Some Cut & Pasting To Think About

[Mackland]

I admit it. I'm one of those poor souls who likes to indulge myself in the fiction that there's something called "the online design community." And (in what is probably a still greater admission of my own naivete) I believe in both the possibility and the worth of associating with this diverse and international scatter of people on message boards.

I do this because, well, I love design. More to the point, I crave design talk: who's influenced who, what tools do you use, what trends do you observe, what rocks your world, and so forth.

I get a lot out of this discourse. The signal-to-noise ratio of this particular subset of the Internet has always tilted strongly towards meaning.

Until fairly recently, that is, when I started to notice a new feeling creeping into the sites I frequented. In what were nominally gathering places to discuss and celebrate online design, design seemed to be just about the last thing on anyone's mind.

This is what you want, this is what you get.
What were people posting on? Let's just say that, between unchecked misogyny, the impotent fantasies, the retread gangsta speech stylings, and the ruminations on which portal does or does not suck, these places have started to feel more like a junior high school cafeteria than creative communities. (Old Dreamless heads, with their memories of what that good grey place felt like towards the end, will understand just what I mean.)

Finally, someone on one of the sites - unfortunately, someone I'm unable to identify, otherwise I would give credit where it is so richly due - twigged to the single most significant reason why this should be. This wise person pointed out the simple fact that the majority of the people who were posting to this board are not designers, in any strict sense, nor are they interested in design per se.

I think this would come as a shock to most of those in question, who seem to identify more or less strongly with the D-word. But I happen to agree. And that's just what I'm wanting to talk about here.

The long road to now
I think there's a common misperception, especially among the younger cohort online, that design is an endeavor that concerns the decoration of a surface in an attempt to achieve aesthetic distinction or beauty.

That the surface in question is a flat-panel screen probably brings its own complications, but I'm not wanting to rock it inna McLuhan stylee at the moment. I'm merely concerned with elucidating a distinction between design and something else, something which I'll name in a little bit.

Let me see if I can make my point a little more concretely, so that it doesn't begin to degenerate into mere bitter-old-fart acidity: I believe that success in design strongly implies a satisfying the requirements of a user. This is what distinguishes it from art or self-expression, and in the West, anyway, we went through several centuries of refinement to arrive at this understanding.

Those centuries were characterized by what I can't help but see as a clear teleology, a gradient one might call "progress," if one was so inclined. Within the meta-field of design - something that to me encompasses graphic design, typography, industrial design, interior design, architecture, fashion, even gardening, maybe even cuisine - you'd have to be pretty thick to miss the broad movement towards utility, simplicity, and clarity.

Clean lines for the Family of Man
Out with the black-letter, in with the sans serif. Say goodbye to the ruffle, the flourish, the filigree, and hello to ferroconcrete and white space: a vast oversimplification, inevitably, but one which I believe captures something real.

In some cases, this movement may have been driven by a plain love for the clean line, the spare façade, the frisson of absolutist glee one can derive from submitting to an ideology like "less is more." But my understanding is that the will towards simplicity was driven - over a very long time, and in a great many places - by a real and increasing concern for the human being using the designed object in question.

The 20th century being a Mass Age, however, human needs were often seen in the mass aggregate. The ideology of the assembly line prevailed, in all its heedless Taylorism. And this explains why there began to be, within High Modernism, and especially in the fields that happen to bear most directly on HTML-era Web design - graphic design and typography - a self-conscious scientism, a sense that "proper" design just might be reducible to something algorithmic, repeatable, predictable.

This is something you can easily enough catch a whiff of from cracking open Josef Muller-Brockmann's seminal "Grid Systems In Graphic Design," for example, and it's undeniably present in such mid-century icons as Le Corbusier's "modulor," and Henry Dreyfuss's The Measure Of Man. It's there in Charles and Ray Eames's furniture and visual design. It informs virtually everything Bucky Fuller ever did, crackpot neologisms and all. (I'd even go a step further and venture that it's there in Coco Chanel's Little Black Dress, but I'm weak on fashion history.)

