When researching about authorship on the internet I found very few articles. However, this was on of the image results. From the image result I found an article about a an exhibition held in 1996. The article describes the exhibition and also introduces the idea of the graphic authorship debate. The article also highlight references from which I can conduct further research.
Designer as Author: Voices (juried show)
Northern Kentucky University, Highland Heights, Kentucky, 1996
February 8 – March 8, 1996
Curators: Steven McCarthy, Cristina de Almeida
Statements: «It is a nationally curated exhibition of exemplary self-authored graphic design [...]»
«[...] Our goal was to find out existent avenues for self-authorship in graphic design and to assess how this kind of practice, which has frequently run in parallel to mainstream graphic design, is currently taking place. We were looking for projects in which designers were involved as thoroughly with literal content as they were with visual form. This involvement could consist of either the origination of verbal/visual content or of close collaboration with writers. We were also looking for writers/editors that were using type in ways that amplify meaning, add a commentary, or simply help to complement their writing. Self-originated projects are not new among graphic designers. Ventures on this area abound in variety [...]. For many years now, graduate work has also become an especially fertile arena for authorial experiments in design. Many are the motivations that can bring graphic designers to self-initiate their own projects. For some it means the opportunity to use their skills and modes of expression to locate questions as well as to investigate solutions. It can also mean an opportunity for interdisciplinary endeavors allowing them to openly address their personal ideologies into the process of generating visible messages. As the design profession is increasingly challgnged by technological developments and deep transformations in work relations, the pervasive presence outside academia of graphic designers as facilitators of their own agendas can be seen as an indicator of visible avenues for the practice [...]. At the same time, increased involvement in content making through mutual cooperation with specialists of other disciplines is enriching the whole design experience in unexpected ways. Endeavors in the borders of the field, exploring overlapping concerns between design and language, literature, philosophy or history, seems to be contributing to expand the field [...]
This show does not intend do exhaust the subject of authorship in design or even trace delimitations. This was an attempt at pointing towards possible directions for authorship in design through what is believed to be a comprehensive display of this kind of work. More than a specific genre or style, authorship takes place whenever the individual voice/vision of the designer is considered a crucial part of the semantic process. [...]» (Cristina de Almeida, in “Re:Port for Exhibition”, exhibition leaflet)
///
The exhibition’s call for submission is also mentioned in Michael Rock’s well-known essay “Designer as author”, Eye, Number 20, Spring 1996.
Additional information about this exhibition and further discussion of McCarthy’s notion of graphic design authorship as well as of curating as meta design-authorship can be found in essays written and co-authored by McCarthy himself:
- Steven McCarthy, “Curating as meta design-authorship”, Visual: Design: Scholarship – Research Journal of the Australian Graphic Design Association, Volume 2, Number 2, 2006, 48-56
- Steven McCarthy, “Designer-Authored Histories: Graphic Design at the Goldstein Museum of Design”, Design Issues, Volume 27, Number 1, Winter 2011, 7-20
- Cristina de Almeida & Steven McCarthy, “Designer as Author: Diffusion or Differentiation?”, paper, DECLARATIONS of [inter]dependence and the im[media]cy of design international symposium, Concordia University, Montréal, 2002
See also McCarthy’s recent book The Designer As…: Author, Producer, Activist, Entrepeneur, Curator, and Collaborator: New Models for Communicating: Author, Producer, Activist, … collaborator: New Models for communicating (BIS Publishers, 2013).
This article was found after stumbling on the Designer as Author: Voices and Visions exhibitions shown above. I found that Christina de Almeida and Steven McCarthy wrote the following article 6 years after the opening of the exhibition, after the graphic authorship debate had progressed. The article is a manifesto of sorts, putting forward a new proposal and direction for a progressive graphic design practice. I think this will be a key text in my essay.
Cristina de Almeida and Steven McCarthy
Introduction | Graphic Design as Advocacy | Design for Arts Sake | Collaboration of Equals | Entrepreneurial Opportunities | Conclusion and Notes
Introduction
The possibility for self-authorship in graphic design seems to cut across a broad spectrum of ideological agendas. In our presentation, Designer as Author: Diffusion or Differentiation?, we will examine the field’s current status approximately five years after a certain confluence of voices around the topic of self-authored graphic design first surfaced as an alternative to mainstream practice. Specifically, projects and publications from 1995-96 helped to put the ideas of self-authorship into a wider discourse: Emigre 35 & 36, the Mouthpiece: Clamor Over Writing and Design issues, guest edited by Anne Burdick, the nationally juried exhibition Designer as Author: Voices and Visions, jointly curated by the authors of this paper, and immediately after, a full issue of Eye magazine from Spring 1996 dedicated to the subject.
