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Graphic Design as Writing

Let's engage in a thought experiment: what do you know about the act of writing? What happens when someone starts to write? Briefly, writing as we know it, means that an author constructs their arguments to themselves. The author needs to anticipate possible objections, defenses, and attacks on his arguments, which means writing is a one-party rational argument. As we continue with this exercise, I'd like to ask: what if graphic design is like the act of writing?

Similarly to writing, there is an author - a graphic designer. However, they construct visual arguments, not necessarily for themselves - but for someone else, the commissioner. In the same way writers anticipate possible feedback to their arguments, anticipation is a concept graphic designers apply as well in their work process. And because they make information accessible to the public, they need to anticipate the possible reaction of the readers, when observing the final artifact. This means that a designer needs to displace himself from his position and be able to think like someone else, in an imaginary situation. Above all, this task requires high emotional intelligence. 

Anticipating an imaginary experience of someone else, that will possibly happen in the future, is an extremely complicated task. Graphic designers, besides mastering a craft, are required to be sensible human beings, that are willing to develop their emotional intelligence to communicate, understand  how others observe, think, and act. This leads us to positionality.

POSITIONALITY

We should always remember that designers are always acting out of the position of strength. In most cases, we persuade readers through our skills. We shouldn't make exploitation the natural state of our discipline. Talking about exploitation, it is important to introduce the notion of positionality which I first got to know through Sheila de bretteville's talk at Walker Art Center (2018). According to her;

One's positionality is contingent on context; for example, our relation to power in a given situation often determines what we see and how we see it. This notion has to do with the idea that any aspect of our identity - race, gender, ethnicity - as well as any image, object, etc. can have multiple significations based on who is looking and their positionally to what is seen. In this light, being aware of positionally helps us think more along the lines of building circuits than building linear narratives, as well as wherever you position resistors on printed circuit effects whether you increase or decrease their collective resistance.

De Bretteville's statement leads me to Roland Barthes's essay, "The Death of the Author" (1967). One of his arguments is that the meaning of texts is created through the experience of the reader, not just by the intention of the author, and therefore texts have different connotations. At the time, and up until now, this was a groundbreaking argument because he tries to shift the focus from the authors the ones who create meaning, to the subjective view of each reader. But, how can we relate his argument to graphic design practice? Regarding Barthes' argument, I am asking myself: can we shift the focus from the intention of the graphic designer to the meaning created through the reader's experience? Through this point of view, graphic design artifacts don't have one coherent and central meaning, but rather several ones, which are created by the different reader's experiences. From this perspective, and according to De Baretteville, we will be able to take on closer consideration to others' positionality and will follow more thoughtful questions of race, gender, ethnicity, and many other crucial questions that should be central to graphic design discourse.

Further readings:

Michael Rock: Designer as Author (1996)

Ellen Lupton: Designer as Producer (1998)

The Death of the Author: WTF? Roland Barthes' Death of the Author Explained | Tom Nicholas (2019

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Having the feeling of flow ain’t easy.

Have you ever thought to yourself, what are the main goals of graphic design? I did. I thought about our interpretation, hierarchy, contrast, and even about persuading others. To examine this more precisely, I tried to displace myself from the role of a graphic designer and positioned myself for a short while in the shoes of the reader.

When actively reading or passively perceiving projects, some artifacts make me feel stuck and slowed down. It’s like having a hike one a rainy day, and the soil is wet. Your shoes are full of mud, you stop and ask yourself “why the hell did I even start this hike?”, The challenge is bigger than expected and you just want to quit. Do you get the comparison? On the other side, there are projects that I experience the feeling of a natural reading flow. I feel grounded and comfortable while naturally gliding through the content. It’s like riding bikes without hands, a moment you decide to lose control while respecting the force of progress.

But how does a project get to that point? Why do some projects get the readers to feel the flow, and others are calling them to close it and move on to the next one?

The start of my hustle In the last two years, I have been thinking about the possible goals of graphic design, as a discpline that takes an active part in the production of culture. I read issues of Looking Closer: Critical Writings on Graphic Design 2, 3, 4, Design as Art by Bruno Munari, and Design as an Attitude by Alice Rawsthorn. And there are many more podcasts that I will mention in the future. The more I dig in the topic, the more challenging it is for me to frame those goals. As the contemporary discourse on design is mostly about processes and contributions of design to society’s structure, I find it hard to conceptualize my thoughts on graphic design. Up until listening to a podcast with Ellen Lupton, and things started to fall into place

The light at the end of the tunnel At this point, what became clear to me, is that graphic design is all about crafting experiences. As we all know, the discipline ranges through different formats, materials, and mediums, so graphic designers create a broad type of experiences. From reading to interacting, and perceiving. Graphic designers construct subjective experiences for others. Due to industrialization and historical developments in the field - the experiences are mostly directed to a mass number of people, and as the quality of the masses is unpredictable, It naturally asks for guidance.

