In Designer as Author I argued that we are insecure about the value of our work. We are envious
of the power, social position and cachet that artists and authors seem to command. By declaring
ourselves “designer/authors” we hope to garner similar respect. Our deep-seated anxiety has
motivated a movement in design that values origination of content over manipulation of content.
Designer as Author was an attempt to recuperate the act of design itself as essentially
linguistic—a vibrant, evocative language. However, it has often been read as a call for designers
to generate content: in effect, to become designers and authors, not designers as authors. While I
am all for more authors, that was not quite the point I wanted to make.
The problem is one of content. The misconception is that without deep content, design is reduced
to pure style, a bag of dubious tricks. In graphic-design circles, form-follows-function is
reconfigured as form-follows-content. If content is the source of form, always preceding it and
imbuing it with meaning, form without content (as if that were even possible) is some kind of
empty shell.
The apotheosis of this notion, repeated ad nauseum (still!), is Beatrice Warde’s famous Crystal
Goblet metaphor, which asserts that design (the glass) should be a transparent vessel for content
(the wine). Anyone who favored the ornate or the bejeweled was a knuckle-dragging oaf.
Agitators on both sides of the ideological spectrum took up the debate: minimalists embraced it
as a manifesto; maximalists decried it as aesthetic fascism. Neither camp questioned the basic,
implicit premise: it’s all about the wine.
This false dichotomy has circulated for so long that we have started to believe it ourselves. It has
become a central tenet of design education and the benchmark against which all design is judged.
We seem to accept the fact that developing content is more essential than shaping it, that good
content is the measure of good design.
Back when Paul Rand wrote “There is no such thing as bad content, only bad form,” I remember
being intensely annoyed. I took it as an abdication of a designer’s responsibility to meaning.
Over time, I have come to read it differently: he was not defending hate speech or schlock or
banality; he meant that the designer’s purview is to shape, not to write. But that shaping itself is a
profoundly affecting form. (Perhaps this is the reason that modern designers—Rand, Munari,
Leoni—always seem to end their careers designing children’s books. The children’s book is the
purest venue of the designer/author because the content is negligible and the evocative potential
of the form unlimited.)?
So what else is new? This seems to be a rather mundane point, but for some reason we don’t
really believe it. We don’t believe shaping is enough. So to bring design out from under the
thumb of content we must go one step further and observe that treatment is, in fact, a kind of text
itself, as complex and referential as any traditional understanding of content.
A director can be the esteemed auteur of a film he didn’t write, score, edit or shoot. What makes
Designers also trade in storytelling. The elements we must master are not the content narratives The span of graphic design is not a history of concepts but of forms. Form has evolved At a 1962 conference at the Museum of Modern Art, conservative art critic Hilton Kramer Because the nature of the designed object is limited, individual objects are rarely substantial This deep connection to making also positions design in a modulating role between the user and The trick is to find ways to speak through treatment, via a range of rhetorical devices—from the Published in Multiple Signatures: On Designers, Authors, Readers and Users (Spring 2013)
a Hitchcock film a Hitchcock film is not the story but a consistency of style, which winds intact
through different technologies, plots, actors, and time periods like a substance of its own. Every
film is about filmmaking. His great genius is that he is able to mold the form into his style in a
genuinely unique and entertaining way. The meaning of his work is not in the story but in the
storytelling.
but the devices of the telling: typography, line, form, color, contrast, scale, weight. We speak
through our assignment, literally between the lines.
dramatically from one year to the next, and suggests a profession that continually revises and
reshapes the world through the way it is rendered. Stellar examples of graphic design, design that
changes the way we look at the world, are often found in service of the most mundane content:
an ad for ink, cigarettes, sparkplugs or machinery. Think of Piet Zwart’s catalogues for electrical
cable; or the travel posters of Cassandre or Matter; or the New Wave work of Weingart, Greiman
and Freidman; or the punk incitations of Jamie Reid, in which the manipulation of form has an
essential, even transformative, meaning.
denounced Pop Art as “indistinguishable from advertising art” because “Pop Art does not tell us
what it feels like to be living through the present moment of civilization. Its social effect is
simply to reconcile us to a world of commodities, banalities and vulgarities.” But perhaps the
content of graphic design is exactly that: an evocation of “what it feels like to be living through
the present moment of civilization,” with all its “commodities, banalities and vulgarities.” How
else can we discuss the content of a typeface or why the typography of a surfing magazine
suddenly becomes relevant? Or how a series of made-up or ‘self-initiated’ posters—already a
medium of dubious functionality—can end up on the wall of a major design museum? Work
must be saying something, which is different than being aboutsomething.
enough to contain fully rendered ideas. Ideas develop over many projects, spanning years. Form
itself is indexical. We are intimately, physically connected to the work we produce, and it is
inevitable that our work bears our stamp. The choice of projects in each designer’s oeuvre lays
out a map of interests and proclivities. (I use the singular designer in the categorical sense, not
the individual.) The way those projects are parsed out, disassembled, reorganized and rendered
reveals a philosophy, an aesthetic position, an argument and a critique.
the world. By manipulating form, design reshapes that essential relationship. Form is replaced by
exchange. The things we make negotiate a relationship over which we have a profound control.
written to the visual to the operational—to make those proclamations as poignant as possible,
and to return consistently to central ideas, to re-examine and re-express. In this way we build a
body of work, and from that body of work emerges a singular message, maybe even what it feels
like to be living now. As a popular film critic once wrote, “A movie is not what it is about, it’s
how it is about it.” Likewise, for us, our What is a How. Our content is, perpetually, Design
itself.