Graphic Design
“If you work intensely and slowly, things will happen that you would never imagine.”
AARON SISKIND, 1990
The dictionary definition of graphic, “giving a clear and effective picture,” reveals a key function of graphic design: to convert information. As with music, design must set a mood, generate tension, surprise, or calm; it can startle or seduce. But all of these emotional states, and many others, are for the designer a kind of information. Music in a movie tells you what to think or feel about what’s going on. In a sense, design does the same thing—it tells you how to respond to the rest of the message embodied in the graphics. And, again, like music, or like smell, the visual signals shoot straight to the emotions. That is the power of graphics. Language, although immensely powerful, seems less immediate, less swiftly channeled into the emotional regions of our minds.
Graphic design is not an independent, private art, such as a painting, sculpture, or music, although it draws upon these disciplines; it is a public enterprise, devising ways to communicate information through form, color, texture, and the other visual signals.
“Professional” design can be said to have started in earnest in the United States in the 1930s, although designing is an activity as ancient as the human species, and it came more clearly into focus in the 1950s, locating itself between the fine arts and advertising art. The first generation of graphic designers wanted to separate themselves from advertising, which some saw, rather preciously, as the sleazy side of graphic communication, since they considered it tainted by commercial intentions.
This disdain for, and suspicion of, commerce was in part a response to the perceived need for more objective, more ethically responsible graphic communication.
These pioneers of graphic design wished to see themselves as more socially responsible than their cohorts in the world of “commercial advertising art.” They wanted to use images and type, color and form, and other design elements to convey information vividly but honestly instead of dressing up hard-sell copy to seduce buyers. Despite these efforts at separation, the distinction between graphic design and commercial art is often blurred, since both serve the needs of business.
Graphic design at its best attempts to deliver direct visual communications, while most “commercial art” is meant to entice. But enticement is a form of communication too, and often a worthy one. Nor can it be said that all advertising is without integrity or that those inventing it have no concern for truth and aesthetics. It is simply that those involved in advertising as a profession need not focus on such matters. Their purpose, quite sensibly, is to sell.
A comparable analogy can be made between the interior architect and interior decorator. The architect is, for the most part, concerned with form and function; the decorator is usually concerned with embellishment, although function is often part of the decorator’s purpose, and form, for its own sake, has deep and rightly honored traditions in architecture. As the old saying goes: “Comparisons are odious.” These distinctions are frequently gratuitous and ill-conceived.
As a kid growing up in Kentucky, I thought art was a label on a Cloverine salve tin or a magazine cover by Norman Rockwell. I had no idea about design, much less graphic design. Yet, life (and my nature?) led me into this field; I became, unavoidably, a graphic designer and have never wished to be anything else.
Early in my career I remember watching a group of businesspeople, thinking how unfortunate they were because they didn’t have a profession that they cared about as much as I cared about mine. This, of course, was ridiculous. They may have been thinking the same thing as me, whatever they imagined my work to be. This happened forty-six years ago, and I still have the same passion for design. I want everyone to understand what it is all about.
I learned much from my father, a first-class carpenter and cabinetmaker. He taught me to take care in what I do—the results, he said, would be compensation enough. He used to tell me that his tables were made for those who looked underneath to see how they were constructed. He didn’t care what I became: “Just like what you do, and do it well.”
I can still see my father standing by the bus as I board to leave for the Navy. I am sitting in the bus, next to an open window; he looks up at me and says, “Be a man.” By this I know he means: Be honest and do good things. This smacks of Hollywood sentimentality, but it rang true to me; still does.
This book tries to show that view of work, the view I learned from my father. If a carpenter or waitress can’t read this book and make sense of it, then it’s no good. The subject should be accessible to anyone who has the time to look—and, even better, the time to do.
If we were dealing with science, let’s say physics, then this book would be about doing physics: it is a lab course, not theory. Design is about doing; it is an act, a process.
If you track a design project from beginning to end, it is not so different from work in other professions, say that of a writer, doctor, or lawyer. You stay with the project until you get it right. You include whomever and whatever may be needed to accomplish the goal.
The designer may serve as choreographer, but most jobs depend on many dancers to bring an idea to fru-ition. A designer with too much ego may forget that his work involves many people, including the client. Those involved may be writers, photographers, illustrators, editors, architects, engineers, computer specialists, publishers, typesetters, printers—a host of people who hold the job together and make it work. If communication among collaborators breaks down, if vanity intrudes, the project suffers. A designer must welcome others into the effort; it is a social transaction.
This book is an example. Many people, beginning with my students at the Rhode Island School of Design and my colleagues at Malcolm Grear Designers, have helped to make it happen. The students produced the exercises reprinted here: my co-workers influenced content and organization.
