The well documented crusade against binary or polarised (or ternary) thinking took a bit of a setback with this seemingly well rehearsed (oft repeated?) discussion on Mike Dempsey’s Graphic Journey Blog.
Asking the question; “Do graphic designers read or just look?” it takes in a selective history of graphic design, and illicits a chorus of ‘yesses’ from (some of) the design establishment, though I’m still a bit unclear of what it’s yes for.
I’ll post below an email exchange between me and friend on the topic, in lieu of a more reasoned write-up:
ME: There’s a comment at the foot of the comments section, that I think is alluding to this idea that each of these ‘isms’ is summarised (in the context of this discussion) by a ‘look’, (rather than the motivation or politics of the piece) and that it has to be an either/or situation, you’re either for us or against us… I think this is the most accurate analysis of the problem.
Surely, as a designer, some work you/I do will have to connect with a wide popular audience, whatever that might be, and some of it will be aimed at more niche audiences, so we’ll permanently be treading this grey area, doing a range of things across a range of areas. Factor in to that the self-initiated projects that all (?) designers do to develop their own practise and you have potentially a very rich, and hard-to-categorise landscape. I think the design/art discussion is defunct (well, maybe not defunct as a discussion, but of no use in this context).
HIM: Design’s essentially pluralist, and any attempt to reduce to a binary argument – ideas/style, tradition/modernism, Fletcher/Crouwel, my dad/your dad – is patently a load of rubbish. I stuck a quick post up on my blog that tries to make the point about how similar even Crouwel and Fletcher’s work can be when you view it outside their own private mythology.
I think my parents would have probably appreciated the Fletcher exhibition more than Crouwel as well, but I think that’s as much down to the staging of the exhibition as the work. The Fletcher exhibition was brilliantly staged by GTF on a loosely chronological basis (or so I remember), with the space subdivided into different rooms. You see a logo, then a poster, then an advert, then a book, then another poster – making the whole thing feel a bit more lively. Spin’s design for the Crouwel show on the other hand, all the posters on one wall, all the logos on another, staged in a massive white room, was almost guaranteed to homogenise everything into a fairly daunting whole. Having seen it though, I think more of the austerity came from the show design than Crouwel’s work. These sort of distinctions are never useful.
Paul Rand was obsessed with Swiss design, and wrote the intro to Wolfgang Weingart’s ‘My Way’ (I prefer that title, personally). Bob Gill’s written appreciatively of Karel Martens. Spiekermann calls Alan Fletcher his hero. And Fletcher and Crouwel were friends. There is no dividing line, just people doing things that interest them.
Actually, maybe the biggest irony of all of this is Mike Dempsey invoking Tschichold to provide back up from his argument, when Tschichold’s own conversion to classical style was in part motivated by feeling uncomfortable with his former didacticism.
ME: I agree. I don’t know if its something to do with the blog format, but its all too easy to fall into generalisations and a ‘this happened, then this happened then this’ type approach, as used here. It seems to be a bit myopic as regards the history of graphic design.
I was intrigued by Sara de Bondt’s ‘treating of matters‘ project with the RCA. I thought this was a great effort towards a more nuanced understanding of graphic design history, and the kind of sensitive enquiry we could do with more of.
Image: Paul Elliman and Peter Miles
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