At this point, graphic design becomes a practice that is concerned with standardization. Standardization, is a process of making things of the same type and that have the same basic features - sounds familiar, right? When graphic designers apply it to information, it creates legibility, and legibility is one of the basic elements of what we call “good design”.

I know what you are thinking - legibility? is THAT what all this is about?

You are not going to get the easy way out from here. Legibility is crucial for the reader to experience that loss of control (just like riding the bike without hands). The thing is, the more we will be engaged in understanding how to establish legibility, our work will be suited to the need of the project, and as well accessible to a greater number of people.

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Typography as a resource

Language expressions come in several forms: there are the bodily articulations of hand signals, sounds we produce to communicate verbally, and written language that help us display texts. Written language is in fact a reduction of our communication to a visual code. Typography plays here an essential role, as a powerful resource that helps to design information into a legible text. Through legibility and readability, typography helps to manifest attitudes that are rooted in the meaning of the text, and making it easier for written language to be displayed publicly in order to reach a greater number of people.

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The form of representations

What if I told you that graphic design above all, is concerned by form of representations? Some might think that it is narrowing down graphic design to a shallow and dry meaning. The big question is what graphic design is, if not the engagement of designers in the way ideas are shown or described?

To continue, I would like to propose a view in which representation of ideas can be analysed: How and Why an idea is shown

‘How’ is the decisions graphic designers make: choosing typefaces, colours, composition, imageries, material and other form-like decisions. It is basically a manifestation of skills and craftsmanship.

‘Why’ is the reason and logic to show the idea in a certain way. This follows a designer’s intellect and humanity that determines the logical solutions offered by the designer.

To briefly conclude, graphic design is a combination of skills, craftsmanship, aesthetics and intellectual contribution. It is expected from graphic designers to inform themselves by the science of form and reasons, and express them through their intellectual inputs.    

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Methods of interpretation

Graphic designers are naturally positioned to establish a set of formal remarks that explain a subject, or express an opinion on it. The remarks create new meaning of the subject and it constitutes a demand for graphic designers to have skills of interpretation, one that communicates their knowledge about the case of the project they are working on.

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The lens of now

Looking at the root of what graphic designers do, graphic design is mainly about designing information that is in the world, both private and public. Information, as a thing in itself - is a matter particularly produced in the present moment, it can't be produced in the past and neither in the future. History for example is a study of the past, and science fiction normally deal with futuristic concepts that are in future times. Both history and science fiction are terms that relate to the past or future through the lens of the present. By being a type of communications that escorts history or fiction beyond time, graphic design is a filter that designers show the contemporary production of information, therefore it’s important to look on graphic design as response to the time and space it’s being made.

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The matter of hierarchy

Graphic design, as a form of communication that is partly based on the ability of people to read, is naturally connected to the logic of human languages. One of the interesting notes I had while reading the book Metaphors We Live By was that we speak in linear order that as well affects the way we read. Speaking about Latin languages, linear reading in this sense is how a series of letters and words are following another, to create the meaning of sentences. Graphic designers take an active part of constructing reading experiences which in some cases needs to be based on the concept of linearity, hence linearity becomes a matter that supports graphic designers to form messages.

Let’s take a simple example to show how linearity is applied as a matter for graphic designers, a poster:

When thinking about poster design, there’s one word that immediately comes in my mind: hierarchy. The poster is in fact a medium that holds information that is arranged according to their importance, that makes hierarchy one of the main ingredient in the method of communication through a poster, linear reading gives the room for hierarchy to perform as device that graphic designers construct the communication of the message. Without linearity, the hierarchy won’t function.

Poster by Emil Ruder, das Kinderbilderbuch, 1960

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Graphic design, a destructive act?

Graphic design is a persuasive form of speech which uses visual arguments to direct a spectator’s mind, in order to see and understand a certain message that the client invites to design. By being a persuasive form speech, it asks to grab the attention of others to convey a message.

Working closely together with the concept of attention span, graphic designers craft artefacts that wish to create an unconscious reaction to make others being concentrated on the delivered information. The craft of designing artefacts that engage with the attention of others can be a destructive act and therefore needs to be handled carefully and with respect to the spectators.

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Can we benefit from failing?

Failing means to not succeed in what you are to achieve or expected to do, graphic designers tend to work with an expectation in the back of their minds, most of the times a certain solution is under our noses, especially in times where looking for inspiration is an essential part of practicing graphic design. As a starting point for examining if failing can contribute to our practice, I would suggest that shifting the focus from achieving a solution to achieve and embrace failures as part of the process will be beneficial and perhaps it can support the search of new methodologies of communications.

