This poster was designed as a response to Michael Rock’s Fuck Content essay. The essay frivolously asserts the designer must be concerned with with form, and form only. Rock’s argument is embedded in the post-modern idea that a narrative style can be asserted over a given content.
In the poster, I have mirrored the frivolity of the statement, and given it my own narrative in a post modern fashion. The given content is bastardised and re-appropriated to my own personal view-point on the subject. The idea of Appropriation was used due to the reading of Rick Poynor’s No More Rules: Graphic Design and Postmodernism.
This content of this poster has been re-appropriated from Craig Oldham’s book The Democratic Lecture. The initial statement is IT IS FATAL TO ASSUME GRAPHIC DESIGN IS A MEDIUM FOR SELF EXPRESSION.Having read the book, I feel the chapter Me, Me, Me is very helpful.
While I agree the traditional graphic design profession is a practice that should be devoid of self-expression, I feel, in particular having read Almeida and McCarthy (2002), that there are ways in which a graphic designer can express themselves through the subtle choices they make within their work.
Once again, I used No More Rules: Graphic Design and Postmodernism as a precedent for the Appropriation. In this instance it has been executed more literally, and the book itself has been scanned to make the image. I re worked the image to contain a message more in line with Almeida and McCarthy (2002).
This poster is my own original non-appropriated response to Michael Rock (2013) and Lupton (2004). Amongst these two texts, other design critics enjoy making contributions to the infamous ‘designer as...’ paradigm. The poster is a call to arms for designers to make their own interpretation through doing.
From theories surrounding graphic authorship, especially regarding the MFA Design Authorship course at SVA, co-chaired by Steven Heller, it is clear that the future of graphic design will stay in the future. Designer authored critical texts that aspire to direct a large, and growing, graphic design community are becoming less relevant to those that want to be uninhibited in their progression as graphic designers.
‘Designer as...’ is an allowance to ‘wait and see’, and a will for graphic designers to create and re-create their own boundaries.
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