The reading is a transcript from a debate held on November 9, 1972, between graphic designer legends Wim Crouwel and Jan Van Toorn. The debate was arranged after Jan Van Toorn’s exhibition at the Museum Fodor, for which Wim Crouwel made the catalog. In the debate, Crouwel represents a rational approach, that the graphic designer is a service provider who contributes their professional specialty objectively and responsibly. Jan Van Toorn represents a personal approach, that the graphic designer is more intent on personal expression and that neutrality is impossible.
Van Toorn contends that the analytical designer is a technologist-designer. Rather than content determining form, technique and technology are determining the form. Wim replies that technology is but a tool of wonder. Graphic designers need to convey information rather than imposing a mindset. Van Toorn replies that design has emotional value and the designer has an inescapable input. Crouwel agrees the designer is participatory in the message but believes the designer can separate themselves and must or else their work would be limited to what aligns with their values. He continues that the designer should avoid amateurism, working on things that they have no idea about. He emphasizes specialties. Van Toorn rebuts that separation between designer and work creates a disconnect. He goes on that the designer’s approach is that of an artist, that the general human experience cannot be reduced and so clearly separated. He critiques that Crouwel’s approach makes the designer’s contribution uniform. Crouwel rebuts that subjective participation is inconsistent and reactive and in its own way uniform in the short run. With the artist approach, designers are living between being a visual artist and a good graphic designer. Back to amateurism, Wim talks about how clumsy work is ineffective and mentions the Paris protest posters of 1968. Van Toorn points to the lack of the designer’s contribution of a point of view. On catalogs, Crouwel believes the designer does not stand between the artist and the public. He critiques Van Toorn’s design having a voice stronger than that of the artist. Van Toorn replies that the work and identity is made collectively and that the artist can see themselves in his work. The debate transcription concludes on the topic of the designer’s role in social change. Crouwel concludes, if you want to change the world, don’t be a graphic designer. Going into political science or philosophy or politics will be quicker.
Both Crouwel and Van Toorn have defining points in the debate. They both agree in the designer’s participatory role and design’s responsibility to communicate but disagree on what that participation looks like, and the priority of the message being communicated. With a final point on the designer’s role with social change, Crouwel shares he became a graphic designer to use his talent at the service of society. Why did Jan Van Toorn want to become a graphic designer?
This reading examines the International Design Conference in Aspen to understand the position of graphic and industrial designers during 1950-1975, the post-World War II and Cold War period, when American companies were growing, and the role of the designer was changing. The IDCA was started by Walter Paepcke, owner of cardboard box company Container Corporation of America. Paepcke, at the suggestion of his wife who studied painting, hired modern artists to create the branding of his company. He believed in the relationship between art and business. While working with Bauhaus teachers Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Herbert Bayer, Paepcke developed an idea for a design conference in the town of Aspen where he owned real estate.
The conference aimed to bring designers and businessmen together. He believed the growing corporate world needed modern designers. At the time, public opinion on corporations was changing from hostility to acceptance and acknowledgement of companies’ contributions to the war effort and a growing economy. With the Marshall Plan, US efforts to restore European economies created a huge demand for American consumer goods. Design emerged as a way for American businesses to distinguish their products and brand identities. Some companies brought in external designers, while others preferred to have more control and created internal teams for design and market research. Designers’ self-image and thinking about their roles was changing as a result, a topic discussed during the first few IDCA conferences. Between 1951-1960, the IDCA conferences focused on design and the corporate world. In one conference, industrial designer Walter Teague advised designers to be aware of the role they are hired for and that work in the corporate world was not going to be easy. In a following conference, the topic started to shift to the designers’ role in society and discussions were about concerns of design becoming servile to business and profit. Businesses lacked leaders who believed in design and design was becoming management oriented. Designers’ values conflicted with approaches like planned obsolescence, to create objects for sales rather than for beauty and function. By the 1960s, with the race to the moon and arms race, public opinion of American corporations was hostile once again. At the IDCA conference in 1960, the discussion was around corporations’ reluctance to change. Within larger units, there is less room for individual creativity and workers in organization are socially engineered to want to belong. Designers were rethinking how the companies that made them successful also undermined their creativity.
In the following years until the end of the IDCA, conference topics seemed to move further away from the original aim connecting design and business and more about designers and the problems of the world, such as the environment and the impact of films abroad. Then, in 1970, the conference was about counterculture and free speech. Designers who had experienced the 1968 Paris student revolt called out American designers for being representatives of a capitalist society. After this, the conferences talked less about design and more about themes until their end in the 1990s. Corporate design had evolved to be more challenging and complex. Designers and design thinking had become an integral part of business in the corporate world and the IDCA conference was not needed.
