Research

Part 3:

Research

In Britain the damaging effects of machine-dominated production on both social conditions and the quality of manufactured goods had been recognised since around 1840. But it was not until the 1860s and ‘70s that new approaches in architecture and design were championed in an attempt to correct the problem. The Arts and Crafts movement in Britain was born out of an increasing understanding that society needed to adopt a different set of priorities in relation to the manufacture of objects. Its leaders wanted to develop products that not only had more integrity but which were also made in a less dehumanising way. Structured more by a set of ideals than a prescriptive style, the Movement took its name from the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, a group founded in London in 1887 that had as its first president the artist and book illustrator Walter Crane. The Society’s chief aim was to assert a new public relevance for the work of decorative artists (historically they had been given far less exposure than the work of painters and sculptors). The Great Exhibition of 1851 and a few spaces such as the Refreshment Rooms of the South Kensington Museum (later known as the V&A) in the 1860s had given decorative artists the chance to show their work publicly, but without a regular showcase they were struggling to exert influence and to reach potential customers.

The Angel with the Trumpet, furnishing fabric, Herbert Percy Horne, about 1884, England. Museum no. T.85-1953.

The Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society mounted its first annual exhibition in 1888, showing examples of work it hoped would help raise both the social and intellectual status of crafts including ceramics, textiles, metalwork and furniture. Its members publicly rejected the excessive ornamentation and ignorance of materials, which many objects in the Great Exhibition of 1851 had been criticised for. For many years in Britain exhibitions mounted by the Society were the only public platform for the decorative arts, and were critical in changing the way people looked at manufactured objects.

Although it was known by a single name (one that wasn’t in fact used widely until the early 20th century), the Arts and Crafts movement was in fact comprised of a number of different artistic societies, such as the Exhibition Society, the Arts Workers Guild (set up in 1884), and other craftspeople in both small workshops and large manufacturing

Left: Zermatt, watercolour, John Ruskin, 1844, Switzerland. Museum no. P.15-1921.

Right: Poster, John Frederick William Charles Farleigh, 1938, England. Museum no. E.598-1980.

companies.Many of the people who became involved in the Movement were influenced by the work of the designer William Morris, who by the 1880s had become an internationally renowned and commercially successful designer and manufacturer.Morris only became actively involved with the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society a number of years after it was set up (between 1891 and his death in 1896), but his ideas were hugely influential to the generation of decorative artists whose work it helped publicise. Morris believed passionately in the importance of creating beautiful, well-made objects that could be used in everyday life, and that were produced in a way that allowed their makers to remain connected both with their product and with other people. Looking to the past, particularly the medieval period, for simpler and better models forboth living and production, Morris argued for the return to a system of manufacture based on small-scale workshops. Morris was not entirely against the use of machines, but felt that the division of labour – a system designed to increase efficiency, in which the manufacture of an object was broken into small, separate tasks, meaning individuals had a very weak relationship with the results of their labour – was a move in the wrong direction. Like many idealistic, educated men of his era, he was shocked by the social and environmental impact of the factory-based system of production that Victorian Britain had so energetically embraced. He wanted to free the working classes from the frustration of a working day focused solely on repetitive tasks, and allow them the pleasure of craft-based production in which they would engage directly with the creative process from beginning to end.

Morris was himself inspired by the ideas of the Victorian era’s leading art critic John Ruskin (1819–1900), whose work had suggested a link between a nation’s social health and the way in

which its goods were produced. Ruskin argued that separating the act of designing from the act of making was both socially and aesthetically damaging. The Arts and Crafts movement was also influenced by the work of Augustus Pugin (1812–1852). An interior designer and architect, Pugin was a Gothic revivalist and a member of the Design Reform Movement. He had helped challenge the mid-Victorian fashion for ornamentation, and, like Morris, focused on the medieval period as an ideal template for both good design and good living.

In the final decade of the 19th century and into the 20th, the Arts and Crafts movement flourished in large cities throughout the UK, including London, Birmingham, Manchester, Edinburgh and Glasgow. These urban centres had the infrastructure, organisations and wealthy patrons it needed to gather pace. Exhibition societies inspired by the original one in London helped establish the Movement’s public identity and gave it a forum for discussion. Members of the Arts and Crafts community felt driven to spread their message, convinced that a better system of design of manufacture could actively change people’s lives. Between 1895 and 1905 this strong sense of social purpose drove the creation of over a hundred organisations and guilds that centred on Arts and Crafts principles in Britain.

Progressive new art schools and technical colleges in London, Glasgow and Birmingham encouraged the development of both workshops and individual makers, as well as the revival of techniques, including enamelling, embroidery and calligraphy. Arts and Crafts designers also forged new relationships with manufacturers that enabled them to sell their goods through shops in London such as Morris & Co. (William Morris’s ‘all under one roof’ store on Oxford Street), Heal’s and Liberty. This commercial distribution helped the Movement’s ideas reach a much wider audience. A particular feature of

the Arts and Crafts movement was that a large proportion of its leading figures had trained as architects. This common culture helped develop a collective belief in the importance of designing objects for a ‘total’ interior: a space in which architecture, furniture, wall decoration, etc. blended in a harmonious whole. As a result, most Arts and Crafts designers worked across an unusually wide range of different disciplines. In a single career someone could apply craft-based principles to the design of things as varied as armchairs and glassware. Arts and Crafts also had a significant impact on architecture. Figures including Philip Webb, Edwin Lutyens, Charles Voysey and William Lethaby quietly revolutionised domestic space in buildings that referenced both regional and historical traditions.

Although the Arts and Crafts movement evolved in the city, at its heart was nostalgia for rural traditions and ‘the simple life’, which meant that living and working in the countryside was the ideal to which many of its artists aspired. Increasingly, many left the city to establish new ways of living and working, with workshops set up across Britain in locations including the Cotswolds, the Lake District, Sussex and Cornwall. All these places offered picturesque landscapes, an existing culture of

craft skills and, importantly, rail links for access to patrons and the London market. Arts and Crafts makers based in rural communities both revived craft traditions and created employment for local people. This kind of development meant that the Movement endured longer in the countryside than in the city, and had a more significant impact on the rural than the urban economy. Significantly, the Arts and Crafts community was open to the efforts of non-professionals, encouraging the involvement of amateurs and students through organisations such as the Home Arts and Industries Association. And it also created an environment in which, for the first time, women as well as men could begin to take an active role in developing new forms of design, both as makers and consumers.

In Europe the honesty of expression in Arts and Crafts work was a catalyst for the radical forms of Modernism, whereas in Britain the progressive impetus of the Movement began to lose momentum after the First World War. Under the control of older artists it had begun to withdraw from productive relationships with industry and into a purist celebration of the handmade. Some organisations sympathetic to Arts and Crafts ideals did survive, particularly in the countryside, and the original Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society mounted regular shows up to and beyond its 50th anniversary in 1938. In 1960, the Society merged with the Cambridgeshire Guild of Craftsmen to form the Society of Designer Craftsmen, which is still active today.

Left: Zermatt, watercolour, John Ruskin, 1844, Switzerland. Museum no. P.15-1921.

Right: Poster, John Frederick William Charles Farleigh, 1938, England. Museum no. E.598-1980.