It could not have been possible without the assistance of many knowledgeable and generous people. A special note of gratitude is due Patricia Appleton for her great skill and her sensitivity and devotion to all aspects of this publication. Pat is president of Malcolm Grear Designers.
In the first edition, Leah Grear, an artist, teacher, and my daughter, picked up my thumbnail sketches and laid out nearly every page.
Another strong influence was Neil Patterson, my close friend and a connoisseur of words and images. Neil is a publisher of scientific books. He taught me stuff about sentences and helped in many other ways.
Some of the reasons for attempting this project are negative. There is, to my mind, more than enough talk about graphics these days, way too much theory. This is an applied field, like engineering or clinical medicine. I am convinced that students learn by doing, by fiddling, and by practicing. So this book is full of exercises. Theory, which is thin soup in the art world, is seldom mentioned. My intention—one that I now fear I have failed to follow rigorously enough—is to avoid the jargon of graphic design and art criticism.
Our world is overstocked with images—mostly clutter—from computer monitors, movie and television screens, product packaging, billboards, magazines, and other print media. We are bombarded by a numbing array of visual “information.” There is little chance of slowing down this high-speed, high-tech culture. We have to adapt. One adaptation that will reduce confusion and offer some solace is improved graphic design.
We are a visual species. Most of us are strongly affected by the signals that reach our brain through our eyes. We seem able to tolerate an astonishing diversity of “visual noise” generated by urban crowding and decay, but we are soothed by the look of trees and fields, the ocean, open sky, art and architecture, and other signs of visual grace—a handsome book, a piece of cloth, any object, place, or creature that we find attractive.
It is for this reason that graphic design has an increasingly significant role to play: Along with architecture, resource management, and environmental planning, it helps to shape much of our world and will shape more of it in times to come. So it matters that designers of products, and designers of messages that promote those products, do their work with a sense of responsibility. We serve a human need for clear, engaging forms of visual communication. This need is more profound and pervasive than we might think. It is not for nothing that we—and all cultures—spend so much time and substance arranging environments to satisfy this need. Not for nothing, too, that we pay so steep a price in stress-related ailments when we neglect the need for visual harmony.
Teaching students how to solve a particular design problem is sometimes appropriate, but it is not the main purpose of a course such as mine. The take-home lesson for the student is the process by which a solution is achieved. Given that there are usually many acceptable solutions to any problem in design, to concentrate on results rather than process is to shortchange students and inhibit their development.
One must see problems in context. A designer needs to take account of the nature and needs of the people who are to use the design. The users are not just those who hire the designer; users also include the “consumers” of the design. If this entire set of circumstances, the state of the total system, remains unexamined, the designer is in danger of plugging in preconceived “solutions” without taking full account of the problem at hand. The designer who solves a problem within its context will not have to worry about doing something original. The outcome will be new because the problem was solved in accord with its context. Each context is unique; a successful solution will likewise be unique.
I like a lot the adage that for every problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious, and wrong. A problem worthy of the name is seldom accessible to sudden and simple solution. It may appear that way at times but usually because the solver, even unconsciously, has been steeped in the problem and its various ramifications and thus is able to experience revelation, sudden insight, as though it sprang full-blown from a brilliant mind. It is best to take it that problem solving is hard work. You might as well enjoy it.
As with clinicians, designers are in the problem-solving business. So teachers help students most by gearing design education to problem solving. However, students should not be expected to—although they sometimes can—solve large, complicated design problems, the sort that takes years of education and experience to solve. I give them basic problems that they can see in full complexity.
A good number of the following pages are filled with students’ work that illustrates this approach to design education. I pose basic problems and encourage the students to think about them holistically and then to work through a series of design progressions. The students learn ways of approaching problems; they learn some fundamental principles; and they become better equipped to solve ornate problems under elaborate constraints. Constraint, of course, is the name of the game. Problems confronted by professional designers are defined by the purpose a design must serve and the constraints imposed by unavoidable circumstances. Such constraints can involve time, money, materials, dimensions, audience, media, and a host of other factors.
It is my view that practicing designers, those who have a professional practice beyond their academic teaching responsibilities, will be likely to teach effectively following this problem-solving strategy. It is like the case method now used at graduate schools of business and, increasingly, at medical schools. Experience in the “real world” is essential background for this kind of teaching. Through professional practice the educator keeps abreast of current needs and is tested against others in the field. But let me repeat a caution: The designer, when teaching, must not simply pass on methods to students. The central task is to teach principles that students can apply over the long haul as they develop through professional work in the world beyond school.
Malcolm Grear
The Furrow 1951
Made from a steel plow point.