The Literature of Graphic Design
I’m a little irked to read in ‘The Literature of Graphic Design’ (Thomson) that for practicing designers ‘libraries are resources for visual inspiration and information on current styles and trends, new technologies, and professional news.’138 138. Thomson, E. (1993) ‘The Literature of Graphic Design’, Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America, Spring 1993, Vol. 12, No. 1. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Art Libraries Society of North America Stable. It seems like a slight. Thomson goes on to contrast this with the needs of the graphic design scholar ‘who relies on the research methodology and tools used by historians and social scientists’. This reads to me like further qualitative distinction. While I do not raid libraries as ‘a treasury of visual ideas’, neither have I approached them as a scholar. In practice my literature and reference material derive from the material from each project; the people I work with; the context(s) in which my work is situated (from the nightclub to the gallery); lived experience; and any number of disparate sources. It’s ad hoc, a bricolage, but out of this my central enquiry into communicating artistic knowledge takes hold. It is through this written thesis that I can now articulate its mechanisms, but approaching this task feels at first like a superimposition, as so much of practice is in response to contingency.
Fig. 78. The Literature of Graphic Design
The graphic designer inevitably responds to the visual culture of graphic design, and this is a vocabulary in which people are conversant. Graphic design is after all ‘the public art’ (FitzGerald, 66: 2010), and ‘the dominant visual medium of our culture.’ (FitzGerald, (1997: 21). Part of this discourse ‘is that of fashion’ (Clarke, 2003: 177), and I draw on this common understanding, fluency and expectation to create a transformation.139 139. ‘… every form of alienation needs something to be alienated from; any deviation or rupture of illusion has to build up a world of illusion in the first place’ Pantenburg, V. (2011: 159) Images or Shadows
Style First
For FitzGerald ‘Graphic design’s current evaluation methods continue to emphasise aesthetic achievement… Good design is defined as high formal accomplishment, such as can only be realised through the patronage of elite cultural or commercial clients.’ (FitzGerald, 2010: 126). This is certainly true of much graphic design output, and prizing production values and trends of professionalism short-circuits the importance of being attuned to a wider cultural context, and the complexities this might afford. In Fiske’s articulation of intertextuality he makes a distinction between horizontal and vertical intertextuality. The horizontal relations are the primary links – for Genette this might be the Hypotext and the Hypotext – while the vertical relates to secondary texts – criticism, journalism, gossip and conversation (Genette’s metatext). I think we can see this horizontal plain as a more linear time, while the Vertical cuts across this, and is more ephemeral: fashion or taste at a given moment. These relationships are dynamic, and change over time. I am interested in these shifting values and perceptions of visual material only in their productivity as points of reference. I will use and reference current cultural tropes (I am not above or beneath fashion) but amongst a constituency of elements, a bricolage which emerges from the material and which exist outside of stylistic dogmas. My use of stylistic affectations is measured against the context and lifespan of a project.
No Style
As Foucault observes, all discourses are ‘objects of appropriation’ (2020: 211). I have coined the term ‘no-style bricolage’ to describe part of my approach regarding my bricolage that comes about through the foldback and mutual constituencies of context and medium and technique. It’s adapted from Scalbert (2013) who in his writings on 6A Architects talks of contingencies, situations and fortuitous collisions which bring about production that is outside of any definable style.140 140. These non-decisions help to illuminate the meaning of bricolage. Through them, unpredictable events seem to overtake the will, the intentions and the authorship of the architects. For sure Keaton and Tati have a distinctive style of acting, but it cannot be said of their jokes that they are typically Keaton’s or Tati’s. Rather they arise form the fortuitous collision between an artefact and a situation, a door handle and a toothache, an inner tyre and a funeral. For this reason, there can be no style, not even individual styles of bricolage. (Scalbert, 2013: 140) Importantly in place of style the learning, and the visual language come from the particular conditions of each site of publication, ensuring that the discourse develops around the subject matter rather than having the undue interference of a style (Pater’s ‘clearly authored visual language’, in 6/7 ‘1968’ / ‘1969’ / ‘Discipline’ / ‘1981’) superimposed upon it (Pater, 2021: 300).