Graphic Design’s Factory Settings

In his book of essays, The Shape of Things, Czech philosopher and media critic Vilém Flusser argues that factories are decreasingly places where goods are produced and increasingly places where new kinds of humans are produced. Flusser viewed factories as the primary vessels and sites for agendas of progress and ideology, ones that instead of manufacturing solely goods also produced new kinds of subjects, writing that “human history is the history of manufacturing and everything else is mere footnotes.” In an article titled “The Critical Crisis of Science,” Flusser describes a similar tautology: “Science has become automated and has transformed scientists into its own tools.” For Flusser, learning was analogous to manufacturing: both being processes which are based on acquiring, producing and passing on—or “turning”—information. “It becomes apparent that the factory is nothing but an applied school and the school nothing but a factory for the acquisition of information.” These insights shed light on design education today. Design education not only teaches its technical and historical canon, or how to design, but more importantly teaches students how to be designers in society and in relation to capital. A school becomes a factory producing designers, one that, in keeping with the principles of “good design,” turns them into efficient and interchangeable parts ready to hit the market. Like a spinning ouroboros—a snake swallowing its own tail—educational institutions pursue what the market requires (a response to capital’s demand for cheap, standardized, and predictable parts), molding future designers into interchangeable units. To what extent has this cycle, an entanglement of design and industry, come to be considered graphic design’s “factory settings”—a kind of default, inherent, and out of the box approach to how its practice, pedagogy, and history have formed and are enacted? Graphic design is a practice inherently defined by its relationship to large-scale production and indus-

Left: The Bauhaus’s curriculum wheel, developed by Walter Gropius in 1922

Right: Early alchemical ouroboros illustration with the words “The All is One” from the work of Cleopatra the Alchemist. try. It was closely intertwined with industrial production beginning with the Arts & Crafts movement—one of the earliest manifestations of the design academy, despite William Morris’ reservations on the matter— and its master-apprentice educational model. Walter Gropius’ Bauhaus— a studio-workshop model (currently celebrating its centenary)—soon followed with its foundational training. Building from the Deutscher Werkbund, an all-encompassing union of design and industry, the Bauhaus’s educational strategy attempted to unify craft with industrial production, its motto being “Art into Industry.” While the Bauhaus anticipated an industrial revolution capable of delivering visions of mass-produced design for social good, most artifacts produced by the school were handmade and given the finish of a machined good—designers imitated factories. The Bauhaus wasn’t inherently different in nature then the factories Flusser wrote about. In his talk “The Bauhaus Virus,” Mark Wigley posits that “the explicit agenda of Bauhaus [was] to design a new kind of human. It [was] not a place for the design of lamps and chairs—but people.”

The school changed locations throughout its existence, from Weimar to Dessau to Berlin, and directors—from Walter Gropius to

Hannes Meyer to Mies van der Rohe—and closed in 1933 due to political pressure. The school’s instructors and students dispersed throughout the world and met varying fates: some would flee to the Soviet Union, Palestine, or to the US, while some would be killed. Despite insisting on being apolitical (with Gropius having said, “If we admit politics to the Bauhaus… it will collapse like a house of cards. I have already announced my intention to prevent any and all politics from entering the Bauhaus.”), both before and after its closing some of the Bauhaus’s biggest names would collaborate with the state. From 1928 to 1937 Herbert Bayer designed posters and publications for Nazi exhibitions and propaganda, including leaflets for the Hitler Youth, only ceasing to do so when one of his paintings was included in the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition in Munich. Hannes Meyer and several former students worked on urban projects and taught in academies for the Soviet Union, including contributing to Joseph Stalin’s first five-year plan. Bauhaustrained Arieh Sharon designed the White City in Tel Aviv—a project since described as aiding in the city’s controversial narrative surrounding the displacement and erasure of Jaffa, a city in part destroyed by 1,500 British soldiers in 1936. Architect Zvi Efrat’s film Scenes from the Most Beautiful Campus in Africa, screened as part of the Decolonizing the Campus symposium, part of bauhaus imaginista, explores Sharon’s involvement in the design of the University of Ife campus and its implications in the context of Lagos, Nigeria. Mies van der Rohe unsuccessfully attempted to collaborate on architecture projects with the Nazis, including signing a “motion of support for Hitler” in 1934 and joining the |Reich Chamber of Culture. It was in part because of the Nazi’s denial to commission him projects, not solely their political pressure, that led van der Rohe to leave for the US in 1938. Today, the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation still considers itself

Bauhaus near Birkbuschstraße 49 in Berlin-Steglitz. The school was housed in an abandoned telephone factory. “apolitical,” as first declared by Walter Gropius, having canceled a performance on its premises of an anti-right-wing band on these exact grounds.

Mies van der Rohe, one of the most widely heralded exemplars of post-Bauhaus legacy, emigrated to the US’s Midwest and took on private commissions for corporations, property developers, and the wealthy elite. His crossing of the Atlantic was made especially possible by Philip Johnson, an American modernist architect and good friend of van der Rohe who secured him his first American commission. Johnson was publicly sympathetic to fascism and anti-semitism, and was an admitted Nazi—to the extent of being surveilled by the FBI after pursuing an armed, fascist uprising in the US after witnessing first hand and being inspired by fascists during World War II. The uprising failed, and despite his involvement with Nazi ideology both in Germany and the US and with all his co-conspirators in prison, Johnson enrolled as a student in Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. Afterwards he would go on to join the architecture department at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, an institution conceptualized by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (the wife of John D. Rockefeller, Jr.). van der Rohe would eventually accept a position as the director at the

Exterior view of The New Bauhaus, Marshall Field mansion, Chicago.

School of Architecture at the Armour Institute (now Illinois Institute of Technology) in Chicago, originally named the New Bauhaus when founded by Lazlo Maholy-Nagy, a former Bauhaus professor. This new Bauhaus was conceived when the Association of Arts and Industries, an organization to whose purpose was to further the implementation of design in industry, expressed interest in establishing a school via a letter of invitation to appoint Walter Gropius as director, who instead recommended Maholy-Nagy. The school, still in operation after several shakeups, now prides itself on being the birthplace of “design thinking,” or the linking of design “more closely to business innovation,” one of the motors behind contemporary design’s deployment in venture capitalinjected, Silicon Valley initiatives. That the the marriage of design and business in the pursuit of profit and progress be labeled as something as ubiquitous as “thinking” is telling as to what extent design is entrenched in industry. Originally housed in the mansion of Marshall Field, founder of the emblematic and successful department store of the same name, the New Bauhaus would eventually encounter financial turmoil and struggled to maintain its program afloat, including losing its funding from the Association of Arts and Industries. This prompted MaholyNagy to found his own school, the School of Design in Chicago. Also susceptible to economic difficulties like its predecessor, it was saved from demise when Walter P. Paepcke, president of the Container Corporation of America—an organization which would become a revered design icon—contributed personal donations and his fundraising efforts to keep its doors open, including money from the Rockefeller Foundation. Over the course of its existence a summer course was also held at a property near Somonauk, Illinois, made available by Paepcke. Amid further financial troubles in 1941, Moholy-Nagy was appointed to the Chicago mayor’s personal staff in order to design and employ camou-

flage to hide military personnel and equipment, including an eventual plan to attempt at hiding the entire city of Chicago.

He embedded in and prototyped these ideas via the school’s curriculum, which Walter Gropius would eventually describe as a “certified school for camouflage personnel.” In 1943, Moholy-Nagy curated a “Camouflage Exhibition” at the School of Design featuring the school’s work. Like mussels on a ship’s hull, the Bauhaus clung to industry (in this case for the army)—crossing oceans on several occasions (both literally in its relocation and less tangibly in the export of its ideology globally) and surviving in

its current state as a result of this bond. Despite its manifestos and intentions, the Bauhaus’s modernism would become the face not of socialism, communism, or Nazism, but of capitalism, with modernist design becoming a powerful tool in the belt of corporations. Both historic and contemporary modes of design

The explicit agenda of Bauhaus was to design a new kind of human.

education are largely informed by this pipeline between their institutions and the commercial environment designers eventually find themselves working in, with graphic design securing its place as a tool almost exclusively for industry (as best evidenced in the advertising and standards manuals of the time, now reissued as holy tomes). The extent to which all these entanglements effect our thinking about and perception of design cannot be understated, and the Bauhaus plays a pivotal role—for example there is the statistical likelihood, as suggested by Mark Wigley, that you are reading this on a device that exists as a direct result of the Bauhaus. In 1981, Steve Jobs attended the International Design Conference in Aspen (IDCA), an organization founded by Container Corporation of America’s Paepcke and whose building was designed by Herbert Bayer as essentially a monument to the Bauhaus through its architecture, furniture, and signage. The IDCA’s first event in 1951 was titled “Design as a Function of Management,” in an attempt to garner support from the business community, and presently the organization collaborates with the American Institute of Graphic Artists (AIGA)—regarded as the largest and premier organization for design professionals, with a particular focus on educational chapters throughout design schools—to realize its conferences. During that visit in 1981 Jobs became infatuated with the same design ideology embedded into the institute’s very fabric. When returning in 1983 to speak at the same conference in a talk titled “The Future Isn’t What It Used to Be,” Jobs proclaimed his subscription to the Bauhaus way of thinking: “What we’re going to do is make the products high-tech, and we’re going to package them cleanly so that you know they’re high-tech. We will fit them in a small package, and then we can make them beautiful and white, just like Braun does with its electronics.” Whether it’s through notions of progress, design tied to industry, streamlined forms and production methods, or the claim

Left: Camouflage course, 1942. University Archives and Special Collections, Paul V. Galvin Library, Illinois Institute of Technology

Right: Camouflage Exhibition School of Design The instructor was Gyorgy Kepes. Chicago1943

that a global, “International Style” is possible (and a good thing), the Bauhaus is present in much of the physical and intangible discourse surrounding design.