The reading examines information design and questions whether it can be neutral. Kinross begins with a passage from German designer Gui Bonsiepe that pure information only exists in abstraction. When a designer gives information concrete shape, there is rhetorical infiltration. Information without rhetoric is a pipedream. Kinross uses the example of railway timetables. The London North-Eastern Region railway timetables from 1928 were redesigned with a body of rhetoric rules that included a change in typeface to Gill Sans, usage of bold instead of medium, and names in lowercase. The Dutch railway timetables of 1970-1971 uses color as a rhetorical device, with a green strip at the top of the page to indicate the section of the book on northern and easter parts of the country, red for network diagrams to show destinations after changing trains, red for intercity trains, and no bold. Kinross makes a point that between design for information and design for persuasion, the distinction is not so clear. When the timetables are designed and redesigned, from concept to organized manifestation, they are designed to say something persuasive.
Kinross continues his point that information design is rhetorical with a discussion on how the use of typeface, type style, rules, dot leaders, symbols, spaces, and color provide data of cultural reference. The usage of Gill Sans from the 1920s to 1960s in the LNER timetables and of Univers in the Dutch railway timetables in the 1970s reflect larger shifts in the history of modernism. Modernism took off in the 1920s, somewhat reversed in the 1930s in Germany, reemerged post-world war, and became common visual currency in the 1950s and 1960s. Rhetoric neutrality and assumptions and beliefs of information design can be traced to the period of heroic modernism between the two wars and from changes in the modern movement post-World War II. Modernism is the belief in simple forms and a reduction of elements not for style but for a need to save labor, time, money, and to improve communication. In Germany after WWI, standardization was an economic imperative. By the 1920s, the time of Bauhaus, life had regained some stability. Between the wars, information design and instructive knowledge arose with beliefs in science and technology. In the 1930s in Germany, there were elements of modernity in industrial production and technological advance, while esthetics borrowed more from neoclassicism. Postwar, ideals of modernism resurfaced. With the economic recovery in the1950s, there was a dream of an ideology free, ideologically neutral world with advances in technology, abundance of material goods, representative democracy, and mass education. This dreamworld of the 1950s and 60s was behind the spread of modernism in design in the United States and Western Europe and provides context for the usage of Univers and Swiss typography that represented technical advance, precision, and neutrality. In post-WWII Germany, the analytical approach was important for efficiency, sobriety, and seriousness in a recovering society. Kinross concludes nothing is free of rhetoric and there is a tendency to deny rhetorical persuasion with information designers. The information revolution seems to reduce ideology, and Kinross calls the reader to continue questioning and resisting. Is neutrality a hope held onto during chaotic times? How are designers thinking or not thinking about rhetorical persuasion and ideology with the increasing use of computers?
This book is a collaboration between media analyst Marshal McLuhan and graphic designer Quentin Fiore about McLuhan’s thesis on how media is an extension of human senses. The book begins talking about how changes in technology and culture have created an age of anxiety because we confront the times with outdated mental and psychological responses. Electrical information devices are universal, and we receive electrical information instantly. We take in information and learn from the world as electrical circuitry travels across time and space and dialogue can take place on a global scale. In an electric information environment, we know more about each other and have become more involved and responsible for each other. Media is personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social. Electronic technology has created a global village and a mass with multiple points of view. Media changes us by changing the way we perceive the world.
On amateurism and professionalism, McLuhan characterizes the professional as merged with environment and uncritically accepting of the rules of the environment. The amateur seeks awareness of the individual and critical awareness of the rules of the environment. On education, students are not taught how to relate with the persuasive outside world created by new media. Printing allowed for documentation of a single point of view. New technologies make self-expression seem less important; teamwork succeeds individual effort. Television is participation of the whole being. It is not a form of print technology, but a totally new technology. It has zooms, editing, no storylines, flash cuts. Television is a window on the world. McLuhan’s book is neither about the designer nor the content, but about the message communicated by the medium. How is the medium, like the designer and the content, a rhetorical participant in design?
This is an opinion piece by Paul Rand in the last chapter of his book Design Form and Chaos talking about the puzzling state of graphic design and communication today. There is an emphasis of style over content. Ideas and images are used indiscriminately without care and design seems to be more about trendiness. Though some design today, like graffiti, may have an affinity to WorldWar I Dada, there is an absence of the seriousness, wit, and intrigue of the dadaists. Rand talks about the idea of trendiness, how it can be unrestrained, fun, self-expressive, and non-conforming. Yet it lacks humility, originality, and restraint. It is an illusion of moving forward, often thought of as progress. It often puts down whatever is not perceived as change and bashes the canon and its antecedents, like modernism and functionalism. He emphasizes the importance of experience in the workplace and knowledge of the history of the specialization for teaching and wellbeing. The essay ends with a discussion on education and schools being a place to prepare students for their share in the world’s work and to learn design through doing and making. Though good design means attention to all needs, social issues are not aesthetic issues, and the classroom should not be a perpetual forum for political and social issues. What is good design?