This week, the topic of removing the (capital) "I" from graphic design came up — and it's the first time I've talked about it in this way:
In a very real sense, "you", the designer — in the figurative sense — don't matter. Graphic design isn't fine art. It's not about expressing yourself and exorcising demons. Graphic design (i.e.: visual communication) connects a message to an audience with a hopeful result. There is no "I" in that equation, is there?
I recall meeting David Carson in the mid-90s and spending time with him in his studio in San Diego. He had just wrapped a series of TV commercials for Hardee's/Carl's Jr. that were passable, but hardly the work of the David Carson we saw in Raygun. I asked him "why?"... "Because they pay really well," he replied. Have you seen them? I doubt it... it's not something he puts in his portfolio. He has done other commercials, but in them, David is far less present than the client's message — be it Nyquil, Motrin or Samsung — and is very different from with work of the enfant terrible persona we've come to know through the design press.
About a decade later, I had the opportunity to spend a good bit of time with Stefan Sagmeister while running a series of workshops around branding. He presented his work for his wife's clothing company and his brother's denim boutique and he discussed the challenges and opportunities with each. They seemed like idyllic projects and then it dawned on me... he had not really done any branding work — at least not that he wanted to show publicly — for anyone he wasn't related or married to. Of course he was doing some great client-based work, but that wasn't really what he was showing. Why? Perhaps the client-centric projects were a bit less Sagmeister and didn't play well for the audience. Sadly, though, as an audience, they were only seeing the "I" side of his work.
This week in class, we literally practiced re-framing the way we talk about design and not using "I". So, instead of saying "I was trying to ___", the approach was "the objective was ___, so it was approached in this way". Try it. It's hard, but very much more on-strategy.
Practically speaking, we're not saying that you — in the literal/personal sense — don't matter, but the above is perhaps something to keep in check and keep in mind, especially when you're just learning the difference between Helvetica and Arial.
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As a side note and for full-disclosure, I've recently become disillusioned with the idea of "the individual voice of the designer" because it strays into design-wonk-ism and/or too far into the area of fine art — and might be a bit counter-productive for the very early student who needs to learn the ropes first.
I've been looking at folks like Stefan Sagmeister or Tibor Kalman as Graphic Artists more than Visual Communicators. Their contributions are immense, for sure — but not always specifically applicable when a student needs to learn the nuances of type personality and the gist of getting a message across without a lot of noise.
They've also earned it... Just as Pablo Picasso went though his Rose and Blue Period before entering into Cubism, Stefan earned his stripes in studios and agencies before landing TED talks. However, a 2nd semester design student can't begin at the "art-star" square and I'm becoming increasingly concerned that an emulation of either Stefan or Tibor as opposed to Brodovich or Rodchenko might be misguided as students overlook the basic fundamentals of the profession for the starry-eyed drive to headline conferences.
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