Much of contemporary design curriculum is still based on the Bauhaus model and its ramifications, including the many offshoots it influenced in Chicago, Basel, Zurich, Ulm, and elsewhere. This isn’t to suggest that everyone involved in the Bauhaus can be categorized under the same umbrella—far from the case, also considering the fact that much of the Bauhaus’s historiography excludes the contributions of its numerous women students, professors, and partners of men—but that what is considered to be the “Bauhaus model,” regardless of how close it actually adheres to the school’s ideology or actions, is the primary model in which contemporary programs are rooted. Here it is unimportant what the Bauhaus aimed to be, or the way it acted in practice, but instead what it came to symbolize—an image designed by the Bauhaus itself. “Whether these ideas were actually realized or even consistent is irrelevant here; they endure as what the Bauhaus has come to represent.” Even more encompassing than the Bauhaus’s model, but certainly as a result of it, design education and history are completely dominated by western principles and hegemony. Exceptions to the reach of both exist, but many design educators will recognize the fact that not much has fundamentally changed since graphic design education’s inception. Compounded by the dismantling of the university’s academic mandate via neoliberal austerity, graphic design education, like much of academia, is far removed from contemporary social, political, and economic urgencies. Assignments which bring client work into the school, or invite “practical and professional experience,” condition students even further. Having just completed the Bauhaus’s 100-year anniversary in 2019, what better time to examine its influence on graphic design education?

Graphic Designer Loves Minimalism

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Company X announces a new logo with a buzzword-filled press release. We’ve been hard at work for months in rethinking how to best represent ourselves to our customers, it reads. We think this new logo reflects our values by signaling simplicity and approachability. Can you picture it? It’s a sans-serif wordmark (bonus points if it’s a geometric typeface like Avenir or Proxima WWNova. Maybe even Helvetica) and set in a solid color (maybe primary, but ideally a tertiary. Think a cool greenish blue or warm mauvey-red).

What seemed like a fun joke a few years ago quickly moved from trend to meme to the dominant visual style in branding. In the last few years, it seems every big company, from Warner Brothers to PetCo to Mastercard to Sam’s Club has jumped on the bandwagon, stripping their brand down to basic parts, cohering around a homogenized, minimal aesthetic that can sell anything from dog food to data, credit cards to car rides. (There are, of course, brands that divert from this stylistically, but the component parts are the same: flat colors, clean type, and lots of whitespace—using a serif typeface is hardly a differentiator.) In an article for Vox in 2017, the writer Eliza Brooke called this aesthetic “startup minimalism,” following a string of Silicon Valley rebrands including Facebook, Google, Pinterest, Pandora, Spotify, and Uber who all employed new geometric sans-serif wordmarks, effectively removing the personality of the previous identities.

Brooke wrote that these new, minimalist logos reflect the products they are selling, a visual indication of “how that product will be purchased and delivered to the shopper: digitally, easily, inexpensively, and with a smile.”

Minimalism in graphic design can mean all sorts of things in all sorts of contexts but no matter what, it is clearly popular. A search for “minimalist graphic design” on any visual search engine will return an endless

Illustration by María Medem.

stream of movie posters simplified to icons, band posters reimagined as if they were designed by a Swiss Modernist, brutalist websites with default black and white styling, interface mockups stripped of context or detail, and logos upon logos boiled down to basic elements. Medium, which got its own version of a minimalist rebrand, is filled with think pieces about creating minimal designs and simple user interactions. Interface design, too — whether a shopping experience, a mobile app, or social media interaction — is focused on erasing all moments of friction by simplifying the number of clicks, the range of interactions, the paths the user can take through a predetermined flow. One of industrial designer Dieter Rams’s famous maxims, printed on posters in design studios around the world, is “good design is as little design as possible,” and Apple’s Jony Ive echoed this when, referring to a new iPhone, said, “You should almost get the sense that it wasn’t designed at all.” In the early 2010s, Microsoft, Google, and Apple quickly abandoned the 3D, skeuomorphic interfaces (drop shadows, faux leather, and paper textures) in favor of flat design, signaling a return to the Bauhausian principles that materials should reflect their use, and decorative flourishes impeded function. The history of design is a pendulum, and each new aesthetic and approach is a

reaction to what came before it. The “New Wave” postmodernists of the ’80s and ’90s were responding to the strict design systems of the Modernists; the bubbly aesthetics of web 2.0 brands and skeuomorphic interfaces were a visual explosion after years of websites designed by engineers. Yet these movements are largely seen today as outliers: as experimental, diversions, moments of unnecessary indulgence on the designer’s ultimate quest for a simplified world. For much of the Western world, the design history pendulum always, inevitably, swings back to minimalism. What if this recent spate of rebrands, then, is less a passing fad — a lack of creativity among contemporary graphic design — and more a natural endpoint in a profession forever obsessed with simplifying?

The idea that everything could — and should — be made simpler is core to the history of graphic design. The field grew alongside the industrial revolution.

At the beginning of the 20th century, as mass production simplified manufacturing processes, moving from the hand to the machine, so too did the work of the designer, moving away from ornate decoration to streamlined “modern” images meant to usher in the technological future. In 1910, the architect and essayist Adolf Loos wrote his famous treatise “Ornament and Crime,” which decried the excessive ornamentation he saw in Art Nouveau and foreshadowed the upcoming Modernist movement. He called ornamentation primitive and wrote that decoration was for “degenerates.” His entire essay, based on a racist cultural superiority, repeatedly uses words like “criminal,” “amoral,” and “barbarian” to describe ornament, comparing the arts and crafts from indigenous populations to that of children. He called for society to move beyond these old ways into modernity: “The evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament.” The Bauhaus, founded in Germany a decade later and often cited as modernism’s first chapter, saw the political implications of mass production and sought to unify the streamlined manufacturing processes with a matching visual aesthetic. It was at the Bauhaus where Mies van der Rohe, the school’s last director, popularized the phrase “less is more,” becoming the mantra of designers everywhere. Rejecting

Dr. Jart+ Packaging, Industrial/ Product Design by Pentagram

ornamentation as “pretentious,” many early Bauhaus teachings focused on the abstract reduction of form and the belief that the materials should reflect their use. (Later, the architect Louis Sullivan’s maxim “form follows function” would act as shorthand for Bauhaus orthodoxy.) We see this echoed in Beatrice Ward’s now-seminal 1927 essay, “The Crystal Goblet.” In an elaborate metaphor comparing typography and printing techniques to wine glasses, Ward, a writer and marketing manager for Monotype, explains that typography is a container for thought, and the design of this thought should not interfere with the message. She writes: “There is nothing simple or dull in achieving the transparent page.” Her essay — still taught to first year design students in many design programs around the country — helped shape the myth that design should be neutral, a clear container for holding content.

The International Typographic Style, or Swiss Modernism, ran with this and attempted to create a universal (i.e. neutral) design system that could be applied to any project, anywhere. Massimo Vignelli, perhaps the most famous designer of the era, infamously only used five typefaces his entire career, applying a similar approach across a range of design projects. Many designers still hold up this era as the epitome of good design, and students are taught —

both consciously and unconsciously — to strive for the aesthetics of the Swiss Modernists: embrace whitespace, use fewer typefaces, align everything to the grid, In short: simplify, simplify, simplify.