As the profession continues to evolve, questions about the role authorship plays in graphic design remain open for speculation. Why have issues of authorship in design become so poignant in the last decade? What are the many agendas co-existing under the umbrella of self-authorship? Are all designers destined to become authors eventually? If not, who will be entitled a voice? Is it possible to reconcile economic needs and personal convictions? With those issues in mind this paper will try to examine some of the avenues currently being explored by designer/authors.
The title of our presentation suggests two diverging paths forking out of the crossroads facing graphic design authorship at present. By "diffusion", we mean the assimilation of self-authorship concepts into the wider discourse of the graphic design discipline, whereby the modes of designing incorporate authorship as an integral part of the activity. In this regard, authoring strategies are used in myriad ways to enrich visual communications and enhance meaning in its many forms. "Differentiation" is defined as the use of authorship in graphic design to define and describe a type of approach that differs from the dominant model of the profession, creating an extra-disciplinary category that co-exists in parallel. Works of self-authored graphic design could then have a function outside of the mainstream commercial enterprise that typifies professional practice.
Following the projects of the mid-90s, debate ensued both through the press and in professional meetings. While there seemed to be an agreement about the timeliness of a renewed sense of agency towards content by graphic designers, the purpose and ends of this idea varied considerably among designers. Although the term "author" was put under rhetorical scrutiny as potentially evoking neo-conservative notions of the creative hero/genius, traditionally related to a male-centered ideology of institutional authority, attempts at naming the activity have been central to its definition. "Authorpreneur", from Steven Heller’s article The Attack of the Designer Authorpreneur (1) was one awkward attempt, while others have included Denise Gonzales Crisp’s "designist" with the suffix "ist" referencing early twentieth century movements and manifestos (2), and Ellen Lupton’s "designer as producer" (3). The relatively new MFA Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York claims to focus itself on the "designer as author" (4). Jeffery Zeldman advocates the online equivalent of "Web authors" in his A List Apart website, while also admitting that his writing in the plural as "…‘we’ instead of ‘I’ lends our prose a certain dubious and jocular authority…." (5)
As we discuss the aspect of naming a movement or direction around the idea of self-authored graphic design, it is also worthwhile to look at names that are used to position designers in contemporary professional practice. The purpose of an ever-evolving nomenclature seems partly a reaction to the transformation of the discipline itself with new opportunities and conditions, and partly due to attempts at elevating the profession’s status through enhanced engagement with graphic design’s commercial role as a value-added service. Buzzphrases such as "strategic planner", "brand champion" and "information architect" are reflective of the desire to contribute to corporate missions through the perception that ‘good design is good business’. These phrases also seem to borrow from other realms of proven influence, such as the military (strategy), sports (champion), and real estate development (architecture and urban planning). The term ‘exotic menial’ might also apply, when one considers the unquestioning manner through which designers’ efforts are used to reinforce the corporate status quo of rampant consumer consumption and the drive for profits at all costs. In the area of interactive multimedia, "experience design" is emerging as a catch-all phrase that connotes the designer’s ability to frame an entire range of emotional, physical and cognitive processes through technological mediation. One can assume not only authorship, but control of the readership as well, in experience design’s deterministic scenario.
In his often-cited text "What is an author," (6) Foucault has suggested that the notion of authorship is hardly a stable matter to be stumbled across and more an issue of framing a function according to varying interpretive strategies. This instability becomes apparent when speaking of graphic design authorship. Until recently, graphic design had occupied the edges of the conventional frames distinguishing authorship from anonymity. While the creative accomplishments of individuals are an important part of the profession’s official culture (7), particularly in their relationship with the 20th century avant-garde, the majority of design work found in people’s daily lives is either unsigned or barely acknowledged. In spite of design pervasiveness in our communications environment, very few people actually realize the presence of individual visions behind the appearance of the messages they are faced with daily.
In a sense, the proliferation of so many new phrases redefining the profession reflects an effort on the part of designers in redrawing the borders that frame current notions of authorship. This broader definition aims to extend and stabilize an activity that seems to have moved towards diffusion during the last decade into the realm of accepted authorial genres. For reasons both economic (the rising importance of the visual brand presence in the global economy) and technological (the spread of imaging and publishing technologies, which allow for efficiencies in reproduction and dissemination), many of the forces that have henceforth defined literary authorship seem to have acquired renewed resonance to graphic designers.
Property, attribution, creative subjectivity and narration (8) can be assessed in the many forms of practice these new words help to define. Issues of property, particularly concerning copyright, trademark and intellectual capital, have obvious economic and proprietary consequences for designers. Attribution can be said to have certain economic implications, especially for referrals and professional reputation, but the designer’s ego looms as a primary consideration for this aspect of authorship; the acknowledgement of genealogies of influence and schools of thought (caused by an increased interest in history and criticism within the discipline) contributes to a larger attributive lineage. Creative subjectivity, entailing the desirability of original individual perspectives, has long linked design to art, music and literature as involving a single passionate voice in the creative process. Narration, where the relationship between the individual’s work and his or her personal experiences are brought together, allows the designer’s story-telling ability to dovetail with the message in an empathetic way.
