Ampersand Vol 2, issue 2. Spring 2007. D&AD

NO LIMITS
While technology is turning us all into voyeurs will there be any need for crafted forms of graphic communication? Nick Bell says graphic designer’s minds are a product of a bygone age

Technology has caught up with our imaginations. What before we had to cleverly allude to, say motion for instance (which we achieved through the dynamic use of static compositional elements), we can now have for real. Nevertheless, graphic design delights in abstraction, the use of simple visual codes, in abbreviations that edit out the detail and clutter of real life and make it easier for us all to get to the point faster. It has become an aesthetic that has developed out of the charm of communication technologies that didn’t carry the resolution to render real life in all its wonderful detail. Not affordably anyway. Now that it can, what do we do?

A reductive approach is deeply embedded in the DNA of most graphic designers. Modern graphic design was founded on the principle ‘economy of means’ – maximum impact with the minimum of apparent effort. It is one of the foundation stones of Modernism, an aesthetic, a philosophy born out of the necessitudes of an industrial age – that of mass production. The degree of economy with which a piece of graphic design manages to function remains part of the criteria through which good design is judged – and that’s despite the fact that the world has moved on. For instance, that broadband internet can serve a panoply of interests no matter how niche makes a mockery of mass production. The ground upon which graphic design was built is turning to jelly.

We now live in a post-industrial age. Nevertheless engrained habits die hard. Graphic designers still get a great deal of satisfaction out of design that appears to transcend the limitations of its own production even though there are no limitations anymore. For example, newspapers no longer need to be black and white, billboard ads no longer need be static, web images no longer need be that small, typeface designs no longer need take account of poor printing, and it doesn’t matter too much if your logo doesn’t work in mono now that fax machines are obsolete and full colour printing so affordable. In fact, soon digital content wont have to be viewed on uncomfortably glaring illuminated screens but electronic bendy surfaces as dull as paper. This means packaging designs wont have to be static but will animate. The weather need no longer be told by the placement of childish cloud and sun shapes onto a map on the wall as charmingly naive as that now seems. Yet, satellite imagery of swirling weather systems, while magically real, leave nothing to the imagination and likewise neither does Google Earth, a BBC wildlife camera team, Hollywood special effects, or porn across broadband.

Why should a graphic designer bother to allude, be analogous or try to symbolise through their work when seeing the real thing is now so much more accessible? Reality television you might assume does away with the need for fiction in the cinema and the theatre but it does not. Replete as we are with literal representation of the world in all its high definition glory there is another part of us that yearns for something stripped down, less literal, maybe incomplete, perhaps poetic, but just as immediate. The saying goes ‘there is nothing so fascinating as the truth’ but we have learnt that it can’t necessarily be found just by looking at what is there. Sometimes the literal, the real thing, isn’t very revealing. This leads us to create our own crude handmade representations of what we feel is going on. This people call art but it is also a description of a lot of graphic design which bequeaths to us all a rich visual record of our activities and values – our culture. That’s a relief then – we are all still needed. This may be so but our thinking as graphic designers or at least the principles upon which we have trained and the canon it has produced are a product of a bygone age (that of mass production) and without some drastic adjustments, not fit for meeting the challenges of this new sophisticated media environment. And that’s whether your aim is to inform or entertain. What exactly we do about it, I’m not so sure but the beginnings of a new approach would have to begin in the schools and colleges. I suspect it already has.

© Nick Bell 2007