarity."
the distinction between advertising and graphic design
Steven Heller, writer - "Advertising and graphic design are equally concerned with selling, communicating, and entertaining… to appreciate one, the other is imperative."
my thoughts - advertising is a media type which, like almost everything, will employ graphic design in the creation of its visual identity.
Richard Hollis - "If advertising is the message, graphic design is the form"
"Like everything in broader culture, design is shaped by sources that pull and push it into new forms." - In other words, the progression of design is not a linear process that is easily described.
Design development is inseparable from technological development. e.g. Johann Gutenberg invented movable metal type and the printing press creating "most of the features of typography that exist today".
It is also linked to commerce - "The first typefaces were a form of branding."
combined these two produce standardisation.
good for many things - commons measurements, processes, terminology, efficiency.
"Standards seemed to embody a collective wisdom, as against the wilful arbitrariness"
Robin Kinross
Robert Hughes - wrote of art "there is no progress, only fluctuations of intensity."
"Early in the 20th century, design was seen to be an important part of the mechanism that would transform society and help build a utopia… Futurisum was just one aspect of this - Constructivisum, Supermatisum, the Bauhaus and its associated schools and teachers were others."
structuralisum, poststructuralisum
Katherine McCoy - "too often our [design] graduates and their work emerge as charming mannequins, voiceless mouthpieces for the messages of ventriloquist clients. Let us instead give designers their voices so they may participate and contribute more fully in the world around them."
"Lorraine wild draws up a shopping list of what we need to know about design work in order to really understand it: "Explicit information about the communications [between designer and client], the chain of command, the schedules, the budgets, the strategies, the presence (or absence) of marketing, the documentation…" in her review of Steven Hellers book on paul rand.
"Is there any need for theory at all? Can too much theory have an opposite effect - switching design from an intuitive, spontaneous, contingent activity to a way of working that is rigid?"
Johanna Drucker - "people who work from a theoretical perspective, whether it's in design or the visual arts, often do very stilted, self-conscious work that ultimately is only an illustration of the theoretical position."
"A theory is a set of ideas: a particular reading of history, associated speculations and value judgments and ideas about the future. We all operate with a set of ideas underpinning what we do. Usually we do not call it theory, because it has built up slowly; an incremental growth of assumptions through hundreds of thousands of incidents, conversations, glancing at illustrated books and magazines, watching the television."
An idea I have come across in conducting this research is that a theory is not really what we think it is, it is in fact the combined set of experiences each of us have had in our lives that underpin how we operate. This brought to mind a conversation I once had with a friend, DK, in which we were discussing the way people were, most likely focusing on some controversial issue like racism or sexism, and how they do not see themselves as being 'in the wrong'. The theory was that given the same set of circumstances and experiences any person would come out the same, of source their is a grey area here in how far you push the similarity of circumstances and whither you believe in free will. The main outcome of this one conversation was that I landed on using to word 'stack' to describe the combined experiences of a persons entire life driving who they are, I imagined all the elements of their life piled up in a stack. My experiences, or 'stack', are different to yours therefore I am a different person. Not being well versed in philosophy I do not know what the established term may be if there is one or what further implications there may be. The main point of this digression is to establish my own opinion that a persons 'theory' and 'stack' are different.
Katherine McCoy - "Garbage in, garbage out"
"Dividing up graphic design into categories is essentially a fruitless exercise. It ought to be clear, at this point in the book, that 'design' in a portmanteau term: it covers a number of interlaced activities that do not fall into distinct parts. But even an elementary analytical undertaking - the work 'analysis' itself mens 'undoing' - leaves us no other choice."
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assimilation from Takuya Hosogane on Vimeo.