Looking at current models of authorship, to ascertain how some of these issues resurface through them, helps us to understand the variety of ideological agendas co-existing within the idea of graphic design authorship. We will see that some of these agendas have generated quite distinct modes of practice, motivated by fundamentally distinct ethical principles. We will also see that, in most cases, the internal contradictions inherent in a field that has historically occupied the ever-changing fringes of the authorship domain are still present within these models.
It is important to point out that a lineage of self-authored works exists throughout the history of Twentieth Century graphic design, whereby many notable designers wrote, designed, edited and published their own works, enveloping a wide and disparate range of subjects. Polemical manifestos, typographic ultimatums, stylistic rants, self-aggrandizing projects, investigations into pure expression, works of utopian idealism, and signifying sub-cultural gestures all contribute to the evidence of the designer as author over the last century and into the present one. However, what has been different, particularly in the last half of the past decade, is the conscious effort from various fronts within the profession to spell out and theorize the existence of authorship as a defining part of graphic design activity. Rather than being an appendage to their regular activities, undertaken by a few highly motivated individuals or groups as an extension of their ordinary work, we see the desire on the part of many designers to include authorship as an integral, defining part of their daily practice.
Our presentation will depart from the four models that we originally proposed while curating the exhibition Designer as Author: Voices and Visions, during the fall of ‘95. They attempt to situate the various relationships found between the designer, the content of the work, and their latent and/or concrete audiences. Since then, we have further revised these conceptual models as ensuing directions continue to reshape the field. The models are: A. "Graphic Design as Advocacy", B. "Design for Art’s Sake", C. "Collaboration of Equals", and D. "Entrepreneurial Opportunities”.
A. Graphic Design as Advocacy
As mentioned above, a quick look in our history indicates that designers have always been the most passionate advocates of their own discipline. Most books and articles on the subject of graphic design are still authored by designers. At least since the early Twentieth Century avant-garde, we have witnessed an endless string of manifestos created by designers, primarily advocating the social importance of their work to like-minded colleagues.
Ironically, many of these authors have helped to consolidate a professional axiom that is considered by many to be anathema to design authorship —that designers are primarily service providers, and therefore must always mediate between the client’s message and its intended audience with neutrality. According to this line of thought, designers would combine objective problem analysis and universal formal principles, thereby arriving at undisputedly adequate solutions. This would require designers to detach themselves emotionally from the designed subject and to look at the problem at hand with scientific impartiality. This positivist credo was particularly welcomed during the ‘40s and ‘50s, when unbridled optimism towards global capitalism encouraged the equation between public good and business health. The client’s message was automatically perceived as beneficial to the audience, so good design was about imparting these "good" messages from the corporate world with a minimum amount of personal bias clouding the channels.
Although these assumptions still hold currency within large sectors of the profession, the chimera of the designer’s total neutrality has become increasingly harder to sustain in the context of the late 20th Century. The cultural theory and criticism of the ‘70s and ‘80s contributed to demonstrate the presence of gender, culture and race biases in the so-called "objective analyses" and "universal principles" in most spheres of knowledge, including graphic design and advertising. Also, in the business climate of the Reagan years, the disparity existent between many companies’ activities and their manicured corporate images grew all the more apparent, calling into question the ethics behind a rhetoric of neutrality in graphic design.
Within the design field, the negotiation of enhanced engagement between designers’ personal convictions and their work falls within a scale ranging across a broad spectrum. On one end of this scale, following the tradition of manifesto writing, independent designers choose to advocate their causes mainly through differentiation. In these cases, the designer bears direct responsibility for the visual/verbal content of the messages conveyed. Either single-handedly or through a network of individuals with similar outlooks, the priority here is to define the self or the group as a unique voice on a specific issue. On the other end of the spectrum there exists what can be perceived as a more diffuse approach. Here the designer establishes work commitments with groups or agencies with which she or he identifies personally, morally, politically, or religiously. Thus, providing audiences with access to information, or a particular rhetorical stance on a subject, takes precedence over the individual designer’s voice. The constant tension between subjective expression and self-effacement existent across this spectrum of approaches is an important aspect shaping this design authorship model.
