What is graphic design?
Graphic design is the most
universal of all the arts. It is all around us, explaining, decorating,
identifying: imposing meaning on the world. It is in the streets, in everything
we read, it is on our bodies. We engage with design in road signs, advertisements,
magazines, cigarette packets, headache pills, the logo on our t-shirt, the
washing label on our jacket. It is not just a modern or capitalistic
phenomenon. Streets full of signs, emblems,
prices, sale offers, official pronouncements and news would all have been just
as familiar to ancient Egyptians, mediaeval Italians or the people of Soviet
Russia.
Graphic design performs a
number of functions. It sorts and differentiates – it distinguishes one company
or organisation
or nation from another. It informs – it tells us how to bone a duck or how to
register a birth. It acts on our emotions, and helps to shape how we feel about
the world around us.
There is an old joke amongst graphic
designers: 'Bad graphic design never killed anyone'. This is meant to show that
design is inconsequential, ultimately decorative, a question merely of picking
one typeface or colour rather than another that would work just as
well. Journalists delight in using the adjective 'designer' to stand for a
particular kind of cynical consumerism that distracts us with a jazzy visual
appearance: fancy bottle-tops, cod-Victorian labels, new logos for unethical
companies for example. This has led to phrases like‘
designer water', 'designer jeans, even 'designer babies'.
Depressingly, graphic designers do sometimes play a small part in producing
this tinsel.
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