Interest and Curiosity for the Future.
Pushing culture forward by understanding and innovating the means of production.
Pushing culture forward by understanding and innovating the means of production.
“Persons are not simply in front of one another; they are along with each other around something. A neighbor is an accomplice [...] All the concrete relations between human beings in the world get their character of reality from a third term. They are a communion.” Levinas writes [2].
To that end, design cannot be self-propelled. Just as the mother alone cannot will a child to form in her womb, the artist cannot truly engage in design by herself. There must be another individual, a community, with which she shares creative communion. Only in community are the conditions for community satisfied. The end is dialogue between the creative community and those communities represented by the creators. On an institutional basis, brand is the intercommunal mediator.
Too often, brand is seen as the product of an economic equation. Such an approach may yield the appearance of brand—proofs, logos, mottos, etc. We’ve seen these pretenders: “white tombs, which from the outside appear lovely, but from within are full of the bones of the dead.”[3]
Brand has the potential to influence/direct/move the existence of the receiver/consumer by the degree to which they engage it. Brand is power, and thus must be responsibly and ethically wielded. The designer/artist does not commune with those who prey on cultural or consumer weakness. The designer seeks communion with those who share a reverence for the challenge of inciting positive cultural movement, engaging them in every step of creation: conceptual deconstruction or reconstruction, design, and the means of production.
Control of the means of production is a historically neglected, yet essential characteristic of brand. The designer’s unique discretion, guided by a communal creative vision, cannot be limited to the conceptual creation of the product, but must carry through its physical creation. When production is merely outsourced, the designer relinquishes control, thus outsourcing the precious relationship between herself and the consumer/receiver. Handoffs of contracted deliverables reduces the brand to a collection of manipulatable assets—an effectual shirking of responsibility.
There are better and worse versions of this. You can contract a faceless Eastern-European graphic designer that has posted a profile on any number of hired-gun, gig-economy websites and receive a polished vector logo by end-of-business today. Some larger, more well-known agencies will deliver a dynamically-coded style guide that resides on a server and can be accessed with a link. The best of the bunch are less guides than systems that grow with a brand, are in and of themselves not at the mercy of another, uninitiated executor to deliver consistent graphic applications[4].
- 1. Martin Hiedgger. Sein und Zeit. Here the English word “being” here is a gerund, an non-inflected verbal noun, as in “My being here is a mistake.
- 2. Immanuel Levinas. Otherwise than Being.
- 3. Jesus to the Pharisees, scribes, and hypocrites. Referring to the common Jewish practice of “whit- ing” or “covering with lime” sepluchures, according to the Syriac, Arabic, and Persic versions render- ings. The Jews would mark their graves with white lime, that they might be known to passing priests, Nazarites, and travellers.
- 4. “Ronald McDonald Ollie Dos & Don’ts: What Mascots Can Teach Us About Branding “ by Other Means for Walker Art Center https://walkerart.org/magazine/for-the-rest-of-your-life
Brand is power, and thus must be responsibly and ethically wielded.
Brand has the potential to influence/direct/move the existence of the receiver/consumer by the degree to which they engage it.
Brand has the potential to influence/direct/move the existence of the receiver/consumer by the degree to which they engage it.
- 5. Reinfurt, David. A *New* Program for Graphic Design. Inventory Press, 2019.
- 6. ibid.
- 7. David Rudnick in his lecture “Crisis of Graphic Practices: Challenges of the Next Decades” at Strelka Institure. Moscow, Russia. 2017 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ejp4AvetSA
If the role of the chef in his sphere is to provide food experiences that change the way we think about food, or at least our relationship to it, why would he be satisfied with the given selection? He chose the arduous path of moving against the given systems of production and working with growers to breed vegetables for taste. With Cornell University, New York State’s land-grant school, he developed a red-pepper paste feed for chickens that would produce deep-red yolks with unprecedented flavor[5].
Seeking to understand and, in some cases, hijacking the production process bridges the gap between the heretofore siloed industries of design and production. It begins to do the work that design has always claimed to do: communicate.
Closing the feedback loop between manufacturing and vision, marrying the two rather than putting them in competition, enables a product than is informed by process, and a process informed by its product.
Who, then, is the audience when design becomes a hall of mirrors-letterhead mockups that will never see a printer, or a series of photoshopped billboards never to know wheatpaste? The true audience, the real-end user is betrayed. We call for design that makes no apologies in creating for the true consumer. Design, if it has any hope to be the site of innovation, cannot keep pandering to those that cut the checks. The responsibility is the designer’s to question the motives behind creation.
In his watershed lecture at Strelka, David Rudnick points out: “Ultimately, if design sees itself as a service whose goal is to address the problems of the client, then design is ignoring what it really is. Design is an environment for its audience. We need to reject the notion […] that the people we work for are our clients. The people we work with should be our clients. The people we work for are our audience. Neglect that, and you start to build dystopias, because you start to create systems of manipulation, systems of control, ways which your service makes it easier for someone to lie for them—to change their appearance—so that they can take on the most commercially profitable position. But you lose the hard work, the tough work which modernism rightly claims credit for, which is the idea that design is a practice with serious stakes that involves responsibilities and involves offering real meaningful change to its audience.”[7]
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