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Public This book is about
producing media for a public. Your public could be large or small,
intimate or anonymous. Consider, for example, a t-shirt. You get
up in the morning and put on a shirt with a message on it. Throughout the day, people might recognize
the band, the brand, or the style printed on your clothes. The people
who see your shirt—friends, family, and strangers— are your public.
People get most of their shirts from stores. Buying
shirts and other products is one way of engaging the world of design.
Deciding what styles you like, or what messages you want to share
with other people, or what bands or companies you want to advertise
on your chest, are all decisions about design and communication.
When you create your own shirt graphics, you decide
exactly what you want to say and how you want to say it. You could
make more than one shirt and sell them to other people, or you could
give them away or trade them for other stuff you want. You could
post your design on the Internet so that people could download it
for free and use it themselves.
One day, you will walk down the street and see someone
you don’t know wearing your shirt. You will have reached your
public in a new way.
Do-it-yourself is everywhere.
Around the world, people are making things themselves in order to
save money, to customize goods to suit their exact needs and interests,
and to feel less dependent on the corporations that manufacture
and distribute most of the products and media we consume. On top
of these practical and political motivations is the pleasure that
comes from developing an idea, making it physically real, and sharing
it with other people.
Imagine a band whose members all have day jobs.
They want to promote their music, but they can’t afford to
hire a publicist or design agency. One guy in the band has a great
visual sense, although he has never called himself a designer. (Let’s
call him Bob.) He does awesome marker drawings and likes to write
and draw on the band’s jackets. At shows, he’s often
asked to write on other people’s clothes.
If Bob could make a poster and figure out how to
get it printed, the band would save money they didn’t have
in the first place. If they could transfer ideas from Bob's poster
to other media (press kit, CD packages, stickers, t-shirts), they
would be building their own unique visual brand, one that expresses
the personality of their group. They could make a Web site where
people could download songs along with Bob’s graphics.
Having learned to do this stuff once, they have
the power to change it whenever they need to. And maybe they will
want to help the start-up candy store down the street learn to produce
their own graphics, too.
For people who have grown up in the digital world,
the impulse to make and share one’s own media is second nature.
Using the Web, artists and writers publish everything from full-fledged
on-line magazines to first-person blogs. Rising dissatisfaction
with the music industry has led some recording artists to sell CDs
directly to consumers via the Internet, bypassing the costly layers
of promotion, distribution, and retailing that constitute the traditional
music business.
The D.I.Y. movement relies on and stimulates public
dialogue. The techniques of self-sufficiency are expounded in countless
books, magazines, workshops, and Web sites. People learning new
skills often want to share them with others, as seen in Web sites
featuring homegrown tutorials on design, animation, and other subjects,
as well as online forums, chat rooms, and bulletin boards where
visitors can learn from each other. In the process of sharing their
practical know-how with other people, they build a community of
individuals joined together around shared interests.
Design is art that people
use. From the house you live in to the clothes you wear to the magazines
you read, every human-made object has been designed. Graphic design
is a particular area of design practice. Conveying ideas with words
and pictures, graphic designers create logos, books, magazines,
packages, posters, Web sites, film titles, signage, and other media.
Most professional designers studied design in an
art school or university art department. This book is no substitute
for such training, and it makes no claim that it will turn you into
a design professional. (We do hope that some readers will be inspired
to study our field in more depth.)
As a D.I.Y. design guide, this book will show you
how to mobilize some of the technical and visual languages of design
for use in your own life—to spread your own ideas or to promote
your own band, club, church, school, or community group, or simply
to make interesting things to wear and share with your friends.
If you get really good at doing it for yourself, other people might
ask you to do it for them, and you will be on your way to becoming
a designer in the professional sense.
Why this book now? This
book was produced by students and faculty in the Master of Fine
Arts program at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). We hope
to broaden design awareness by spreading knowledge of what we do.
Compared to law, medicine, or architecture, whose
formal discourses date back to antiquity, graphic design is a newcomer
to the professional scene, appearing in the early twentieth century.
As a medium closely connected to popular culture, graphic design
has had a tough time defining itself as an autonomous academic discourse.
One could say that for graphic design, the barbarians
have always been at the gate. We are the barbarians, the bastard
children of the fine arts. We are the publicists and popularizers,
the people of the street. You don’t need a license or a set
of initials after your name to become a graphic designer. Indeed,
you don’t need special permission from anyone to put something
on paper, or on a shirt, or on the World Wide Web (as long as it’s
your own work or in the public domain).