Design for the masses
You wouldn't be wrong to understand this as design for the masses, for use or for understanding. Its virtues are clarity and legibility and (putatively, anyway) universality. And those are great virtues, but one less fortunate concomitant of them is the idea that people are more or less fungible, as modular as little Lego pieces.

No wonder then that the whole enterprise began to feel a little oppressive, somewhere 'round about the time Michel Foucault was dissecting the less visible workings of power and the Ramones and the Sex Pistols were tearing history a new one.

It didn't help that all that stability and consistency were, well, stable and consistent, i.e. something that's bound to read as boring and stagnant to generations raised on the spiky amphetamine geometries of 220-beats-per-minute punk rock, to say nothing of the larger-than-life narratives and chest-thumping swagger of hiphop.

Nor was it a point in Modernism's favor that its icons, in architecture anyway, degraded with a particular gracelessness. Anyone who knew midtown Manhattan in the 1970s likely remembers it as a profusion of exercises in hollow Miesianism: Cor-Ten steel left to rust in the rain, statutory Calders gathering pigeon shit amid the windswept emptiness of all-but-unvisited plazas.

And it was at just this moment the computing power to make design became available to first the credentialed, affiliated professional - and then quickly thereafter the aspirant, or the dilettante, or the simply curious. Between the DIY ethos of the time and the sudden availability of the technical wherewithal, the field underwent an unprecedented democratization.

Suddenly you didn't have to have gone through Parsons, or Central Saint Martins, or wherever, to call yourself a designer. This is undeniably a great thing. Get rid of offensive, hidebound notions of who may and who may not design? Absolutely! Eliminate preconceptions that the untrained are incapable of finding workable answers? Totally. Babylon must fall.

But I think we largely threw the baby out with the bathwater when we collectively made the leap to hyperspace - the mass exodus to the computer, and computer-mediated creation. There was something good and valuable and honorable and real in that tradition, and I think, in our fuck-you-heroes craving for self-definition and our desire to violate the various grids that contained us, we left that something behind.

Think David Carson and Raygun, think grunge fonts, think Neil Denari and Art Chantry. There are only two things wrong with this, really: one, that after all it's sort of an adolescent way to cast the world, and two, it's rather solipsistic. A good way to understand this would be by contrasting a work of the immediate predigital era with something that's acquired currency since.

[Mackland]

Who's your daddy?
For example. I'm holding in my hands (insert flailing, Joe McCarthyesque gestures here) a book I picked up not too long ago at Aoyama Book Center here in Tokyo, called British Rail Design. This is a neat little volume published in 1986 by the Danish Design Council, of all things, so I wouldn't be surprised in the least if you had never heard of it.

Nevertheless, if you have any slightest interest in corporate identity design, or more broadly, in how to work out a consistent visual communication program across multiple channels, you would do well to acquire this book. This is a story about the work of capital-D Designers, from saint Jock Kinneir of the U.K.'s Road Research Laboratory (he who co-devised Transport Medium as well as the British Rail typeface and signage standards) to the Design Research Unit,who penned the inspired, damn-near-timeless British Rail logomark.

For a brief volume, it gets into a pleasing amount of detail about how factors like the density of foot traffic in a railway station or the speed of a passing train affected decisions relating to line weight, color, positioning and size. One gets a real sense of the discipline these designers brought to thinking about the conditions under which their work would be perceived, encountered, decoded.

And all of this discipline manifests clearly in the work, right down to "petty" details: the paper stock used for schedules, the layout of a maintenance shop, the angle of an armrest. Taken as a whole, the sense one gets from perusing British Rail Design is one of seriously humanist thought about the difficulties of life in the modern world.

For me, it was a reminder that good (i.e., deep) design is not merely "good business," as the book's introduction makes it clear British Rail understood, but potentially a lubricant and a cushion to smooth, simplify and mitigate all the inevitable daily hassles we're presented with by having the temerity to live in an era of complexity.

The bathing ape has no clothes
By contrast, across the room I see a purple-camouflaged Pepsi can decorated by Nigo, the driving force behind the Japanese fashion label A Bathing Ape. Now, Nigo is regularly cited as one of Japan's top young designers, and his Bathing Ape products (or knockoffs of same) adorn roughly every fourth kid in Harajuku on a Saturday.

