Good theory is still needed

There used to be something called the Journal of the American Institute of Graphic Arts. I gave a talk and then wrote a short article based on it for the journal. In my view, despite all the technical changes in how we go about designing, the rallying cry I tried to make back then still holds true today. The aim to build theory for design has driven my work for the past 30 years and this short piece makes for a pretty good manifesto as I begin this Medium platform.

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Who indeed were the creators of all these things and what were they thinking?

Good Theory is Useful Theory

Published in The Journal of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) June, 1997. —

In graphic design, there are two myths about theory. One is that design lacks a theory. The other is that theory is not important to the designer’s craft. The first is incorrect because designers do base their decisions on a kind of theoretical underpinning. That is what allows judgements to be made. It is just that our theory is implicit and covert. Because we do not even admit its existence to ourselves, it is dishonest. Because we do not acknowledge its influence, we are not able to clearly explain how our solutions succeed (Siegel, 1990).

Based upon a set of values that we rarely consider, seldom justify, and cannot explain, design theory is an assembly of principles by which solutions are pulled hither and yon as effectively as strings on a marionette. Yet, unlike the marionette’s strings, design theory remains invisible not only to the audience, but also to the controller. Any puppeteer knows the importance of the marionette’s strings and keeps them in good order. The designer, on the other hand, often chooses to ignore theory, refuses to admit its importance, and even fears it. Does the discussion, elaboration and development of design theory threaten the practice of design? Does understanding the operation of his marionette cause the puppeteer to forget how to control it?

The second myth is perhaps more prevalent. Those who take the position that design theory is irrelevant to the practice of design generally couch their argument in some variation of the Nike tag line: “Just do it.” They say there is a danger to creativity if you try to understand the act of communication. Be a partner in the communication process but do not, under any circumstances, reflect upon your actions. William Golden put the Nike-ite view succinctly when he said, “I don’t know what it is that impels so many designers to drop their work to write and speak so much about design” (Golden, 1959). Now, as far as I am concerned, William Golden hung out the moon and stars along with the CBS eye, but a designer can no longer be an honest Nike-ite. Design is now a self-conscious activity. The time for honest Nike-ites, if it ever existed, passed with the demise of commercial art after the Second World war. The work of William Golden helped to seal its doom. The Nike-ite position pretends that the marionette has no strings.

Designers know better. Indeed, we have been working for the greater part of this century under a theoretical paradigm that has been very active if only dimly acknowledged. Designers — and perhaps this is the fault of design education — have failed to clearly articulate the theory. Design has been governed, at least since the 1930s, by formalism. This theory, or more properly, this “mode”, developed through the teaching practices of the Bauhaus and more explicitly in the architecture of Mies, Le Corbusier, and others. It is the foundation not only for modernism, but for the post-modern movement that pretends to be its counter. It is why you tended to choose circles and squares for logo shapes in the 1970s and it is why you are tending to select ovals and oblongs now. It is why you tended to use a grid in 1965 and why you tend to rupture that grid today. The presence of this silent theory of form accounts for the industrial and furniture design that fits the eye better than the body. This is not to indict formalism as a mode of working, but to call into question why it should be absolute and why it should be covert, why so unchallenged as the basic principle of design.

The design world has mounted challenges to formalism. An example of this is the “naive vernacular” design of people like Charles Spencer Anderson. Anderson causes us to consider the work of commercial artists working before (or ignorant of) the dictates of formalism. We are reminded of a simpler time when artisans churned out designs in a manner that was anonymously submersed within the climate of their culture. While Anderson’s work operates as a “whistle-blower,” pointing to the formalism it mindfully rejects, it fails to erect a new paradigm in formalism’s place. Confronted with oblique challenges to a paradigm that has never been clearly articulated, unable to return to the days of unselfconscious commercial-art innocence, designers today are left floating in a strange land of half-shadows. We find ourselves doomed to endlessly copy, “appropriate,” steal, or otherwise blindly follow the “Trends of the Design Annuals.”

How to mount an alternative to this picture? Surely, graphic design theory would be planted firmly within a general theory of communication and must include several disciplines including the psychology of visual perception and semiotics. Furthermore, it seems to me that designers themselves must do the work to erect this theory, doing so in a way that makes the assimilation of the material accessible and useful to the design community. A design theory must therefore meet certain requirements:

1. explain how visual communication signifies what to whom
2. relate to and explain real-life situations
3. provide a clear, consistent, and efficient lexicon
4. provide a paradigmatic model from which critical judgements can be made (not a set of rigid rules)
5. be capable of offering techniques and developing toos for studio conceptualization and for client presentations
6. be verifiable through constant reinforcement of the paradigm through design practice

In other words, design practice is a kind of laboratory upon which the tenets of the model are continually tested.

One thing seems clear: We are witnessing a surge of interest in developing a theory of graphic design and making that paradigm a significant part of the conceptual background from which designers work. It seems that this work will be done by designers or those involved in design criticism. They will be young, generalists, and they will be international. The Semiotic Society of America conference in Philadelphia last fall and the International Semiotic Conference in Berkeley had papers devoted to design issues from participants from Finland, Poland, Germany, and Mexico as well as the United States and Canada. It is, perhaps time that the puppeteer attend to the maintenance of the strings.

References Siegel, Rita Sue. “Design Speak”, Communication Arts Summer 1990. Golden, William. “What Is New In American Typography?” Typography USA, The Type Director’s Club Forum; NYC April 18, 1959).