Never mind that none of these designers referred to their work as “minimalist.” Never mind that the writings of many of those theorists, who were responding to particular demands of a particular era, have become the gospel texts of the graphic designer, and their aesthetic a style to be replicated. “Minimalism” and “modernism” have become largely interchangeable, unable to be pulled apart. I’m guilty of it too, frequently asking my own students how they could simplify their projects or to leave more whitespace. Sometimes it’s easier to teach a set of aesthetics rules. Yet for the Bauhaus, less is more was not merely an aesthetic position, but also a political one. The promise of the Bauhausian modernism or the Swiss Modernists was the belief that mass production, intentional use of materials, and functional and modular design were inherently socialist ideals: giving the widest range of people access to the highest quality products. “I think what Massimo saw as the strength of Swiss Modernism was that it was replicable. It wasn’t predicated on inspiration or individual genius or talent,” Pentagram partner Michael Bierut, who worked with Vignelli for ten years, told me. “You could systematize it. I think that’s why it caught on in corporate America.”

As Swiss Modernism made its way to the United States, it entangled itself with capitalism evolving into what we now know as “corporate modernism.” In the 1950s and ’60s, as America emerged from the second World War, the country’s biggest corporations hired designers like Paul Rand, Saul Bass, and Leste Beall to update their visual identities. Borrowing from the International Typographic Style of the preceding decades, the logos they created sought to eliminate ornamentation in favor of tightly branded identity systems revolving around carefully drawn, simply constructed marks — a style we might today refer to as “minimalist.” This is essentially how brands are still developed today, especially as the world these brands live in becomes increasingly complex, spread across physical spaces and social media profiles, app icons and YouTube videos. This complexity makes creating a coherent identity all the more important — how does a brand represent itself across a range of media? We can think of startup minimalism not as a new trend but rather a twenty-first century, digital-first update to corporate modernism.

In April 1964, an exhibit of 193 trademartks, symbols, and logotypes opened at the National Design Center in Chicago.

Today, minimalism has been reduced to a buzzword that describes a lifestyle, a type of decorating, an Instagram aesthetic, or a decluttering movement, but its roots are in art history as a term first used to describe the simple, geometric sculptures of Donald Judd or the paintings of Sol Lewitt in the 1960s, right around the same time corporate modernism was taking over American businesses. In 1980, Buzz Spector, a designer, artist, and professor, curated “Objects and Logotypes: Relationships Between Minimalist Art and Corporate Design” at Chicago’s Renaissance Society that put many of the mid-century corporate identities of companies like CBS, IBM, and Chase Manhattan Bank alongside the work of minimalist artists like Judd, LeWitt, and Dan Flavin. Spector drew formal comparisons between the seemingly unrelated work by presenting a consistent philosophical underpinning around the control of space and presentation. Noting the similarities between how Donald Judd wrote about his sculp-

Sally Maier thesis, Design Dissection, uncovered how ideas around minimalism subtly signal different values.

“From the beginning of your design education, you are trained to appreciate minimal design” By Sally Maier

tures and how George Nelson wrote about developing the Herman Miller brand system, Spector argued that both the minimalist sculptures and corporate logos were “strong reflections of social values.” In an eerily similar context as startup minimalism, Spector writes that the decreased government oversight over corporate mergers following the war allowed for the formation of the first truly big American companies like CBS, IBM, International Paper Company and Merrill Lynch ( that era’s Facebook, Google, and Apple). Both the artist and the graphic designer, Spector writes, share a “common faith in the efficacy of form as a means of restructuring society through public exposure to works executed within particular systems of use.” These “systems of use,” Spector notes, can be seen in both the detailed instructions artists supplied galleries in displaying their work and the brand guidelines produced by designers outlining how a logo could and could not be used. For the graphic designer, the single iconographic logo was the visual analogue for the corporate mergers. They helped the companies grow while presenting themselves in a simple, clean manner. In other words, their logos made them approachable.

But as ideology became dogma, minimalism was flattened to a style, stripping it of its socialist ideals and turning it into something that can be marketed, a signifier of taste. (The clearest example of this might be the publisher Standards Manual, which has largely built its business in recent years through fetishizing the minimalist logos from history by republishing mid-century brand guidelines as glossy table books.) In 2015, while a graduate student at Maryland Institute College of Art, designer and brand consultant Sally Maier began exploring the various aesthetics of high and low cultures. Her thesis, Design Dissection, uncovered how ideas around minimalism subtly signal different values. She found that the more minimal an advertisement’s

design, for example, the more expensive the product it was marketing. On the flip side, more visual complexity and larger text on an advertisement often meant cost and affordability played a bigger role in a potential buyer’s decision. “It’s like the hoarder mentality. You sometimes see rich hoarders, but it’s usually associated — class wise — with poverty,” she continues, “You want to keep everything because you might not be able to afford it. Emptiness, on the other hand, shows that you have the luxury to decide what to fill or not fill your space with.” (As da Vinci supposedly said: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”) The same, it turns out, is true in graphic design. Maier diagrammed the whitespace of magazines ranging from high-end fashion magazines to grocery store tabloids. Cross-referencing this research with readership data, she discovered magazines with more whitespace typically had a readership with a higher average income. It’s a surprising correlation, but it shouldn’t be. Whitespace is, quite literally, expensive — more whitespace means more pages and more pages means more money.

“From the beginning of your design education, you are trained to appreciate minimal design,” Maier told me. “It signifies intention. You’re trained to see all the decisions that are being made. This is why you see those logo redesigns where they draw those fake grids on top — it’s saying, ‘look, I thought about this.’” I see this in my own students every year: At the beginning of class they always want to add more, to fill up every corner of the page or the screen. Minimalism, for them, isn’t sophisticated, it’s boring. I don’t blame them for thinking this. They are surrounded by a flood of images all the time — on Instagram and Tiktok, on t-shirts and storefronts — and they see it all as equally interesting. So why do we value whitespace? Why do we ask our students to only use a few typefaces in a composition? Because that’s how we were taught? Because this is what separates the professional from the amateur? Because the theories of designers a half-century ago got lost in translation and reduced to a style? We must not confuse simplicity with clarity, minimalism with readability, approach with aesthetics. “What if you saw the daily evidence piled up around you that the world operated with thousands of visual codes, but somehow you would not be taken

seriously if you used any of them other than the desiccated form that modernism had devolved into?” Lorraine Wild wrote in her brilliant essay Castles Made Of Sand. “Could you be forgiven, perhaps, for beginning to suspect that what you were being taught was not actually modernism at all, but habit? Or bizarre fraternity rituals?” In his recent book on the cultural history of minimalism, The Longing for Less: Living with Minimalism, Kyle Chayka argues that minimalism always obscures complexity: The minimalist interface you use to order your takeout, for example, sits above a complex network of gig workers that make sure your ramen is still warm when it arrives. The simple presentation hides the complicated system just below the surface, whether that is the infrastructure for data collection or the multi-conglomerate corporation. (The digital design version of this is the hamburger menu: It gives you a clean layout before revealing an anxiety-inducing number of buttons hidden behind it.) The company wants to appear friendly so it can take your data, the magazine with lots of white space is accessible only to a wealthier readership, the invisible interface is filled with dark patterns to get you to buy, share, browse, or search more.

“Design is all about desire, but strangely this desire seems almost subject-less today, or at least lackless;” wrote the art critic Hal Foster in his essay Design and Crime, a loose-reinterpretation of Loos’ essay. “That is, design seems to advance a new kind of narcissism, one that is all image and no interiority — an apotheosis of the subject that is also its potential disappearance.” This is the limit of the Modernist project and the blindspots of its creators. The very promise of modernism — its modularity and replicability — is what made it a convenient tool for capitalism, turning it into a style that helped usher in our current aesthetic blandness. In trying to be everything it becomes nothing. Call it modernism, flat design, or minimalism, but in the end, the variations on this style have evolved to primarily communicate an aesthetic, or a false idea of taste. Today, the message is the design itself.