The appeal of these products, which consist in their entirety of the phrase A BATHING APE (or alternately APE SHALL NEVER KILL APE) run across them in a variety of typefaces and colors, escapes me entirely, but that's not the issue. Nor is his success. To me, if he can ship giga product and make the owners of said product happy, he's entitled to all the accolades the world has offered him, right down to the favor of luminaries like Futura 2000 and the tie-ins with Pepsi - all, that is, except those that accrue to him as a designer.

Call me cranky, but contrast Nigo's t-shirts and posters to the painstakingly worked-out, user-need-driven work of one of the creators featured in British Rail Design, say Jock Kinneir himself. Is this an unfair comparison, a sterling example of apples v. oranges? Absolutely. Because only one of the two works in the field of design.

The other is best described as a stylist.

A seat on the style council
Ah, there, I've said the loaded word. Let me say it again: stylist. I think it's high time to restore this important term to wide currency, and not to disparage the validity of styling as a mode of expression, or as a career path. (I'm not one of those who would slag a young talent off with a dismissive "Oh, her? She's just a stylist." Styling is as crucial to good branding work as design, and maybe more so, but it's not a replacement for it.) Not at all: it's a term that is useful in the world because it observes - preserves - an important distinction.

For, as my mentor Jon Olson always reminds me, the practice of design necessarily involves solving problems. Further, these problems present constraints; whether these originate in the client's budget, the target audience's availability, or in the technical limitations of the medium is immaterial.

The important part of this idea is that the task of the designer is to present the client with a solution within an ambit circumscribed by factors beyond his or her control, factors that limit the ability to unrestrainedly impose personal taste. When a designer - a Paul Rand, a Saul Bass, a Neville Brody - can consistently succeed at this and still develop a recognizable personal style, well, that (by my lights, anyway) is where all the artistry resides.

Exercises in pure styling like A Bathing Ape, or to a significantly lesser but still important extent, the work of people like Shepard Fairey, fail this test. A Bathing Ape addresses no issue, solves no problem, admits no constraints. It's about nothing but itself, a blank screen onto which the customer can project any desired attribute: all of which makes it the ultimate antibrand for a headlong-rushing, amnesiac culture like Japan, but a piss-poor example of design.

And, coming full circle now, kids who mistake this kind of work for design are the same ones most likely to feel that the price of admission to the ongoing discussion consists of little more than throwing one Photoshop layer over another, slapping some freeware fonts over the thing, and braying about "reprazenting."

That they're clearly not operating in the same tradition as Josef Muller-Brockmann, or Henry Dreyfuss, or even Joshua Davis seems to escape them. I'm not even sure why they'd bother to call themselves designers, except that it has a vaguely contemporary sexiness to it, whereas stylist sounds like someone you might find working at a hair salon.

Where to, bub?
My guess is that the great majority of the people on the designer boards doing the most to drive the signal-to-noise ratio towards zero have no actual desire or ambition to be designers in the sense outlined above. The question then becomes, do we let go of what may at first blush appear to be an aging definition in the name of a greater inclusivity? Or do we attempt to hold the line with respect to the values of a proud and meaningful tradition, and risk becoming brittle, irrelevant, maybe even risible?

I'd argue that the risk is worth taking, that the latter is a better course. Far from being past its sell-by date, I think the notion of design as a conscious attempt to articulate solutions to real human situations is more meaningful than ever - in Flash and Photoshop every bit as much as in titanium and aerogel and carbon fiber.

The world, as one cannot help but notice lately, is a challenging place, and occasionally even a dangerous one. There are things that design can do to address these challenges and mitigate at least some of the dangers, things that are not within the reach of even the best stylists.

I believe these two figures, designer and stylist, constitute two poles of an as-yet largely unacknowledged debate in the online community. I'm looking forward to seeing how this debate will play out over the years to come. Generating more light than heat, though, will ask some things that have often seemed in short supply in online discussions: mutual respect, for starters. Maybe an acknowledgement of the difficulty of what it is that we're attempting, and the corresponding, nontrivial degree of talent and discipline demonstrated by those who have achieved success in this attempt.

I don't think that's too much to ask, but I guess we'll see.