Several calls for an increased sense of social responsibility have been invoked in professional gatherings during the past decade. The attention to pro bono and environmentally-conscious work given by the design media during the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, as a way to balance the dominance and potential damage of commercial work, marked the beginning of a wide acknowledgment of a possible discrepancy between the socially-desirable and the profitable. At times, these calls have seemed like opportunistic ploys, eventually being co-opted by designers on behalf of large corporations trying to carve a niche for themselves among socially conscious consumers. Occasionally, the motivations behind pro bono commissions have had more to do with exchanging adequate compensation for freedom of experimentation than with effectively reaching specific audiences.
Nevertheless, the inherent contradictions exposed in these earlier discussions have been genuine concerns for a number of designers throughout the rest of the decade. Within the context of "Graphic Design as Advocacy", the use of instigation, investigation and criticism serve as tactical devices, while reaction to external content, with often contrarian views to the audience, is employed strategically. However, the personal engagement of designers in political or social causes is not by any means a phenomenon restricted to the ‘90s or beyond (9). Plenty of early precedents exist including the French group Grapus’ posters about injustice and racism, Marlene McCarty and Bethany Johns’ work for the Women’s Action Coalition; Art Chantry’s politicized designs for Seattle cultural events, etc.
We see today a renewed discussion about the potential of graphic design for being a catalyst for external change and a growing conviction that the same tools used to enforce the status quo can be subverted into a powerful critique of it. While in earlier days, posters and billboards were the primary medium for designers’ social and political statements, in evidence today is a broader diversity in approaches and an incorporation of more complex and interactive media outlets, such as video, packaging, web publishing and environmental graphics, examples of which are the street interventions of ‘skulling’ and ‘subvertising’.
Examples of ‘culture jamming’—the act of defying, defacing or disregarding the pervasive corporate messages that invade the public sphere—are shown in the pages of Adbusters magazine and other publications, and in cities across North America, as this movement gains momentum. Numerous recent books have addressed the graphically branded corporate world in which we find ourselves: Kalle Lasn’s Culture Jam rants about our polluted ‘mental environment’, Bill Stumpf implores society to ‘restore civility’ in The Ice Palace That Melted Away, Naomi Klein discloses all manner of corporate-branded dirty laundry in No Logo, and the compilation Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos from the Baffler, rails against the ‘Culture Trust’. While the resonance of these writings in the design community might not necessarily indicate any drastic shift in the professional milieu’s priorities, it does point to an increased willingness on the part of many designers to give a cold look at the larger context of their activities and the ramifications stemming from them. Klein and Lasn, for example, have been frequently invited to speak at design meetings; the September/October 2001 issue of Adbusters (Design Anarchy) seems targeted primarily towards designers, as it speaks from a deliberately insiders’ standpoint.
In an American Institute of Graphic Arts "Communique Special Edition", emailed to its 10,000+ members in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attack, an endorsement of enhanced commitment with content and context on the part of designers to facilitate dialog and serve as a pillar of civilization is strongly implied:
Design is critical in creating civil societies. Civilizations differ from gangs by the quality of expression that occurs among their citizens. The vestiges of civilized thought reach us as designed objects and messages. …
Each designer has an opportunity to use his or her special talents in ways that illuminate the important issues in our society and to build understanding of both shared and different values. (10)
A major challenge for advocacy in graphic design is reconciling personal engagement with economic subsistence. Numerous alternative practices that attempt to strike a balance between money and love exist within the profession. Oftentimes, academic affiliation may become part of the equation. The cultural critic Maude Lavin has written about the role "multitasking" plays into the practices of designers who have committed themselves to developing an authorial voice in their work (11). She defines "multitasking" as a flexible arrangement mixing teaching and self-employment structures allowing for small semi-independent practices combining personal and client-based work.
With origins in the Bauhaus and other early 20th Century movements, the relationship of design to art was strengthened, through social, political, philosophical and aesthetic movements. By mid-Century the maturation of graphic design as a profession (called ‘commercial art’, ‘graphics’, or ‘graphic art’ at the time), along with the desire of various post-war art movements to distance themselves from the quotidian aspects of a capitalist economy and consumer culture, began to create the rift between art and design that still exists in some camps of thought today. The lasting vestige of the earlier relationship is found in higher education; most graphic design programs exist in departments of art, as though the only differentiating factor is the medium in which they work, like sculpture, painting or ceramics. A common curricular approach is to have all the department’s majors share a core group of foundations courses where emphasis on formal elements and principles is seen as unifying art and design pedagogy. However, similarity of imaging tools and techniques is deceptive when the creative processes, external factors and communicative outcomes can have vast differences.
Nonetheless, perhaps because of shared aesthetic experiences, elective coursework, or an increased desire on the part of designers to draw more from internal sources through personal expression, the Design for Art’s Sake model of self-authorship has strong viability. The ability to incorporate subjective content, to experiment with materials and processes, to engage in personal therapy, and to have an empathetic relationship with an audience all contribute to why art-making appeals to many graphic designers. Graphic design faculty within art departments have the added incentive of existing in an academic culture that encourages art-making and exhibition as scholarship, at the possible detriment of other forms of dissemination.