Public interest in design has grown over the past
twenty-five years. The rise of “desktop publishing”
in the 1980s delivered digital design tools to the general public.
Although some designers worried that secretaries equipped with Times
Roman and Microsoft Word would obliterate the design profession,
the field got bigger rather than smaller. Not only could administrative
assistants bring visual order to internal publications, but managers
were starting to shape their own documents, and were even becoming
their own secretaries, just as graphic designers had become their
own typesetters and paste-up artists. The processes of production
were bubbling up through the corporate soil.
Desktop publishing made people more attentive to
design values. Learning to edit and format text electronically helped
them recognize the quality of professionally produced design and
typography. As the cost of print production went down, expectations
for design went up. Everything from memos to flyers to in-house
newsletters could now be executed with some level of sophistication
instead of being shoved out naked into the world. Some of this was
done in-house, but a lot of it was produced by professional designers.
In the 1990s, when desktop publishing collided head-on
with the World Wide Web, design became a multimedia enterprise.
PowerPoint emerged as a basic job skill for middle managers, and
just about anyone could hang a virtual shingle out on the Internet.
Retailers were becoming more design-oriented as
well, as Pottery Barn, Crate & Barrel, IKEA, and other companies
expanded their markets by offering housewares and home furnishings
that felt both contemporary and familiar. These clean, accessible
products became emblems of a design-conscious yet easy-to-implement
lifestyle.
A big influence in the new taste-making has been
Martha Stewart, who built a small catering business into a powerful
family of publications, products, and media. Her magazine, Martha
Stewart Living, provides D.I.Y. instructions for achieving
beauty and hospitality in the home. Martha Stewart’s editorial
sensibility influenced other magazines as well as numerous catalogs
and Web sites, from Williams-Sonoma to Home Depot. Inspired by Martha
Stewart but seeking to express new points of view, magazines like
Real Simple, Readymade, and Budget Living have
each staked out their own territory in the arena of lifestyle publishing.
Growing alongside the awareness of design has been
an anti-consumerist discourse, exemplified by the Canadian magazine
Ad Busters and the book No Logo, written by the
Canadian critic Naomi Klein. Raging against the corporate machine,
these publications gave voice to communities of citizens disgusted
by the exploitation of international workers and the destruction
of natural resources represented by the endless onslaught of branding
and advertising.
We have thus arrived at a compelling turn in the
evolution of design consciousness. The general public is more aware
than ever before of the values and languages of design, from graphics
to architecture to automobiles. At the same time, many consumers,
especially younger ones, distrust the global corporate economy upon
which mass production relies. Furthermore, they do not identify
with the gracious perfectionism of Martha Stewart or with the tidy
traditionalism of Pottery Barn.
A writer whose work helped inspire the making of
this book is Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), an Italian Marxist
who was jailed by the Fascist regime for the last eleven years of
his life. His posthumous Prison Notebooks expressed a new model for
the socially engaged thinker, whom he called the “organic
intellectual.” In contrast to the “traditional intellectuals,”
who were tied to formal entities such as the church, the state,
the academy, and the mainstream media, the new “organic intellectuals”
were doing their work in the context of trade unions, clubs, cafes,
political parties, the independent press, and other emerging institutions.1
These organic intellectuals could merge physical
and mental labor, building “new modes of thought” out
of acts of doing and making. Their skills would be both technical
and theoretical. To start an independent newspaper, for instance,
requires knowledge of how papers are printed and distributed as
well as knowledge of how to write.
Gramsci argued that all people are intellectuals,
but that only some take on the public role of an intellectual within
society. Likewise, we might say that everyone is a designer (a particular
kind of intellectual), because all people make decisions about their
environment, their personal appearance, their media consumption,
and so forth. To manipulate the messages and materials of design
in an active, public way is to take on the social role of the designer.
Following Gramsci, we prefer to define design as a social function,
rather than as a profession or an academic discipline.
Gramsci believed that organic intellectuals would
emerge from institutions of practical learning, where thinking and
doing are connected. These organic thinkers function, in turn, to
educate others: they inform, explain, persuade, inspire, organize,
promote, and instruct, engaging in a process of exchange and interaction
through which publics are built.
The authors of this book, a group of graduate students
and faculty, have each brought a body of experience to the editorial
table. By asking what other people might want to know about what
we do, we have expanded our own knowledge.
1. Antonio Gramsci, “The Intellectuals,”
Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Q. Hoare and
G. N. Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), p3–23. |
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