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Graphic Design: Structure and Experiment

Book proposal

Ellen Lupton

Director, Graphic Design MFA Program

Maryland Institute College of Art

January 4, 2006

Manifesto for a new formalism

The literary theorist Stanley Fish recently published an Op Ed piece in the New York Times last spring describing his freshman composition course, in which students have to invent a new language, complete with vocabulary and grammar. Fish’s course focuses on how language functions, not what it means. Students are forced to analyze the mechanics and architecture of language, while ignoring its topical content.[1]

* * * * * *

Steven Johnson’s controversial book Everything Bad is Good for You (2005) asks readers to ignore the banal content of video games and look instead at the complex tasks and nested thinking these games ask us to carry out. Comparing television dramas of the 1970s with those of the 1990s, Johnson attends not to their content but to their structure: TV has become more complex, with multiple simultaneous plots and elaborately wired character systems.[2]

* * * * * *

Consider this: everywhere you look, form is coming back. Everywhere, that is, but the field of graphic design, where from the academy to the street, Pop art appropriations have become standard practice. Whether it is called visual scratch mixing, stylistic appropriation, cultural referencing, or “the vernacular,” Pop is the established design ideology of our time. Pop has become an example of what Antonio Gramsci called “hegemony”: a normative idea that is accepted and even enforced by those who live within its grip.

Graphic Design: Structure and Experiment will focus on the study of form within the context of basic design studies. The intellectual movements of post-modern historicism and multiculturalism sidelined the study of form in the 1990s, while at the same time, the digital revolution was generating a new and rapidly expanding body of required technical knowledge. Classic textbooks such as Armin Hofmann’s Graphic Design Manual or Donis A. Dondis’s Primer of Visual Literacy were struck down by the double blow of culture and technology. No book of sufficient stature, authority, and originality has emerged in their wake. Few of the current books on basic design takes an experimental and critical view of the medium; instead, the current literature emphasizes practical applications.

Graphic Design: Structure and Experiment will distinguish itself from the pack in the following ways:

> by taking a strong position in a period governed by relativism;

> by promoting intellectual thought in an era governed by populism;

> by creating a bridge between old and new media;

> by embracing formal experiment in an era obsessed with content and the applications of knowledge.

The idea to create a book on basic design arose when a faculty member from another school asked me to recommend an introductory design book—not about typography or applied communication problems (logos and so forth), but about basic two-dimensional design. I could not, honestly, find any such book to endorse. Around the same time I was looking at MICA student work (graduate and undergraduate) and was struck by the need to expose my students (and myself) to a more experimental, systematic, open-ended exploration of the design language. Although we had acquired a solid understanding of design from a cultural point of view, I was seeing a lack of invention and confidence regarding design as abstract structure, a phenomenon that is occurring not just at MICA but across the design field today.

Together with some colleagues at MICA, I have been devising form-based design problems for use in courses at MICA and elsewhere. At both the graduate and undergraduate levels, we are implementing problems that are defined in terms of such structural ideas as transparency, pattern, and framing. Other faculty at MICA who have been invited to participate include Bernard Canniffe, Nadra Kebaili, Abbott Miller, Jennifer Cole Phillips, and Mike Weikert. In addition, we may invite a few colleagues from other schools to contribute problems and student work in specific areas. A team of graduate students at MICA will design and produce the book.

Graphic Design: Structure and Experiment will thus fill a void in the current literature. Design students and educators need a book that discusses the visual language of graphic design in a critical, rigorous way, informed by contemporary media, theory, and software systems. They need a book that allows the relationship between design and production, theory and software, thinking and making, to illuminate one another, rather than holding them apart as opposing agendas or irreconcilable pedagogical areas. Graphic Design: Structure and Experiment aims to reintegrate our understanding of digital software with physical tools, materials, and processes, and to look at the formal vocabulary of design from the changed perspective of the twenty-first-century world.