This erases the vernacular of local cultures and the plurality of human experience — race, gender, class — reinforcing the myth that design decisions are neutral while creating aesthetic hierarchies of good and bad

Standards Manual, which has largely built its business in recent years through fetishizing the minimalist logos from history by republishing mid-century brand guidelines as glossy table books

design. What started as a utopian ideal leading us into an egalitarian future, inevitably would become another system of oppression, pushing the tastes of the few onto the many. It should be no surprise that most of the names mentioned here were white and male. (And what of Adolf Loos? He was tried for pedophilia, so maybe he’s not the guy whose racist tastes we should be perpetuating.) To resist these narratives takes more than new maximalist logos, but that’d be a start. “If graphic design reflects the society we live in, it also plays a role in reflecting, perpetuating, and maintaining the social and cultural structures in which we operate,” wrote Jen Wang in an essay called Helvetica, Modernism and the Status Quo of Design. “We need to challenge the foundation of design practice, to contextualize the history and social role of design as a buttress to imperialism, and to create space in design education for broader explorations of design aesthetic.” In a moment where we are rethinking how we talk about design history, decolonizing the industry, and rethinking design’s relationship to power, perhaps this is also a chance to rethink the cultural signifiers we give to what we call “good design,” or why we value whitespace, or why we still think that less is always more. This could be the beginning of the pendulum swinging back. Until then, to crib the architect Robert Venturi: Less is a bore.

If there is one style of corporate branding that defines the 2010s, it is this: sans-serif lettering, neatly presented in black, white, and ultra-flat colors. Cobalt, for example. Its goal is noise reduction, accomplished by banishing gradients, funky fonts, and drop shadows, and by relegating all-caps to little “BUY” buttons. The abundance of white space around words, photos, and playful doodles exudes a friendly calm. You’ll find the information you need in seconds, and what a pleasing few seconds they will be.

Sans-serif typefaces have been in circulation since at least the 18th century. (Serifs are the little lines that decorate the ends of letters in fonts. Sans serifs omit them.) Minimalist design in marketing isn’t new either, but this genre of branding has become especially, almost predictably, concentrated among venture-backed lifestyle startups like Outdoor Voices, Bonobos, Frank And Oak, Lyst, AYR, Reformation, Glossier, Allbirds, and Thinx. Some use it for nearly everything on their websites but the logo, and some use it for nearly everything, including the logo.

One of the remarkable features of startup minimalism is its flexibility. It can sell anything. At a new Brooklyn bookstore called Books Are Magic, it sells books. At the Brooklyn Bread

The totes and boxes of Outdoor Voices. Photo by Outdoor Voices

Lab, a bakery tucked into a row of warehouses on a litter-strewn street in Bushwick, it sells bread. Versions of startup minimalism appear on the covers of cookbooks like Everything I Want to Eat: Sqirl and the New California Cooking and Salad for President, and in the pages of Rosé All Day: The Essential Guide to Your New Favorite Wine. When Airbnb rebranded in 2014, it replaced its bubbly, three-dimensional novelty script with a lowercase, sans-serif logo rendered in white and coral. The British rain boot company Hunter, which was founded in 1856, has its classic logo at the top of its website, followed by a wave of sans serifs encouraging us to shop “new colors” and “Slide Through Summer” (by purchasing plastic slides).

Rather than being descriptive of the product itself, startup minimalism indicates how that product will be purchased and delivered to the shopper: digitally, easily, inexpensively, and with a smile. It promises no bullshit and no imposition on your busy schedule. The more you see branding like this, the more the individual data points seem to coalesce into a single mass. To graphic-design aficionados, though, there are notable, carefully considered distinctions within that cluster.

OV Gothic is the signature typeface of Outdoor Voices, a laid-back activewear brand that launched in 2013 just as the concept of “athleisure” clothing was gaining momentum. According to Benjamin Critton, the typographer and graphic designer who created OV Gothic, it began as a tongue-in-cheek sendup of another classic American sportswear brand: Nike. Nike’s high-impact logo is a bold, italic, condensed, all-caps version of Futura. Critton riffed on Futura’s upright (not-italicized), regular weight over the course of three months, drawing inspiration from designer Larissa Kasper’s earlier experiments with the typeface. Eventually, he reworked it into something that represented the lighthearted approach to exercise

Versions of startup minimalism appear on the covers of cookbooks like Everything I Want to Eat: Sqirl. that Outdoor Voices endorses.“It’s very clean and modern, but it’s a little offbeat. You can sense that there’s some humor in it,” says Outdoor Voices art director Alejandra Ferreyros of OV Gothic. She took over from Critton when, after a year and a half spent designing everything from garment labels and packaging to tote bags and advertising, he left the company to move to LA. Humor how? “I think it has to do with the geometric roundness of it, compared to some other sans-serif faces that have really pointy Vs or As,” she says. “There’s something friendly about roundness. The V is cut off at the bottom, so it’s not this sharp, angular V.” Startup minimalism has deeper roots in the Dutch de Stijl movement, now a century old, which reduced artistic expression to abstract geometric shapes, clean lines, and primary colors. (Think of Piet Mondrian’s grid-like paintings filled with red, yellow, blue, and black rectangles.)More overtly, contemporary startups draw on International Typographic Style, also known as Swiss Style, a genre of graphic design developed in Switzerland that proliferated in the 1950s. It emphasized clarity and objectivity through the use of grid layouts and sans-serif typefaces like Akzidenz-Grotesk and the now-famous Helvetica, created in

1957. When the Montreal-based clothing brand Frank And Oak replaced serifs with sans serifs in its logo last year, Swiss design was front and center on its inspiration board. “It’s a design approach that confidently stays out of the way when it needs to,” writes creative director Edmund Lam in an email. For clothing brands, photographs are frequently more important than words. In graphic design, as in fashion, style is cyclical and tastes are often a kickback against what came just before. The ’90s were a time of funky typography and chaotic layering of words, images, and shapes, a look embodied by the influential Emigre magazine. It had the effect of “contesting values of legibility and order,” Cooper Hewitt design curator Ellen Lupton wrote.

Beyond the world of professional graphic designers, weird logo design burst into the open during the dot-com bubble of the late ’90s and early ’00s. According to Armin Vit, a graphic designer who also blogs about the discipline, businesses started zeroing in on the idea of establishing “corporate identities” during the ’50s and ’60s. For a long time, branding was limited by the available technology, meaning designs were drafted by hand and printed in one or two colors. Digital printing enabled brands to go crazy with full-color logos, though, and the internet completely blew away

those restrictions. Entrepreneurs could make their companies as colorful and flashy as they wanted.

“People wanted to jump on the internet, and they created their logos themselves because now there were tools available online. It was like a weird Wild West,” says Vit. “Some of the uglier logos came out that era.” Of course, that bubble burst. By 2009, Lupton wrote, “a sense of order and sobriety” had taken over again.

Scott Barry, the creative director of the trendsetting LA restaurant Sqirl, was studying graphic design at CalArts in the early 2010s. Though he was inspired by his introduction to the ’90s look, professors who had watched the movement come and go were at that point teaching their students how to strip away the layers and extra decoration to convey a clear, sharp message through design. It could be playful — as Sqirl’s website is today — but it was humor rendered in simple forms. As was the case with those early dot-com companies, digital technology has proven to be a potent influence on the look of e-commerce startups today. Brands don’t exist as individual (or physical) spaces anymore, and are instead tethered to the social platforms that popularize them and the devices that contain them. Phone screens are small, so web design can’t be too crowded. “These brands look accessible and action-oriented, like an app on your phone,” writes Lupton in an email. “The fact that many of these clothing brands rely largely on internet sales, it works for them to have a brand so strongly identified with the language of user experience.”Besides, if you stare at iMessage’s white sans serifs and blue speech bubbles all day, your subconscious might eventually conclude that this is just how communication looks.

Simple branding also reinforces many startups’ pitches, which go something like this: They’re making great-quality products and selling them straight to you at a low price, because they’ve cut out the retail markup. They offer at-home try-ons and free return shipping, with the label pre-printed and included in your delivery. Not only does pared-down branding mimic the straightforwardness of the customer experience, but, as Critton points out, it holds the brand responsible for the quality of its service. There are no trimmings to

disguise a shoddy product or user experience — unless, of course, startup minimalism has become that very trimming.

