In Rock’s ‘notorious’ essay ‘The Designer as Author’ (1996), he takes apart contemporary claims of graphic authorship, amongst those that ‘the amplification of the personal voice legitimises design as equal to more traditional privileged forms of authorship,’ stressing that ‘the primary concern of both the viewer and the critic is not who made it, but rather what it does and how it does it.’47 47. Rock, M. (1996) ‘The Designer as Author’ Eye No. 20 Vol. 5. London: Eye Magazine Limited. Pater observes the added market value of ‘a clearly authored visual language’ but that designers produce monographs ‘lacking any serious criticism or self-reflection’. It is evident that this type of ‘authorship’ has a commercial foothold – ‘a condition of economic success’ (Pater, 2021: 300), but this authorship seems to me to be about differentiation in a competitive market, and while we all must compete, it is far removed from the authorial space that I am contesting as central to my thesis.48 48. Pater, R. (2021) CAPS LOCK: How Capitalism Took Hold of Graphic Design, and How to Escape from It. Amsterdam: Valiz. Rock’s follow up essay ‘Fuck Content’ (2005) sought to clarify misreading, advocating for treatment ‘as a kind of text itself’ suggesting that what designers ‘must master are not the content narratives but the devices of the telling’.49 49. Rock, M (2013) ‘Fuck Content’, Multiple Signatures: On Designers, Authors, Readers and Users. New York: Rizzoli International. Available at: https://2x4.org/ideas/2009/fuck-content/ [Accessed 12 August 2024]I came to Rock’s articles late (as usual). At the time of the first essay’s publication I was not troubled by terms of authorship, but more simply by trying to create unique and innovative work through an exploration of content, and graphic design let me in on discourses of interest to me. His later clarification seems curious to me. Surely the treatment is a text too, but one that has a mutual constituency with the ‘narrative’ it carries. How can I be concerned by one and not the other? FitzGerald was critical of Rock’s initial essay in that it never strays far from traditional conceptions of design activity… (1997: 21) suggesting instead that ‘as design is inextricably linked to other cultural productions, it’s meaningful to look to other disciplines for insight on how those cultural products come about and are perceived.’ FitzGerald (1997) proposes music as a model through which to perceive design’s cultural role, and my parallel engagement with graphic design and independent music, anchored in the reciprocal knowledge bases or ‘operational fields’ of these two fields is reflective of this framing.