Category: politics of design
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The missing centennial.
W.A. Dwiggins first used the term graphic design in the text “New Kind of Printing Calls for New Design,” published in August 1922 in a special section of the Boston Evening Transcript devoted to the graphic arts. It was a hundred years ago this August. I waited in vain for the fireworks. As a discipline,…
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What about Ukraine?
It has been challenging for me to think about the implications of Ukraine’s war on graphic design. I haven’t read any texts or interventions on the subject. Before writing this post, I took a look at Aiga Eye on Design and Design Observer and found nothing. The same at Futuress. I don’t know if I…
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What Comes After Form? (2)
If Form is not Design’s paradigm anymore, what comes next? If you’d asked art critic Hal Foster around the turn of the Millenium, he would probably answer Design itself succeeded Form. In 2000, Foster published his influential essay “Design and Crime,” which echoed Adolf Loos’ “Ornament and Crime.” Loos’ text was a violent, often racist…
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Design as a morality of form
What had Jan Tschichold and his adversary Max Bill in common? Both equated form with morality. During design’s high modernist phase, it was usual to talk about form in terms of morality, personal but, above all, civic. Good form was a moral and not so much a political objective. On the old form/content divide, politics…
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Form is political
What are we speaking about when we speak about the politics of design? The “First Things First Manifesto,” published originally in 1964 and updated periodically, is an excellent place to search for an answer. In brief, the manifesto appeals to designers to do less publicity work for corporate clients, choosing instead to solve public and…
Unseen by Design 