Vit sees Airbnb’s 2014 rebranding as an inflection point in the spread of startup minimalism. Its sleek new look got a ton of media attention (bloggers couldn’t help but comment on its new logo’s resemblance to a vagina), and on top of that, it was actually doing well as a company. Cue a stampede. Uncluttered design felt fresh and new a few years ago, but there will come a point when it no longer has the same specialness. Eventually, all that delicious, soothing nothing will just look like nothing. Brands will either have to undergo Airbnb-grade makeovers, or update aspects of their look. At the same time that startup minimalism has entrenched itself in the e-commerce landscape, a handful of heavily stylized and arguably goofy fonts have become fashion memes. Bright-red, gothic lettering was front (and back) and center on Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo tour merch, a hot-ticket clothing collection in its own right. The skateboarding magazine Thrasher’s flaming logo (a version of the Banco typeface) became an unexpected trend when teenage runway models, fashion editors, and Rihanna started wearing T-shirts and sweatshirts with its name across the

Thinx, a feminine hygiene company using minimalism design style

chest. Forever21 inevitably knocked it off, to Thrasher’s not-at-all concealed irritation. Vetements, the rogue design collective that’s had the fashion industry in its thrall for the last few years, has co-opted DHL’s bulky logo, Metallica’s lightning bolts, and Champion’s nearly unreadable script, among others.

There’s a degree of irony at play here, but there’s also real excitement over fonts that are flagrant and unmistakable and silly in the way that nostalgia can be. Sometimes it feels good to scream. Maybe all those sans serifs make you want to scream. At just five years old, Frank And Oak is already on its third logo. It started off with a sans serif in 2012. A year later, it wanted to communicate to shoppers that its product was more sophisticated than before, so it brought in a serif font, as well as a “Rue St-Viateur” signature. (As we know, everything sounds better in French. Or French-Canadian.) Last year, the team decided it wanted a cleaner, more modern look. A new sans serif was brought in. “We’re always course correcting,” writes Lam, the creative director, in an email. “As a digital native company where this is possible, we can’t resist improving every chance we get.”

Top: Outdoor Voices offical website

Bottom: Frank And Oak lifestyle company

We Live Under The Extension Of Branding

In 2010 a US court ruled that corporations are persons by law, and have a right to free speech. Internet and social media platforms gave corporations new platforms to create personalized communication and services. On social media, corporations cultivate designed personalities, with clever jokes and witty replies to angry customers. Corporate identities have expanded to performative fields, extending brand guidelines to instructions for behaviour or “staff on representative positions”: what to wear, how to speak, what music to play in the store, and detailed scripts for how to deal with parents. For an employee being “on brand” means to communicate all aspects of the brand at all times, whether or not they align with your mood, beliefs, interests, or talents. Brand personalities were created to fill the void of the absent craftsmen. Now those working for the brands have to hide their personality, in favour of adopting the artificial personality of the corporation.

Corporate identities were a response to a scaling of organizations, which required a clear and consistent communication strategy. Graphic systems allowed large groups of people to communicate and interact, and in that aspect the organizational part of the corporate identity design is not unlike wayfinding. But The success of the corporate identity has surpassed its functional use, and has become a dictatorship of professionalism that is intended to prevent creative expression from individuals within the corporate form.

Graphic designers should realize that their work on corporate identities can be used as a straitjacket by managers, to discipline their staff to stay ‘on brand’. Designers aren’t usually aware of the impact of corporate identities guidelines, as their work is finished when delivering the manual and the print-ready files.For those working within the corporation, especially in the lower echelons, it means a disciplining of behaviour for the sake of a designed image of consistency

and efficiency.Why would corporations want to extinguish individual personalities in favour of a single dominating persona?Because the corporations are owned by the stockholders. They decide on the basis of their dividends, not on behalf of the well-being of people or the planet. Until that changes, the corporate identity will fulfil no other purpose than maximizing shareholder profit.

The Direct-to-Consumer aesthetic, with its minimalism look obscures our identities. What happens when an aesthetic begins to obscure culture & design possibilities?

The Instagram ads you are mysteriously compelled to click on are slowly molding your style preferences. You know the ad with the perfect looking french bulldog wearing the sleek pink harness for purchase. The dog is walking toward their monochromatic-outfitted-owner standing against a bold orange studio backdrop. You

Photo from Wild One showing their minimalism design athestics

can’t forget about the expected Sans Serif typeface with a pre-destined personality. I’m in a candy store filled with digital brands like Warby Parker, AllBirds, Outdoor Voices, Everlane, Casper, Wild One, Glossier, By Humankind, and BarkBox products, to name a few. Or am I? I’m beginning to lose my taste. Is the flavor losing its punch or is it me? Would I dare to purchase that random plant pot misplaced at the local garden store rather than from The Sill, the epitome of DTC brands? This distinct style of these brands is rapidly finding its way into all sorts of areas in this digital consumer era. The designs are becoming predictable. Equally as predictable: the backstory, the mission.

Now more than ever, consumers want a story and cause to rally behind. The idea of “putting your money where one’s mouth is” is the fruition of new generations leveraging their collective online presence. During the heated 2016 Presidential Election, we witnessed brands come under the limelight for their endorsements, specifically from upper leadership, and laid out bare for criticism, resistance, and bad press. Vogue? Couture? Flagship Only? Who cares. Tell me about your social, environmental, and political impact. Only radical transparency, please. The first time I walked into Warby Parker to purchase a pair of glasses I was embraced warmly by their seemingly sensible product, story, and mission. This could be a case for successful branding and marketing efforts. What we’re seeing more is the DTC brand aesthetic infiltrating media and other industries beyond lifestyle products. This minimal and distinct Sans-Serif, hand-drawn illustrations, suave color schemes, and brand woke-ness is a formula reaching all corners of the internet. No doubt, these once small digital brands are shaking up larger, older brands to compete in this new social media enriched era.

Minimalism is embraced in the DTC world. I’m thinking of the minimal effort placed on the consumer to get what they want. Who are these new products really serving though? There’s always the forefront of inclusivity, sustainable practices, and ally-ship with many brands through social media features, collaborations, and representations. It’s all becoming formulated to serve the ideal consumer who fits this ideal streamlined lifestyle. The personality of the

One avenue of influence from strict minimalistic aesthetic guidelines is found in the food entertainment industry. More specifically, the growing popularity of the Bon Appétit YouTube Channel has created a cult following of what would appear to be a wholesome fandom. product is dismantled into a distinct profile and leaves little for the imagination. This reminded me of a recent Scratching the Surface podcast featuring Kyle Chayka and host Jarret Fuller. In this episode, Jarrett and Kyle discuss how minimalism often obscures complex systems. Kyle described an example where magazines sold were sorted by their level of minimalism. The copies that were more minimal in design were sold at a higher price point than those with a less minimal composition. Industries hold certain aesthetics as more valuable and more worthy than others. This might be rooted in our Western cultural values and the oppression of other cultures. One avenue of influence from strict minimalistic aesthetic guidelines is found in the food entertainment industry. More specifically, the growing popularity of the Bon Appétit YouTube Channel has created a cult following of what would appear to be a wholesome fandom. “Burnt the bread? No problem, it happens. We’ll work it through together.” Every test kitchen editor oozes the New York cadence and carries a homecook’s approach to cooking.

This past summer, Bon Appétit dismantled their iconic staff due to pay discrepancy between their white staffers and those who are Black or of color. From their editorial side, a conversation started to spark around how often BIPOC create recipes rooted deeply in their culture that must be decontextualized and trimmed away to mold into the minimal and accessible-yet-exclusive framework that many mainstream food media abide by. Effective inclusive practices in the digital age are not a watered-down more

This might be an extreme case, but any KoranAmerican in the states will recognize this chaotic mashup of distinct gradients and saturated colors at the grocery store. There’s personality and a stark memory that gets enveloped by these products that bring nostalgia. chewable version of a piece of content. Instead, it contains a longterm embodiment of culturally diverse stories and content that go beyond becoming culture props.

I want to remind us of the magical experience of connecting with an object or service where a story is continued over time. Also where the design and aesthetic possibilities aren’t so formulated. It doesn’t have to be a one and done story.

In an interview with Adobe, Brian Collins, chief creative officer of COLLINS, shared insights around their design decisions and approach for the recent rebranding of the global digital platform Twitch. COLLINS embraced the radical idea of “mess is more.” Collins discusses the reasoning behind this decision, “One look at the history of Twitch told us that to reduce this winning formula it to a bland, minimalist design language would be ridiculous. For Twitch, less is not more. Mess is more.”

Design is THE things right now. These trendy DTC brands have typically put human needs to the forefront of their products and identity. This might explain why a desk lamp from an online DTC brand is far better than the one off the Staples shelf. It’s now a matter of keeping these brands accountable and preventing one’s identity to be swept away by aggressive online aesthetics.