Recent independent curatorial projects such as educators Kali Nikitas’ Soul Design exhibit and publication, and Kenneth FitzGerald’s Adversary: an Exhibit (of) Contesting Graphic Design are opening alternative venues to communities of designers interested in expressing contrarian or personal views. These efforts seem to be part of a series of attempts during the last decade to expand the spaces for graphic design as a form of subjective expression. By bringing design into the art gallery, these projects help to push the boundaries of the profession towards the fine arts realm, a relationship that has historically occupied both reciprocal and polemical positions. So while cultural jamming takes graphic design authorship to the streets, shows like Soul Design, Adversary and Nikitas’ earlier curatorial project And She told Two Friends (an openly feminist graphic design statement), invite graphic design authorship into the supposedly sacred spaces of high art. The act of authorship in these projects takes on an additional layer of creation: the curators have a macro vision of the conceptual framework that the project will have, while the individual designers produce work that addresses the theme on a micro level.
Examples of art-design include: artists’ books by numerous graphic designers like Warren Lehrer, Martha Carothers, etc., Neville Brody’s experimental type projects published as Fuse, Martin Venezky’s American West photography series, etc.
C. Collaboration of Equals
Through the history of the profession of graphic design, the dominant process of initiating and producing visual communications seems to have involved the designer at the final stages of creation, followed only by the printer and binder. The designer’s role in this process assumed a neutral position in regards to engagement with the message’s meaning by emphasizing formal elements, aesthetics and technical know-how as primary skills. Furthermore, the orientation of graphic production in the latter parts of the process precluded much involvement with the ideas being communicated, the definition of the target audience, the format or medium of dissemination, and the written content used to create "copy." For example, the designer’s relationship with clients, editors, writers, publishers, illustrators, photographers, and the eventual end-users of the designed artifact was defined in a very limited and specific manner.
Self-authored graphic design serves to integrate these formerly segregated tasks into a more synthesized process. Partly due to the technological tools of the past two decades designers now can write and edit text in the desktop environment prior to typesetting. Conversely, page layout software and scanners put visual capabilities in the hands of writers and editors, enabling a crossover in the creation of content and form. Additionally, the profession has realized that a more ‘strategic’ involvement with the definition of the communications opportunity created value and invited their participation earlier in a more interdisciplinary process (and higher up within their client’s corporate hierarchy). Alternative venues for publishing, such as ‘zines and comics, letterpress shops, independent websites and niche magazines, have also aided the collaborations between content-makers, form-givers, producers and their audiences. A collaboration between equals is realized in this arena, with allowance for role differentiation, but with a sense of shared mission.
Examples of collaboratively authored design include: Jonathon Branbrook’s work with artist Damien Hirst, Tibor Kalman’s art direction of Benneton’s Colors magazine, and the collaborations between designer/typographer Stephen Farrell and poet Daniel X. O’Neil, etc. A popular collaborative format with graphic designers, borrowed from the surrealist writers and artists of 1920’s Europe has been the ‘exquisite corpse’, a compilation of works that interact with, make a commentary on, or somehow engage sequentially with the other pieces. A Gilbert paper promotion used this device several years ago, by having international graduate students design into each others’ work. The Mohawk Paper Mills-sponsored publication Rethinking Design featured an article written by Tucker Viemeister, "On Doing Nothing" with a layout designed by P. Scott Makela, that aggressively subverted this message, demonstrating that collaboration needn’t always be a symbiotic relationship.
The collaborative potential of new media is also having a large impact on authorship and graphic design. The ease, speed and relatively inexpensive cost of publishing to a global audience of potential millions, along with the increased emphasis on visual over literal communications, is enabling self-authoring web designers to achieve wide exposure. With the interactions of the audience now central to the communications experience, the collaboration of creation is met by the collaboration of response, in both synchronous and asynchronous modes (Plumb Design’s Visual Thesaurus is an example of the former, while Amy Franceschini of Futurefarmers’s interactive CD-ROMs employ the latter). Hypertextual navigation, animation, video and sound are being added to the designer’s tool kit of pictures and words in the creation of technologically sophisticated multimodal works. In this realm, graphic designers often collaborate with software engineers, media producers, and other ‘content providers’.
Through the history of the profession of graphic design, the dominant process of initiating and producing visual communications seems to have involved the designer at the final stages of creation, followed only by the printer and binder. The designer’s role in this process assumed a neutral position in regards to engagement with the message’s meaning by emphasizing formal elements, aesthetics and technical know-how as primary skills. Furthermore, the orientation of graphic production in the latter parts of the process precluded much involvement with the ideas being communicated, the definition of the target audience, the format or medium of dissemination, and the written content used to create "copy." For example, the designer’s relationship with clients, editors, writers, publishers, illustrators, photographers, and the eventual end-users of the designed artifact was defined in a very limited and specific manner.