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To show and speak

A metaphor is a figure of speech that describes an object or action in a way that isn’t literally true, but helps explain an idea or make a comparison. Graphic design at its basic, is supporting ideas that are used as a symbol of something else.

Talking about visual identities, they support places by showing what they are made of in a visible way, logos and logotypes are serving as metaphors for the places that they help to visually represent.

To focus a bit, let’s take an example; a logotype for The Library Of Congress, part of the brand identity that Pentagram developed. They treated the logotype so it will serve as a visual metaphor, which comes from the idea of a book shelf. The letters themselves are literally acting as a metaphor - they make us understand and experience one kind of things (books) in terms of another (typography).

In most cases, graphic design is about fusing two ideas together to create something new - which is exactly the nature of metaphors. I believe that the more we will be engaged in understanding metaphors and their different rhetoric effects, could help us to develop visual solutions which are supporting the essence of graphic design - to show and speak one thing in terms of another.

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Graphic design is infrastructure

As citizens living together, they are depending on their ability to communicate. They do it through words and writing, and the more mass of people need to see the communication, the better you need graphic design to be around. It enables, sustains and enhances societal living conditions.

As much as we need infrastructures like roads, tunnels, bridges or railways to help citizens to commute, graphic design is serving as an infrastructure that helps escorting information and ideas from place to place.

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Podcast: An artwork a day #41 - Barbara Kruger: Forever (by Ran Altamirano)

As part of my Master studies at HFBK Hamburg I recorded a short podcast about Barbara Kruger’s work Forever [ shorturl.at/knxFJ ] Shared some insights about the impact of text based artworks, the nature of communications and more.

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Composing stories

Story telling is one of the basic elements that holds the work of graphic design together. Whether we design a visual identity or a book, we tell a story in the language of graphic design. It has a different setting from films or novels, because graphic design doesn’t carry linear characteristics that have a beginning, a middle and an end. The story it tells is mostly ambiguous and can deliver several connotation at once. In most cases, there is a slight hint which guide to understand the beginning but brings a promise of the whole. A well crafted hint is ellegantly hidden from the eye (Like a gestalt in a logo), but when the eye reveals it, a fast forward is played and we witness a rich and vivid story that the graphic designer composed.

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Containers

Words are containers of highly complicated concepts, typography helps to visually transform concepts through time and space.

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Transcending the past

A fellow student of mine once said in one of our critical discourses, “Written language has something to do with the past, oral language has something to do with the present”. At that moment I realised that graphic designers, especially the ones who work with printed matter, work mostly with the concept of the past as a material that they shape. With this in mind I am asking myself if it makes what we do irrelevant, or even old. I think that as long as we make a stand with our interpretations, it doesn’t mean that our work is irrelevant, the opposite - we take concepts and ideas of the past and transform it to something of the present times which are concealed and preserved through the printed matter. Which led me to the conclusion that words are a great vehicle for transcending the past into the present and the future.

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Paths for information

Graphic designers are interpreters of information, we receive it in a certain state of readability and apply our own interpretation which acts as a path that support a transmit of information from one mind to another. Our design work acts as a filter which eventually being filtered again with the interpretation of our readers, the manner in which people understand our work is the final stage of information processing which we are directing.

Why the readers interpret our work the way they do is already out of our control and has a lot to do with the subjective experience of different individuals and their position in the world. Knowing how readers will interpret our work could be key for a successful project, or perhaps the spoke on our wheel. It’s a paradox that builds up through the process of our work, should we be led by the realisation of how people will interpret our work, or should we trust our authorship as graphic designers to complete the work of shaping paths for transmitting information?

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What we don’t design

I recently got to know the French artist called Daniel Buren, which is famous by his colourful stripe pattern used in different kind of mediums and materials in several situations. I specifically liked this 1968 photo from Paris, which he pasted paper on a billboard in the middle of Paris. 

I find this specific installation very close related to what we do as graphic designers. He of course abstracted our act into a simple form, but I think it’s an accurate way to illustrate what we do with positioning information in public. Graphic design is behaving as a layer in the public landscape, we intrude spaces and appropriate people’s attention. If not made properly and consciously, graphic designers can easily looked as one’s who control and persuade others with visual means.  

Through this photo, we can also see how the stripes emphasise the advertisement and information next to it, and vice versa - how the other information next to the work emphasise and back up the work itself. An interesting anecdote arise here that we should bear in our minds, that sometimes it’s not about what we design, but rather what we don’t design.