This might be an extreme case, but any Korean-American in the states will recognize this chaotic mashup of distinct gradients and saturated colors at the grocery store. There’s personality and a stark memory that gets enveloped by these products that bring nostalgia.

What I’m getting at is that there’s a connection between consumers and products that can encompass a bit of “tough love.” A not-so-neutral aesthetic that is so detached from a consumer’s own style. Is it cool to not want to be a cool trendy indie-mainstream consumer but instead embrace the weirdness and work that goes into deciding for myself why I’m drawn to this funky object that has no brand backstory?

What’s becoming of me is the stitching of these various DTC brands into my daily activities and outward projection of myself to the world. What I find myself becoming increasingly conscious of is how this identity might plague areas where experimentation and discovery occurs.

This might partly explain the rise in thrifting, supporting local artisans, and savoring those hidden gems with one-of-a-kind goods. These various outlets lure me with how they align with my style and beliefs rather than how I might fit their brand.

I’ll keep that slightly bland and eccentric-looking $7.99 biodegradable plant pot purchased from the local garden store near and dear to my heart — safe from storylines and excessive product packaging reminding me of how good some brand is. The meaning it carries to me is mine to conjure.

In 2001, students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, under the direction of architect Rem Koolhaas, published The Harvard Guide to Shopping, a wide-ranging survey of the spaces, techniques, and ideologies embedded in contemporary retail experiences. Moving from early village markets to the first arcades, then into malls and airports, they argue that shopping has infiltrated every aspect of our daily lives, profoundly influencing one’s experience of the city — the city, in essence, has become one big mall. But it also goes a step further: not only has retail infiltrated all of public space, it’s completely reshaped our conceptions of what public space is.

Allbirds retail design and brand style guide by Mythology

The research clearly had an impact on Koolhaas, whose firm OMA was at the same time designing Prada’s flagship store in New York’s SoHo. The two level store feels less interested in filling the space with product than creating an experience. In the New York Times, the paper’s then-architecture critic Herbert Muschamp— in a review titled Forget the Shoes, Prada’s New Store Stocks Ideas— marveled at how little of the floor plan was actually dedicated to product. Instead, the store featured wall-length murals (designed by New York based studio 2×4) and a sloping ramp to the basement level that could double as stadium seating, turning the store into an event space. The dressing rooms were outfitted with video screensand technology was implemented so customers could check out anywhere. “If you’re in the market for ideas, here’s the place to stock up,” Muschamp wrote, “Think of this as a museum show on indefinite display.” (In a bit of irony, the space was the former home to the Guggenheim Museum’s SoHo outpost.) Twenty years later, Koolhaas’s theories prove prescient and Muschamp’s description of Prada could apply to any number of retail experiences around the world. In fact, a whole industry around “experience design” has built up around retail stores. Luxury brands have always seen their brick and mortar stores as destinations, but as more and more shopping moves online, perhaps even more so in a post-pandemic world, the flagship concept has been democratized — a store is no longer simply a place for commerce, it must also be a place for content. This is seen most clearly in the direct-to-consumer brands who have been opening retail shops of their own in trendy neighborhoods in cities around the

country. Throughout the 2010s, brands like Casper and Warby Parker, Allbirds and Glossier, marketed convenience — you no longer need to go to the mall optometric or the local mattress shop, it’d just come right to your door! — while wrapping otherwise utilitarian products (glasses, sneakers, mattresses, face wash) inside a fully-branded package. They mixed good design and a strong social media game with the ease of one-click shopping, foreshadowing an end to brick-and-mortar retail. So when these brands started opening retail spaces of their own over the last few years — beginning with temporary pop-ups before quickly moving into full fledged brick and mortar shops — they borrowed the language of the luxury flagship. They are not simply places to shop, but also destinations, experiences, content. A brick and mortar store can do many things a website cannot: provide a place to feel the materials, try items on, and experience the product in a real context—but what they do best is create a space for the brand’s faithful to congregate. These stores are less brazen shopping experiences and more like immersive sponsored content: works of total branding, temples unto themselves, a capitalist Gesamtkunstwerk.

While the religious terminology might feel extreme, according to Ted Galperin, a partner and the director of retail at the New York-based branding agency Mythology, it’s not far off. “As we, as a culture, become less religious, these stores sort of replace the churches and synagogues and mosques,” he tells me. “You go to the store because it says something about you.” Mythology, formerly known as Partners and Spade, has designed many of these new experiences, counting Warby Parker, Harry’s, Away, and Sonos as their clients. “These stores are about selling a product, but these environments are really about creating a narrative,” Anthony Sperduti, the studio’s co-founder, continues. “We develop a series of codes and stories that make the brand personal in some way.”

Walk into their Warby Parker flagship store in SoHo, for example, and you’ll find the walls lined not just with glasses but a curated collection of books also available for purchase. Glance across the two long tables that stretch down the middle of the store and you’ll be presented with a museum-like timeline of key moments in the company’s history. (Disclosure: I

worked as a designer at Warby Parker from 2011 to 2013, shortly before they opened this store.) The flagship Casper store features pod-like structures, the insides decorated like faux bedrooms so you can privately test their two mattresses, the walls lined with cheeky slogans and tips to get a better night’s sleep. Off Canal Street, you walk into the Glossier store (designed by Peter Rich Architects and Gachot Studios) by entering an epic pink staircase that takes you through mirrored rooms to try on product and take selfies, a vibe that’s less Sephora and more the Museum of Ice Cream, the popular millennial pop-up experience. Around the corner, you’ll find an almost 900 square foot Chobani Cafe designed by architecture and branding studio a l m project, where, while you’re eating your greek yogurt in an environment clad in wood, glass, and steel that “represents our brand elements of agriculture, transparency, and manufacturing,” you can look at a menu “that pays tribute to our founder’s heritage.” Since the beginning of the COVID-19 lockdowns, legacy retailers around the world filed for bankruptcy, from J.C. Penny to Brooks Brothers, J. Crew to Century 21. Still, it’s a mistake to once again announce the end of retail. Sperduti told me he expects we’ll see even more direct-to-consumer retailers move into brick and mortar spaces as leases drop and people begin itching to leave their homes again. And since online sales have grown more than 30% this year, post-pandemic shopping might lean even more towards branded environments — online shopping gives us the convenience, the store gives us the experience. You order the product online, but you visit the store to make the brand pilgrimage.

In addition to their own products, many stores now feature coffee carts or juice bars encouraging you to stay and hangout, carefully curated products that signal brand values, and photo booths and vibrant spaces that seem custom-engineered for sharing on social media. Instead of

filling the store with product, every surface becomes content that furthers the brand narrative. These are environments for interacting not just with the products, but with like minded customers and friendly representatives. “Brands are how we relate to each other,” design critic Alexandra Lange tells me. “They are how we communicate and find common ground.” Brands have always strived to create a religious-like loyalty, suggesting feelings belonging andthe language of community. Social media largely closed the gap between brand and customer and these stores are recreating that feeling: turning your Instagram feed into a real place. Just as we signal our values, interests, and desires on social media, this is what brands do inside the store itself. It’s not a coincidence that the rise of direct-toconsumer brands parallels the rise of Instagram—it’s only natural for the two to begin influencing each other. It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that studios like Mythology and a l m

Away retail design and brand style guide by Mythology

Industries hold certain aesthetics as more valuable and more worthy than others. This might be rooted in our Western cultural values and the oppression of other cultures.

project — branding agencies — are designing these stores as opposed to a more traditional architecture studio. Like the Prada store, these retail spaces are selling an idea just as much as a product.

In many ways, we can trace this approach to Apple, who opened their first retail store in 2001. When Apple announced their plans, critics called it dead on arrival — Apple only sold a handful of products at the time, none of which carried the cultural currency they do now. The genius (haha) of the Apple store was turning the store into a destination. It wasn’t just about selling an iPod but giving you an experience: bring your iPod to be fixed at the Genius Bar while you shop for other products. These stores became physical advertising for the company and, alongside the iPod, helped turn it around to the behemoth it is today.