Self-authored graphic design serves to integrate these formerly segregated tasks into a more synthesized process. Partly due to the technological tools of the past two decades designers now can write and edit text in the desktop environment prior to typesetting. Conversely, page layout software and scanners put visual capabilities in the hands of writers and editors, enabling a crossover in the creation of content and form. Additionally, the profession has realized that a more ‘strategic’ involvement with the definition of the communications opportunity created value and invited their participation earlier in a more interdisciplinary process (and higher up within their client’s corporate hierarchy). Alternative venues for publishing, such as ‘zines and comics, letterpress shops, independent websites and niche magazines, have also aided the collaborations between content-makers, form-givers, producers and their audiences. A collaboration between equals is realized in this arena, with allowance for role differentiation, but with a sense of shared mission.
Examples of collaboratively authored design include: Jonathon Branbrook’s work with artist Damien Hirst, Tibor Kalman’s art direction of Benneton’s Colors magazine, and the collaborations between designer/typographer Stephen Farrell and poet Daniel X. O’Neil, etc. A popular collaborative format with graphic designers, borrowed from the surrealist writers and artists of 1920’s Europe has been the ‘exquisite corpse’, a compilation of works that interact with, make a commentary on, or somehow engage sequentially with the other pieces. A Gilbert paper promotion used this device several years ago, by having international graduate students design into each others’ work. The Mohawk Paper Mills-sponsored publication Rethinking Design featured an article written by Tucker Viemeister, "On Doing Nothing" with a layout designed by P. Scott Makela, that aggressively subverted this message, demonstrating that collaboration needn’t always be a symbiotic relationship.
The collaborative potential of new media is also having a large impact on authorship and graphic design. The ease, speed and relatively inexpensive cost of publishing to a global audience of potential millions, along with the increased emphasis on visual over literal communications, is enabling self-authoring web designers to achieve wide exposure. With the interactions of the audience now central to the communications experience, the collaboration of creation is met by the collaboration of response, in both synchronous and asynchronous modes (Plumb Design’s Visual Thesaurus is an example of the former, while Amy Franceschini of Futurefarmers’s interactive CD-ROMs employ the latter). Hypertextual navigation, animation, video and sound are being added to the designer’s tool kit of pictures and words in the creation of technologically sophisticated multimodal works. In this realm, graphic designers often collaborate with software engineers, media producers, and other ‘content providers’.
D. Entrepreneurial Opportunities:
Another commercial outlet for designers is in the realm of entrepreneurial venues, whereby designers seek marketing and sales opportunities for their own products. Through successful corporate positioning and entrepreneurial endeavors, the designer’s financial independence is achieved while an increased intellectual cache may also be an important intangible reward. Here, issues of property and attribution become deeply entangled with economic gain. Self-authored graphic design becomes a supply-side, market-driven process geared towards the development of new products, services, media, etc.
On one side, designers are looking into the possibilities of marketing their own products. Early examples of this trend can be found during the ‘80s in venues such as Charles S. Anderson’s clip art compilations and wristwatches, M&Co.’s line of office products, Erik Spiekermann’s font and publishing ventures, etc. These are usually characterized by designers who, having achieved an overall notoriety through their client-based practices, move on to transforming themselves into brands associated with somewhat rarified objects of desire, or perhaps into consultancies with global recognition.
With the increased access to technologies of production, the ‘90s witnessed a proliferation of small product-oriented businesses. Independent digital type foundries such as Emigre, House Industries, and Plazm were emblematic of this trend. In the case of Emigre and Plazm, the conflation of type sales and publishing enterprises, carried on by large corporations such as ITC during the ‘70s and ‘80s, becomes attainable on a small-scale level. Despite the obvious contradiction between opposing the dominant segment of capitalism as is evident in the Graphic Design as Advocacy model and seeking entrepreneurial opportunity, some self-authoring designer-entrepreneurs have chosen this route as a means of economic sovereignty and self-determination. Not only do they fill the needs (and desires) of new markets, they create competition by offering alternatives to corporate mass consumption.
In the past decade, a transmutation occurred of many originally so-called graphic design firms into strategic communication consultancies. These designers now want to be involved early in the strategic process while the content is still being generated. This is particularly the case in the process of branding. If the common analogy between brands and human personality holds true, designers envision themselves moving beyond being the developers of the easily changeable styles normally attached to names, towards becoming true architects of character. They aim for playing a part in the development of the essence of the brand, the full combination of style and character that composes the brand personality.
