The Essence of the Matter

Despite the contradiction, being revolutionary doesn’t mean having to be noncommercial. Designers have the capacity to affect social change beyond their written remit, and also earn a living.

When architects were bored with functionalism, they turned Louis Sullivan’s dictum “form follows function” into form follows fun; they added arbitrary elements to their buildings—towers, concrete sails, ziggurats, arches, architraves, and all sorts of embellishments that served no purpose except embellishment. When graphic designers got bored with the perfection offered by the newly arrived computers that could render artwork to within a tiny pixel, they rebelled by writing programs that randomized individual letters and whole pages every time a printer processed them. One designer who didn’t like what a copywriter had delivered set the text in illegible pictograms and icons. That act of incredibly courageous defiance made him famous, at least within the circles of students who were destined for lives as layout slaves in advertising agencies. I even had a design professor call me a traitor for driving my employees to work in the service of sinister capitalist enterprises; he, meanwhile, praised his own fight on the barricades of the profession against such exploitation, a fight that consisted of making posters protesting the spread of AIDS or world hunger. He thought those were incredibly risky anti-establishment messages. (It should not be necessary to say that he now enjoys a state pension after thirty years of safe employment while I still crack the whip over my poor dependents in the studio.) It has always been easy to protest within the safe environment of art magazines or galleries with their audiences of designers who would be artists if there were safe prospects of money in it. 

It is, indeed, hard to live with the contradiction of designing messages to get people to spend money they do not have on things they do not need. When they leave design school, young women still want to make children’s books and young men posters against the world’s evils. Months later they are glad to be able to sit in front of a computer, churning out endless variations of diagonally striped labels for yet another “light” product variety. Meanwhile, our world is in a pretty sad state. Our public services are broken, traffic is a nightmare, the air not fit to breathe, politicians corrupt and high unemployment the rule, not the exception. Shouldn’t we turn our considerable skills as strategists, communicators and problem solvers to those issues? Fix public transport? Design efficient and sustainable energy systems, affordable housing and inhabitable neighborhoods? 

When the First Things First manifesto from 1964, signed by twenty-two visual communicators from Britain, was republished in 2000, it was underwritten by a long list of designers from several countries. Most of those worked and still work in an environment that the manifesto describes thus: “designers… apply their skill and imagination to sell dog biscuits, designer coffee, diamonds, detergents, hair gel, cigarettes, credit cards, sneakers, butt toners, light beer, and heavy-duty recreational vehicles. Commercial work has always paid the bills, but many graphic designers have now let it become, in large measure, what graphic designers do. This, in turn, is how the world perceives design.

The profession’s time and energy is used up manufacturing demand for things that are inessential at best. I also signed this manifesto because I do believe that we could apply our skills more effectively to solve more pressing issues than the ones described above. But who would pay our bills? Governments and other institutions are notorious as bad clients, constantly underestimating and undervaluing what we do. Being perceived as what we mainly are—people who apply make-up to the ugly face of capitalism—we are not seen as worthy contributors beyond the confines of the commercial world. 

This discussion took another fourteen years to come up again. First Things First 2014 is more concerned with us designers selling data rather than dog biscuits, but it nicely brings our issues into the digital age. Rather fittingly, the undersigned this time around call themselves designers, developers, creative technologists, and multi-disciplinary communicators. New job descriptions, same old issues. 

This vicious circle will not be broken by protesting its viciousness. Neither will we make new friends outside our own world by pretending to bite the hand that feeds us. Protesting against the world of overconsumption and overdesign by displaying our “noncommercial” work in art galleries in the evening and then going back to work for The Man in the morning may ease our conscience, but it doesn’t solve the dichotomy of our situation. Not that I have an answer. 

When my son accuses me of shoring up this sick system, I can reply only that I at least provide a decent environment for our designers. We have central heating, an espresso machine, fast computers, and good lighting. We pay regular wages, grant thirty vacation days and provide maternity and paternity leave, and nobody gets hired without his future peers’ agreement. We won’t work for really evil purposes like cigarette brands or banks. While we wouldn’t kill or let ourselves get killed for our clients, we respect them, and they treat us as well as we treat them. We provide an environment with as little alienation as possible. It is not through what we do but how we do it that we can truly influence. I cannot think of a more honest answer.