[steppingrazor]

first off, thanks for posting that on here. its going to blow over alot of people's heads on here, even myself was unfamiliar with some of the references in it. I havent the time to respond fully, but i will soon enough. quickly tho, i just want to say that while i have always been aware of the acute differences of a graphic designer (what i consider most streetwear- an exercise in graphic design, even for the cut and sew) and what the writer would call a "real designer", I always felt that design is design, regardless where it is implied, and sublabels were appropriate to distinct them from one another (industrial designer, architect, etc). I understand the arguement concerning design being an agent of solving a particular problem of a client, but that would imply that design only exists in the realm of commercial interests, which i feel it does not. Perhaps i have misunderstood what the writer said, but that is what i gathered from it. Design for self promotion, design for personal satisfaction, while it could also be considered art merely on the intentions of its creation, still involved thought and a solution to a problem that perhaps the CREATOR proposed. Doesnt it then still fulfill some of the purposes that you presented?

Now as far as the declining level of the quality of graphic design (again, what i would call it, not that the stylist arguement isnt valid to a degree), attribute that to it being a trend, the easy availability of design software and ready made design elements at the ready to the public via the internet. Whereas any budding designer in decades before would not come into the public eye until they had already proven themselves with tangible products- meaning that they had already done years of learning and refinement of their skills- now they can instantly show the world their work from the first moment their first creation is birthed. This can be a blessing for them, being that the whole world is there to critique and challenge them, but at the same time, it may lower the percieved bar of what is expected from experienced designers, because uneducated designers are getting praise from invisible people on the internet who can hardly prove their reasons for liking something other than "its DOPE". And while aesthetics in design have a purpose (wouldnt exist in its form today without it), like they said there should be some underlying purpose, and in tee design that purpose could come from utilizing a new design idea that hasnt been done before, or conveying a message.

I'll get into it a bit more, as i like discussions like this...i just have to get my daughter to school.

[steppingrazor]

i knew no one else would get up on this. hahaha

[1ahB]

great write. wrong forum for it.

[Tronics]

I get it im just writing my answer!

hahaha

[bnj]

I understand the arguement concerning design being an agent of solving a particular problem of a client, but that would imply that design only exists in the realm of commercial interests, which i feel it does not.


I was going to write out a very long, drawn out reply, but this basically summed up my feelings on the matter.

[revs boi]

nice topic. Reminds me of my illustration/graphic design lectures back in uni before i went onto animation instead. I have alot of thoughts on this subject (design and function )but alas, i'm not particulary skilled in putting them together in any sort of cohesive form. I'll be back when i have gathered something worthwhile.

[steppingrazor]

So where did this write come from??

[Mackland]

So where did this write come from??

hahaha, i notice you physically deleted your previous post and made a new one.

no i dont live and have never been to japan nor did i write that article.

anyway, its an article from a few years back before hypebeasts were a hype. i found it usefull to finally post up that article right now after all the bitching about what streetwear actually was, is and ever will be or wont be.

source: http://www.v-2.org/displayArticle.php?article_num=9

soo... the title explains.. i just cut a text and paste it up here, credits to the writer.

keep it in mind, bookmark the link, make a college project of it...

[TheFly]

An interesting read, and a good reality check for a lot of the would-be-designers out there. I find the article a little harsh, but on point for the most part. The term 'designer' is thrown around so much and every day it seems to become more and more meaningless.

The recent (past 5-7 years) I've noticed a lot of people going to school for design. A lot of schools offering design degrees, a lot of art schools popping up, a lot of trade schools offering design courses. In these schools the quality of word is outstandingly bad. Not only from a design perspective but in the concept/execution. It seems like there was many people who saw it as an easy out, a fun little job, something to do on the side, a way to get rich quick. I don't think its any of the above. Well... except maybe the fun part. But its work, and its hard.. and its NOT just "throwing one Photoshop layer over another, slapping some freeware fonts over the thing, and braying about 'reprazenting'." The problem is a vast majority of people in that major did exactly that. I have to admit I took the easy way out sometimes, and it showed. I'd like to think I'm above that now.

