Anxious about the Future?
Ken Garland
It seems to me that our trade, craft, profession, or what have you, is in crisis. I know this sounds like the sort of gloomy prognostication you might expect from an old man (which, at seventy-five, I suppose I am, though I have the greatest difficulty accepting the role). It is indeed, much given to the elderly to bemoan the increasing deterioration of, well, just about everything. So here goes.
The crisis has two heads. One arises from the vast growth in the numbers of practitioners—the direct result of the success of the practice of design itself. We have proliferated; we’re everywhere! And of course, there are even more of us on the way, through the educational system that has encouraged the increase in the size of student intakes. So what are we elders, the favored few, who graduated in the 1950s and 1960s, to say to the many now emerging from colleges of art and design in ever greater numbers?
The other head of the crisis, as I see it, relates to the universal acceptance of computer-driven design processes in the field of visual communication. Since the 1980s the introduction of user-friendly applications has enabled graphic designers to work more speedily and to control the processes of typesetting, and of the assembly of type and image, right up to the point of printing. The proud occupations of the compositor/typographer and the process engraver have long ago been subsumed into the general, all-inclusive category of prepress origination. In the not-too-distant future, the desktop publishing cycle will be completed by the primacy of “printing on demand,” which will supplant the traditional pattern of commissioning authors, designers, and photographers; editing; hiring printers; storing; marketing; and distribution. In theory, and surely in reality before long, authors will be able to act as their own publishers, since the hitherto indispensable skill of balancing unit production costs against estimated sales will no longer be crucial.
What all this comes down to is that many of the “mysteries” of printing, publishing, and—yes—the most recent “mystery” of graphic design are being made accessible to the reasonably well-informed nonprinter, nonpublisher, and nondesigner. Acceptable approximations of catalog, brochure, and periodical layout can be arrived at by suitable design templates and computer applications. Paradoxically, at a time when graphic designers are being offered ever more enticing technological aids, these are also falling into the eager hands of nondesigners: Our hard-won skills are already being overtaken by do-it-yourself design packages.
So what are we to say to would-be recruits to our craft? Must we acknowledge, bluntly, that at present there are too many of them trying to get into the act? And should we, however reluctantly, agree to share our increasingly user-friendly facilities with nondesigners?
On both points the answer is yes. Distasteful as it may be, we can no longer pretend that the market for our skills will magically expand in proportion to the unplanned increase in students that we have graduated.
Equally, we cannot, even if we were empowered to, restrict the use of any new development in information technology to ourselves. If others want to handle the gear, however ineptly, who’s to stop them?
You may, if you accept the above scenario, think that the future for graphic design is a gloomy one; that we are facing a period of retrenchment, even of total eclipse; that the bubble has burst, the great days are over, the race is run, and so on, and so on . . .
Not so, my friends, not so. We were never meant to be narrow specialists, nor slaves of machines, however user-friendly, nor the unthinking servants of powerful entrepreneurs. We are, most of us, alert, independently minded, inventive, and inclined to be anarchic (in the nicest possible way, of course). We resist labeling, compartmentalizing, and confining. Here is what a perceptive design teacher had to say about what we should be. I ask you not to look at the next page to see who he was and when he wrote this until you have first read what he had to say:
A human being is developed by the crystallization of the whole of his experience. Our present system of education contradicts this axiom by emphasizing single fields of activity. Instead of extending our realm of action, as primitive man was forced to do, we concern ourselves with a single, specific vocation, leaving other capacities unused. . . .
Here our system of education has been found wanting, despite vocational guidance, psychological testing, and IQs. A calling today means something quite different from solidarity with the aims and needs of a community. . . .
The future needs the whole man. . . . A specialized education becomes meaningful only if an integrated man is developed in terms of his biological functions so that he will achieve a natural balance of intellectual and emotional power. Without such an aim the richest differentiations of specialized study . . . are mere quantitative acquisitions, bringing no intensifications of life, no widening of its breadth.
Only when men and women are equipped with clarity of feeling and sobriety of knowledge will they be able to adjust to complex requirements, and to master the whole of living.
It was the old Bauhaus master himself, Lázló Moholy-Nagy, and he was writing in 1928, nearly eighty years ago; but apart from the anachronistic gender bias, he could have been writing today. If you, as students, teachers, and practitioners, accept his thesis—and I hope you do—you will see that, by character, by inclination, and with the right kind of education, you need not feel anxious about the future. They need you out there. They really do.