What Can Students Learn From Studying Misinformation?
Colin Berry
Propaganda—the willful spreading of ideas, information, or rumors with the intent to help or hurt some person or cause— takes a variety of forms: radio and TV broadcasts, loudspeaker announcements, Web sites, or printed materials such as leaflets, stickers, periodicals, or posters. Much has been written about propaganda as graphic design, from the brilliant works by Mayakovsky and Rodchenko in post–World War I Russia, to recruitment posters, whether the Nazis’ or James Montgomery Flagg’s two decades later. In the twenty-first century, propaganda is used by all sides in the war on terror, from Al Qaeda’s gritty videotapes to the America: Open for Business posters that sprang up in shop windows after 9/11. But what about its inverse? What can we learn from graphic design as propaganda? Can studying age-old intimidation and misinformation tactics instruct the modern graphic artist?
Absolutely. First, consider how both designer and propagandist necessitate the creation of titles and subheadings and utilize type, text, and layout; both incorporate drawings and photographs that illustrate and clarify their ideas; both ponder paper weight, font size, screen resolution, and methods of distribution when considering their final product. Second, from a tactical perspective, both work under strict deadlines for a client who can be unpredictable, unreliable, and challenging; and both seek the clearest and most direct methods of communication—sometimes in the form of a bold-faced lie.
Recognizing these methods and teaching these fundamentals under the rubric of “propaganda” (as opposed to “design”) can afford the instructor the chance to study their psychological intention—that is, their intent entirely outside the graphic aesthetic. It removes the caveat that something look good and replaces it with the requirement that it deliver a message—an essential distinction many designers often forget.
Consider, for example, a flier created by the Army’s 4th Psychological Operations Group (psyop) and dropped by the United States on North Korean civilians in 1953. It shows a fleet of bombers with the inscription “warning!” and graphically and textually details the fate of anyone who stays in their path. The piece, like all U.S. psyop pieces, was designed, created, and delivered in a few days, and evidently succeeded in saving lives—enemy civilians and American military personnel alike.
Clearly, most graphic designers aren’t hired to protect the nation’s armed forces, nor create works that routinely make the difference between life and death. One’s client isn’t usually the enemy. Yet a course of instruction that elucidates such direct methods of visual communication may prove as essential to budding designers as one on typeface or Photoshop. Propaganda is the extreme sport of graphic design: a medium of pure, unadulterated message.
Yet it can be more nuanced. Rather than a direct warning, propaganda can be merely demoralizing, a difference that requires the designer to understand more keenly the complex cracks in an enemy’s psychological armor. In Vietnam, a leaflet designed by the North Vietnamese and targeted for African American soldiers implored them not to “fight for racist USA.” In World War II, a German flier lampooning President Roosevelt bore the saying “Rich man’s war—poor man’s fight,” while Japanese leaflets suggested American GIs look to their unfaithful wives. More recently, an American flier dropped on Baghdad during the second Iraqi war carried the slogan: “We wish only to liberate the people of Iraq from Saddam’s tyranny.”
A design student’s understanding of the basest human motives—our desires for food, freedom, sex, money, dignity, or seeing our families and our fears of infidelity, injury, or dying—is key to creating effective visuals. Learning how to appeal to these root human motivations affords a foundation, a boundary against which the young designer can push.
This is not to endorse the spread of global conflict; there are other ways of integrating misinformation’s tactics. Recently a new generation of designers and artists has begun to tinker with propaganda’s tools, creating fresh works that speak to social or cultural issues. Conceptual artist Packard Jennings distributes eight-page textless instructional booklets at his local mall, pamphlets that advocate overthrowing institutions of consumerism—in a playful, cartoony style. Painter Sandow Birk includes American flags and other familiar symbols into his work to comment upon what he perceives as the country’s tendency toward xenophobia.
As a method of direct communication, propaganda predates graphic design by hundreds of years. In the thirteenth century, insurgents flew message-bearing kites into a Chinese prison to incite riots; British soldiers at Bunker Hill were given fliers offering them freedom and land if they surrendered. Often intended for an audience with an entirely different visual aesthetic, it is designed to mimic the targeted culture’s native style. As they study its techniques and technologies, students of propaganda will be forced to consider the good of the cause first and the quality of the design second. Recognizing this distinction will afford them a divining rod, a tool, an essential means of understanding human nature for the rest of their professional careers.