My opinion is, in todays schools... about... 5-10% should be in the design field. Except of course for some of the nicer school (Cal Arts, RISD, MCAD, etc) where they have strict entrance requirements and a small student body. There was a good article from AIGA about this problem. (CLICK FOR LINK (http://voice.aiga.org/content.cfm?ContentAlias=_getfullarticle&aid=1245018)) Basically what it says is that the schools let in too many people who dont have the talent or drive. I think its a reflection on the attitude about a lot young people who want to be designers but have a warped concept of what a designer is and does.

[revs boi]

cosign the above.

the funny thing in London is that alot of the graphic design industry here preys on the young naive graduates and rapes them for all they are worth. By this i mean constant rotation of placement students with aspirations of doing major things. Quality is not much of an issue as compared to quantity when they enter many of these companies. When you are pumping out 5 - 10 adverts a day is there even a consideration for concept, function and form? This would be a new concept to many budding "designers" who are not trained properly at school, often by people who don't even work in the industry or have no concept about what is currently happening in design.

lol, I don't even no if i'm making sense. I just wrote off the top of the dome.

[bigsink]

t may lower the percieved bar of what is expected from experienced designers, because uneducated designers are getting praise from invisible people on the internet who can hardly prove their reasons for liking something other than "its DOPE".

That is the direct result of hype. Just observe the millions of people who support the garbage mainstream rap coming from the south. They dont care about the artistry they care about the dope.

[steppingrazor]

well theres nothing wrong with something being dope. you have to get that gut reaction to get people excited about it. you can be dope and creative at the same time. its just bad when the dope is shallow and the creative missing.

[andyrussian]

Great read, a lot of it I agree with and a lot of it I'm torn up about. I love real design, and have always been a huge fan of art and going to museums since I was little. However I love hardcore/punk which represents a far more stripped down and raw approach is which is what I love about streetwear so much. Design is great, and I think genuine designer clothes and true art are great but I love nothing more than a simple t-shirt and jeans. Hardcore/punk at its essense wasn't creating anything new, just reworking laid out designs in musc and rock and transforming them into their own image to convey their beliefs.

Streetwear brands may not be creating new types of shirts or jackets with original design aesthetics, but ideally they are creating graphics or reworking the images around them to convey their lifestyle and beliefs. Just like everything else in the world, the barriers to entry into any type of market are lowering because of new technology and theres a large influx of uninspired derivative work, but at its core I think streetwear is just as valid and important as designing a rail station. This may sound cheesy and I hope nobody I know is reading this, but the way we choose to dress and the images we put on our chest represent and shape how we navigate through the world much like a railway. The images, language, and shared history that turns a group into a culture. Every culture in the world is filled with bullshit, and at times the pendelum moves toward popular trends or superficiality that may make people jaded. That doesn't mean there isn't any depth or meaning left. You just have to dig deeper. I remember going to malls and trying to find the shirts of brands that I saw in skate mags or trying to find albums for bands I liked or shoes that I wanted and not finding them anywhere. Everyone knows what that was like. I fear I may have digressed from the main point of the article or what we are discussing, but my main thing is that at its core and when done well streetwear is creating something just as genuine and complex as "real design."

[bnj]

Hello, I'm still a bit tipsy from dj'ing tonight. I was checking emails and stumbled onto this again. Apologies in advance.

I believe the argument being presented is a little too cut and dry. While the examples are very on point and all, the grey areas are not adressed, and to me personal definition of "art/design/what have you" is a very grey area.

For instance, if a stylist, (going by the arguments definitions) builds a clientele, then focuses on altering their branding to fit said clientele, do they become some kind of stylist/designer hybrid? There is still the problems and constraints presenting themselves, the only difference in the situation is the client and designer are one in the same.

[TheFizixDotCom]

An interesting read, and a good reality check for a lot of the would-be-designers out there. I find the article a little harsh, but on point for the most part. The term 'designer' is thrown around so much and every day it seems to become more and more meaningless.

