“Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”
—Johnny Rotten, 1978
This is a book of opinions in essay form, gathered from a Facebook™ blog I worked on for a few years. These are thoughts and convictions gathered from over 40 years of practice in the field of freelance graphic design in America. I’m firmly convinced that graphic design is a language form—a language of color, shape, icon, idea, etc. It is a language everyone can read and understand—and yet nobody recognizes that fact. As a graphic designer, it has been my job to use this language to change the minds of the viewer—“Buy this product! Go to this event! Vote for this candidate!”
In that process, I use all the skills and knowledge at my command to manipulate the viewer into thinking the way that another interest—a client—wants to see. I’m a virtual cultural propagandist of the lowest order—a mindfucker. And I do this for hire.
Graphic design has taken on a higher reputation over the last 30 years, becoming an “art form” in many eyes. It is taught in art departments of the highest universities and institutions in the world. But it’s not art at all. It’s anthropology and politics and economics—almost ANYTHING except art. It is not a muse-driven masterpiece created by a single person in an edition of one. It is mass-produced manipulation and coercion created to maintain the current economic system of exploitation.
Throughout my four decades of design practice, I have intentionally kept one foot in the popular culture dialog (particularly the subcultures that produce so much design language for us) and one foot in the “high design” culture dialog where I sought recognition and professional prestige. By straddling that fence, my work and my ideas became a conduit between the two, pumping in new language and ideas from one end of the cultural spectrum to the other. This fence-sitting also gave me a soured reputation on both ends. Neither side fully accepted my work (or me) but they still wanted me and needed me. This outlaw status allowed me the freedom to pursue what I was interested in the most: to observe, study and understand the world I operated in.
I am not a scholar. You’ll see no footnotes, few references in my writing. Most of these essays were written daily in a single first draft and then posted warts and all. Quite often, I would get some things wrong and the resulting corrections in comment threads acted as my only fact-checking source. Needless to say, it was humbling to face my constituency and find myself corrected over and over again. I remain in their debt forever. I thank you all, no matter how annoying you were.
In the end, I think I’ve managed to express the observations and history of much of this poorly documented language form. I find it differs remarkably from the accepted mainstream narrative presented in “design education,” which tends to promote the “great man” theory of history. I discovered that there is no “high” or “low” in this historical dialog generally. And precious few great men. This graphic language I present is a dialog among people—of all stripes and walks, some talented, some lucky, all practicing the cultural learning style of ‘monkey see, monkey do.’ The truth I found is that this language has a deep, rich cultural interplay that goes back generations with many players, and thinkers and doers. Yes, there may be key links in that chain of history, but it takes all the links to make the chain.