Many times the methodologies utilized in this process are themselves invested with authorial garb. A case in point is Seattle-based Girvin Design, which during the ‘90s added the phrase "strategic branding" to its title. The company offers an exclusive proprietary strategic process for brand development comprised of steps with denominations such as brandquest®, brandspirit®, brandcode®, and transparent® design, describing something akin to a typical design routine (12). Authorship is thus defined by the accumulation not only of intellectual but also linguistic property and the designer/author becomes the colonist of both procedural and verbal territories.
One of the quintessential forms of self-authorship in graphic design, the self-promo piece, can at times be mingled with advocacy and personal testimonial. This can take the form of products such as the numerous paper company promotions where the designer is afforded rare creative latitude, to design studio holiday greetings, or to self-aggrandizing monographs on their own work. The recent flood of published titles in this vein (featuring Bruce Mau, Bill Cahan, David Carson, Steven Tolleson, John Maeda, Wolfgang Weingart, Stefan Sagmeister, etc.) provides a medley of tones, agendas and philosophies of life and work but the basic combination of portfolio show-and-tell accompanied by the claim for a unique personal vision—or vice-versa—is consistent through all of them. This approach is reflective of what critic Monika Parrinder (13) describes as the striving for "genius status," where the designer’s personality often overrides the personal content of the work.
Another commercial outlet for designers is in the realm of entrepreneurial venues, whereby designers seek marketing and sales opportunities for their own products. Through successful corporate positioning and entrepreneurial endeavors, the designer’s financial independence is achieved while an increased intellectual cache may also be an important intangible reward. Here, issues of property and attribution become deeply entangled with economic gain. Self-authored graphic design becomes a supply-side, market-driven process geared towards the development of new products, services, media, etc.
On one side, designers are looking into the possibilities of marketing their own products. Early examples of this trend can be found during the ‘80s in venues such as Charles S. Anderson’s clip art compilations and wristwatches, M&Co.’s line of office products, Erik Spiekermann’s font and publishing ventures, etc. These are usually characterized by designers who, having achieved an overall notoriety through their client-based practices, move on to transforming themselves into brands associated with somewhat rarified objects of desire, or perhaps into consultancies with global recognition.
With the increased access to technologies of production, the ‘90s witnessed a proliferation of small product-oriented businesses. Independent digital type foundries such as Emigre, House Industries, and Plazm were emblematic of this trend. In the case of Emigre and Plazm, the conflation of type sales and publishing enterprises, carried on by large corporations such as ITC during the ‘70s and ‘80s, becomes attainable on a small-scale level. Despite the obvious contradiction between opposing the dominant segment of capitalism as is evident in the Graphic Design as Advocacy model and seeking entrepreneurial opportunity, some self-authoring designer-entrepreneurs have chosen this route as a means of economic sovereignty and self-determination. Not only do they fill the needs (and desires) of new markets, they create competition by offering alternatives to corporate mass consumption.
In the past decade, a transmutation occurred of many originally so-called graphic design firms into strategic communication consultancies. These designers now want to be involved early in the strategic process while the content is still being generated. This is particularly the case in the process of branding. If the common analogy between brands and human personality holds true, designers envision themselves moving beyond being the developers of the easily changeable styles normally attached to names, towards becoming true architects of character. They aim for playing a part in the development of the essence of the brand, the full combination of style and character that composes the brand personality.
Many times the methodologies utilized in this process are themselves invested with authorial garb. A case in point is Seattle-based Girvin Design, which during the ‘90s added the phrase "strategic branding" to its title. The company offers an exclusive proprietary strategic process for brand development comprised of steps with denominations such as brandquest®, brandspirit®, brandcode®, and transparent® design, describing something akin to a typical design routine (12). Authorship is thus defined by the accumulation not only of intellectual but also linguistic property and the designer/author becomes the colonist of both procedural and verbal territories.
One of the quintessential forms of self-authorship in graphic design, the self-promo piece, can at times be mingled with advocacy and personal testimonial. This can take the form of products such as the numerous paper company promotions where the designer is afforded rare creative latitude, to design studio holiday greetings, or to self-aggrandizing monographs on their own work. The recent flood of published titles in this vein (featuring Bruce Mau, Bill Cahan, David Carson, Steven Tolleson, John Maeda, Wolfgang Weingart, Stefan Sagmeister, etc.) provides a medley of tones, agendas and philosophies of life and work but the basic combination of portfolio show-and-tell accompanied by the claim for a unique personal vision—or vice-versa—is consistent through all of them. This approach is reflective of what critic Monika Parrinder (13) describes as the striving for "genius status," where the designer’s personality often overrides the personal content of the work.