The recent (past 5-7 years) I've noticed a lot of people going to school for design. A lot of schools offering design degrees, a lot of art schools popping up, a lot of trade schools offering design courses. In these schools the quality of word is outstandingly bad. Not only from a design perspective but in the concept/execution. It seems like there was many people who saw it as an easy out, a fun little job, something to do on the side, a way to get rich quick. I don't think its any of the above. Well... except maybe the fun part. But its work, and its hard.. and its NOT just "throwing one Photoshop layer over another, slapping some freeware fonts over the thing, and braying about 'reprazenting'." The problem is a vast majority of people in that major did exactly that. I have to admit I took the easy way out sometimes, and it showed. I'd like to think I'm above that now.

My opinion is, in todays schools... about... 5-10% should be in the design field. Except of course for some of the nicer school (Cal Arts, RISD, MCAD, etc) where they have strict entrance requirements and a small student body. There was a good article from AIGA about this problem. (CLICK FOR LINK (http://voice.aiga.org/content.cfm?ContentAlias=_getfullarticle&aid=1245018)) Basically what it says is that the schools let in too many people who dont have the talent or drive. I think its a reflection on the attitude about a lot young people who want to be designers but have a warped concept of what a designer is and does.

I maybe still high from last night so pardon my response but I couldnt agree more. Why? Because I am guilty of trying to take that easy out. I didnt know what to do after high school so I thought that maybe trying out graphic design in college (back east) would be a cool major not knowing what to expect. While having easy ass prereq's I found that a lot of the kids in there were taking way too many shortcuts in design and not focusing on the actual design process much like myself who had the willingness to learn and understand it. Kids would just go straight to the computer and finish a piece within a day while I was still skecthing 2 or 3 concepts. And even tho I shouldnt care but it did annoy me because I was taking this shit seriously while these knuckleheads were slapping together poor design. And at the end of the day you can see who took the time to sketch out drafts and had a thought out message to someone who just used a photoshop filter and called it a day. I definately was not the most talented person in my class, I had to work twice as hard to get to the level of the 3 people (out of 20) who I felt had the talent and the drive to succeed. I guess you can compare it to "streetwear" today where you(smart consumer) can see past the hype and see who constructed a well thought out design/collection to someone who just threw it together in one night and had it sent to the printers the next day. I agree that schools do let too many people in who do not have what it takes. After awhile you soon realize whats going on and understand why there is still good design schools out there that require portfolios. In other colleges where there is no real requirements, anyone can become a 'design' student. In streetwear culture being that it has boomed recently (as in dollars is now making sense) there isnt requirements. I guess thats why some just follow trends and run with it. However, I do believe that 2007, the strong designers with thorough collections will do very well and create a new echelon for others to strive for; the fly-by-nights will soon diminish and the ones that think anyone can do this will think twice before printing on AAA's.

Is this making sense? I dunno I am just rambling on to see if something is correct. I have witnessed the breakthrough at Magic with the seperation of the new streetwear section and the campground. I guess its that analogy of the prestigious design schools vs colleges with a graphic design dept. And i dont wanna offend any brands that we carry because I feel that many of them deserve not to be around some of the weaker ('2nd tier') brands around them at the high5.

And on a final note, being business owner who does sell 'streetwear' I do get annoyed/offended when I see kids trying to start up a store not having knowledge how retail works and not knowing that this shit is hard work day in and day out. And I am not saying I have this shit down but Ive always had the determination to succeed in whatever I felt passionately about. And on another random note, when people ask for discounts, wholesale pricing or even free shit, I do get frustrated that people do not realize that this is a business and my life here. Hookin up shit from a business I dont own vs hookin up shit from a business you do own is different. We got bills to pay homey. holla!

[PopYaColla]

Likke Steppingrazor said, there is different types of designers. I do not feel that one should solve a problem, or make the world a better place to be allowed to call one self a designer. Designing a t-shirt that looks good to some people actually HAS a purpose, even though it might not be a practical or particullary important purpose.

My mother is an educated, experienced and well respected artist, but the oil paintings she has devoted her life to does not solve a probelm at all. The writer said that this was some of the things that seperated art from design, but I feel those two overlap each other all the time, and maybe even more when it comes to clothes.

So, I think the point that SteppingRazor made about different kinds of designers is valid. A graphic designer may have more in common with a painter when it commes to the motivation behind his work, then he might have in common with a more classical designer.

'scuse my English, I'm Norwegian 8)