A systematic view of basic design is more valuable than ever in an age defined by code, networked communities, time-based arts, and trans-media publishing. In an age when it has become second nature to mix and match imagery and to endlessly quote and recycle popular media, young artists and designers should be exposed to visually intensive, form-based thinking in a manner in tune with contemporary art, life, and technology.

What "basics" would provide an appropriate foundation for artists and designers in the global, networked visual world of the twenty-first century? What situations would encourage students to actively and critically explore the formal, cultural, and technical aspects of visual communication? What readings and discussion topics would help students understand the context and meaning of basic design? Graphic Design: Structure and Experiment will answer those questions in a colorful, compact, clearly written volume illustrated with inspiring examples of student work.

My previous book, Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, and Students, addressed a similar void in the area of basic typography, providing a theoretical and practical overview of this fundamental design discipline. Published in October, 2005, Thinking with Type has been met enthusiastically by educators and designers around the world. Graphic Design: Structure and Experiment will serve as a companion and complement to Thinking with Type.

Basic background

What is basic design? Strategies for approaching design as an abstract language have been around since the Bauhaus, when the creators of the Vorkurs or Basic Course approached two-dimensional form as a “language of vision” whose vocabulary and syntax could be described in geometrical, perceptual, and technological terms. Artist/teachers including Johannes Itten, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy believed that this language of vision transcended culture through the universal functionality of the eye. They analyzed visual form according to a set of formal parameters: from point, line, and plane to color, texture, pattern, scale, and contrast.

This powerful approach, which looked at two-dimensional design as a universal, perceptually based "language of vision," had a lasting impact on design education around the world. Since the 1940s, numerous educators have refined and expanded on this systematic approach, from Laszlo Moholy-Nagy at the New Bauhaus to Gui Bonsieppe at the Ulm School. In post-war Switzerland, designers including Emil Ruder, Armin Hofmann, and Joseph Müller-Brockman created a total design methodology based on ideas of modularity, grid systems, and minimal, rigorously defined typographic hierarchies.

In the late 1960s, Wolfgang Weingart, a student of Armin Hofmann, rebelled against the uniformity and anonymity of the Swiss style while embracing its abstract vocabulary. Weingart turned the Swiss methodology inside out, creating a typographic revolution that inspired designers around the world in the 1970s and 80s. Generations of American designers went to graduate school in Switzerland and returned to the U.S. to become prominent educators. At Cranbrook Academy of Art, Katherine McCoy led a controversial MFA program in the 1970s, 80s, and early 90s that encouraged students to divert the modernist design vocabulary away from problem-solving and neutrality towards self-expression and formal experiment.

Art schools today continue to implement foundation programs that claim to define a common ground across a range of disciplines. Yet there is no longer a consensus as to what a foundation in two-dimensional design should be. For some educators, a relativized "visual studies" approach has replaced formal analysis and construction. Exercises in parody, appropriation, and readings of popular culture are taking the place of the seemingly outmoded approaches inherited from the Bauhaus, while a focus on the needs, interests, and abilities of particular audiences has supplanted the ideal of universal forms.

Intellectual goals

• To analyze the language of graphic design in light of the cultural and technological transformations that have taken place since 1985, the point at which modernist pedagogies began to disintegrate and digital technologies began redefining design practice.

• To actively explore the lexicon of visual/technical "operations" that are built into the tools that we use.

• To perform formal operations on cultural materials: i.e. to shape the meaning of an image, text, or body of information by implementing precisely described devices/strategies/techniques.

• To explore the interconnected languages of print, typography, film, animation, interaction design, and architecture.

• To articulate a set of conceptual tools. Although our students are becoming adept at understanding "conceptual thinking" from a cultural point of view, they often do not understand how to build a concept abstractly: for example, how to manipulate scale, contrast, timing/sequence, editing (in both the filmic and literary senses), hierarchy, grids, systems, and so on.

• To better understand how software both enables and limits what we do.

• To identify (and produce) relevant theoretical texts to inform contemporary design practice.

Creative Work

Just Click and Earn Money

Graphic Design: Structure and Experiment

Manifesto for a new formalism

Basic background

Intellectual goals