Conclusion
As we have shown, the notion of authorship in graphic design is far from being a monolithic given, but is rather like a process of constant re-negotiation of a series of functions around the edges of conventional authorial domains. At times, this notion is closely related to the authorial formats frequently found in literature and fine arts, where the signature of the artist (or firm) becomes a fundamental aspect in assessing the body of work. In other occasions, authorship in design can be identified in the quiet choices an individual makes regarding which voices she or he will amplify through their work. Rather than "writing the songs" as composers, the choice of a consistent "performance" repertoire becomes an act of authorship in the designer’s construction of his or her personal and professional narrative. In all cases, the constant factor seems to be a move towards an increased level of commitment and responsibility with the message’s content.
The models thus presented are open-ended, allowing for overlap, contextual reconsideration, and shifting relationships. An integration of motivations, opportunities and scenarios contribute to making self-authored graphic design present in many of today’s practicing models—indeed these new conditions are bringing the field towards a significant intersecting moment. In this regard, we believe the path of diffusion to be a more promising one for the further development of authorship in the design field. This means that the theories and practices inherent in its definition ought to be available to all graphic designers as they produce the work of our visual landscape, resulting in a heightened engagement with the work’s meaning and its cultural, social and economic consequences.
The differentiation route, while initially necessary to establish the differences in the activity of graphic design authorship from the professional status quo, seems to support the notion of the hero/genius prevalent in Twentieth Century modernity and post-modernity, or its 21st Century counterpart, the maverick cool-hunting, synergistic, brand-building entrepreneur. As educators strive to delineate a curriculum that reflects these new possibilities, the question of how to approach the issue of design authorship in the classroom becomes a relevant one. To focus an MFA program on the "designer as author" is an effort at reinforcing this aspect of differentiation, whereas the introduction of an integrative approach to teaching self-authored graphic design at the undergraduate level seems a more holistic way to bring positive change to the discipline.(14) To paraphrase University of Minnesota president Mark Yudof, "in higher education, the 20th Century was concerned with taking things apart (reductivism, positivistic research, specialization, etc.), while in the 21st we will be challenged to put them back together."(15) This attitude endorses a movement toward integrative learning, synthesizing knowledge, and diffusing the qualities of authorship into graphic design curricula and professional practice. In this way, the discipline of graphic design might be respected for its vision, insight and engagement with the formulation of meaning, an inseparable part of our civic, cultural, and economic discourse.
As we have shown, the notion of authorship in graphic design is far from being a monolithic given, but is rather like a process of constant re-negotiation of a series of functions around the edges of conventional authorial domains. At times, this notion is closely related to the authorial formats frequently found in literature and fine arts, where the signature of the artist (or firm) becomes a fundamental aspect in assessing the body of work. In other occasions, authorship in design can be identified in the quiet choices an individual makes regarding which voices she or he will amplify through their work. Rather than "writing the songs" as composers, the choice of a consistent "performance" repertoire becomes an act of authorship in the designer’s construction of his or her personal and professional narrative. In all cases, the constant factor seems to be a move towards an increased level of commitment and responsibility with the message’s content.
The models thus presented are open-ended, allowing for overlap, contextual reconsideration, and shifting relationships. An integration of motivations, opportunities and scenarios contribute to making self-authored graphic design present in many of today’s practicing models—indeed these new conditions are bringing the field towards a significant intersecting moment. In this regard, we believe the path of diffusion to be a more promising one for the further development of authorship in the design field. This means that the theories and practices inherent in its definition ought to be available to all graphic designers as they produce the work of our visual landscape, resulting in a heightened engagement with the work’s meaning and its cultural, social and economic consequences.
The differentiation route, while initially necessary to establish the differences in the activity of graphic design authorship from the professional status quo, seems to support the notion of the hero/genius prevalent in Twentieth Century modernity and post-modernity, or its 21st Century counterpart, the maverick cool-hunting, synergistic, brand-building entrepreneur. As educators strive to delineate a curriculum that reflects these new possibilities, the question of how to approach the issue of design authorship in the classroom becomes a relevant one. To focus an MFA program on the "designer as author" is an effort at reinforcing this aspect of differentiation, whereas the introduction of an integrative approach to teaching self-authored graphic design at the undergraduate level seems a more holistic way to bring positive change to the discipline.(14) To paraphrase University of Minnesota president Mark Yudof, "in higher education, the 20th Century was concerned with taking things apart (reductivism, positivistic research, specialization, etc.), while in the 21st we will be challenged to put them back together."(15) This attitude endorses a movement toward integrative learning, synthesizing knowledge, and diffusing the qualities of authorship into graphic design curricula and professional practice. In this way, the discipline of graphic design might be respected for its vision, insight and engagement with the formulation of meaning, an inseparable part of our civic, cultural, and economic discourse.
Leave your comment