Apple clearly understands the value these experiences have for their brand. In the last two decades, as Apple’s products have gotten smaller and thinner, their stores have only gotten bigger and more architecturally complex — think of the famous Park Avenue store, completely underground except for a transparent glass cube; or their new Singapore store, an orb floating directly on the Marina Bay. In 2017, Apple’s then-retail executive Angela Arendts announced Apple wouldn’t even call their stores ‘stores’ anymore. Now, they’d be called ‘public squares’ — a place to buy a new phone and get your laptop fixed, a place to meet friends or sit and finish work. Local stores organize daily classes around using their products alongside photowalks and lectures. As Kyle Chayka wrote for Racked in 2017: “Apple stores are like the sponsored content version of public space: advertising for the brand that would like to pass as something organic.”

“The marketplace is the final arbitrator and regulator of life,” writes Koolhaas in The Guide for Shopping. Indeed, the tension in these stores is that they are private property

Away retail design and brand style guide by Mythology

masquerading as public space. The Apple store is not more of a public square than the shopping malls were. Koolhaas notes the ever-invasive, almost predatory, tactics built into stores to entice customers, from smart shelves that track product movement and red signed checkout spaces. This, perhaps, is another parallel between stores and social media — our feeds feel like a public forum, but are always controlled by corporations, who often are employing tactics to get you to come back. You might feel a more personal connection to a brand when you follow them on Instagram or visit their store, but the goal, as always, is to make money.

“The mall was a collective experience, a place you visited with friends,” Lange, who’s writing a book about the history of shopping malls, tells me, “These stores are collective via social media posts. We visit to say we visited. We visit so we can post it.” As an influencer promotes a product on Instagram, every visitor in the store, then, becomes a walking advertisement. (I bet the proliferation of Glossier’s famous pink bags in downtown Manhattan communicate just as much as a billboard or bus ad would.) Sperduti told me that after a store opens, they’ve found that online orders in the surrounding area also rise. After you visit the brand temple you are more likely to go forth and evangelize. At the end of the day, just like on social media, the content is you.

The Desigh Professional And The Amateur

The focus of this special issue is the constantly changing relationships between amateur and professional practice during the last century or so, over the course of the ascent of modernism in design. In Europe and the USA, this period has seen the emergence and growth of the design professions and concurrently the development of design practice as an unpaid under- taking in myriad forms ranging from handicrafts, to DIY, to digital tinkering. Given the porous nature of the boundaries between professional and amateur, this introduction does not attempt to define once and for all these slippery terms. Indeed, this special issue demonstrates that it is impossible to do so. Rather, it examines the themes of influence and alterity that recur in design in diverse locations, periods and practices. As we shall see the terms ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’ can have both positive and negative connotations and are often contrasted with each other. As a whole, the special issue demonstrates that professional and amateur practices are always connected, even when the relationship is one of repudiation. Professional practice defines itself by its distance from the unschooled practitioner yet, as the essays in this collection show, the vernacular is an inescapable part of modern design. At the same time, the professional is often a categorization that amateur designers reject, as a limitation to their creativity or originality. These essays look at the conscious appropriations of vernacular design by professionals and at the rejection by amateurs and working designers alike of professional specialization. They emphasize the complexity of the interchanges between the professional designer and the dilettante and the amateur and the vernacular maker.

Professional organizations, educational standards, journals and systems of licensing are instruments through which professions try to define themselves. In the design professions, this self-definition is a continual struggle, in part because everyone engages in design through the

Logo design of the Society of Industrial Designers (founded 1930) quotidian choices we make, from the font and type size in which we set an office notice to the color we paint our homes. The term ‘profession’ originally referred to a public statement or vow, and it is only in the sixteenth century that it was used to describe a range of upper class work, principally the practice of law, medicine and divinity. By the nineteenth century, other forms of endeavour sought the social and economic status en- joyed by these elite professions. Nonetheless, the boundaries of the three established professions had been somewhat hazy, as medicine, law and the Church were not closely regulated and had no systematic training. Professional status had generally de- pended on a liberal university education followed by an apprenticeship that required economic support from family or a patron. Gradually these, and newer fields such as engineering and pharmacy, developed specialist graduate and professional schools and systems of licensing and legal regulation that controlled entry and limited competition. Professionalization acts as a system of exclusion by setting up criteria that, intentionally or unintentionally, bar individuals and groups on the basis of money, class, ethnicity and gender. In broad terms, professionalization in Europe and the USA became a means of creating business networks and social arenas that were largely middle class, white and male, maintaining the gentlemanly hierarchies characteristic of divinity, law and medicine.

In design, Jill Seddon has traced the pseudo-inclusion of women in the British design professions in the first half of the twentieth century when women were effectively excluded from upper levels of groups such as the Design and Industries Association (founded 1915) and the Society of Industrial Designers (founded 1930) but were encouraged to take the lead in design activities that were connected with the home.

The recent special issue of this journal, ‘Professionalizing Interior Design 1870–1970’, addressed matters

of gender in one of these domestic areas, recognizing that ‘issues of professional and amateur status in relation to interior design are intrinsically gendered within a broader gender divide in the history of design’. Women’s needlework in Austria–Hungary, professional female interior decorators and the feminized promotion of synthetic materials for interior decoration in the USA were shown as arenas in which stereotypically gendered roles were, in fact, renegotiated.

Until the 1980s, the history of design was usually seen in terms of the personal genius of individual professional designers and the objects they

produced. Indeed, the idea of the design profession is bound up with the establishment of creative individuality, the separation of tasks and the suppression of collaboration with artisans and craftsmen. Rozsika Parker’s The Subversive Stitch traces the origins of this shift to the sixteenth century and the split between professional artists and craftsmen. Artists promoted their individuality whereas artisans were anonymous workers whose labour was collective. Parker also notes an important division within embroidery, as amateur work became associated with the home and femininity. 5 Parker’s study is an instance of the interest in material culture and

Certain amateur craft work flourished only when notions of early specialization, narrow professional training and the isolated individual artist as genius were challenged

the significance of design in everyday life that has, since the 1980s, focused design historians’ attention on the work of often anonymous nonprofessionals. Studies have moved beyond the examination of paid work to demonstrate the importance of leisure activities, for instance Pat Kirkham’s study of the resurgence of handicrafts in Britain between the wars. Craft activities undertaken during leisure time by members of organizations such as the Women’s Institute were outside existing artistic and design hierarchies. Kirkham locates them within a growing appreciation of ‘primitive’ art and crafts and the influence of the Arts and Crafts movement. She states ‘Certain amateur craft work … flourished only when notions of early specialization, narrow professional training and the isolated individual artist as genius were challenged’.

In 2006, a special issue of this journal, edited by Paul Atkinson, drew attention to DIY across a range of activities. The issue traced the democratization of the design process through amateur practices— practices that allowed individuals to find personal meaning and that opened up design to a wider range of participants. Domestic crafts, construction projects such as boat building and fanzine production, among others, allowed those who would otherwise have been excluded by gender, class or lack of expertise to be independent of the professional and gain a sense of creative satisfaction. The issue also demonstrated the importance of fora such as magazines in the support and encouragement of these activities.

It is not only in academia that DIY has become more prominent. Over the last decade, there has been a renewed popular interest in DIY, as evidenced by numerous television programs such as Changing Rooms and DIY SOS in the UK. In the USA, the resurgence of making can be traced in magazines such as ReadyMade, Craft and Make, which often promote ideas of bricolage and customization. These

magazines target a younger and more experimental reader- ship than the audience for the more conventional domestic skills promoted by the Martha Stewart media empire. Indeed, craft is now posited as a form of self-reliance and an earth-friendly means of subverting conformity and passive consumption. Ready-Made promotes the reuse and appropriation of objects, turning tennis racket cases into bags, broken speakers into coffee tables and popcorn containers into lamp- shades. Its publicity states ‘Your home should be a reflection of your own personality, not a hodgepodge of mass-produced whatnots from a big box store’. Its projects often reference the classics of modernism, offering ‘Eames-style’ designs. ‘ReadyMade will excite and stimulate your modern design eye, and help you make your place all yours.’

These attitudes have been supported by recent books, including the contributions of the prominent American designer, writer and educator Ellen Lupton. In 2006, she published D.I.Y. Design it Yourself, a book addressing a general audience that attempts to provide some basic design principles as well as some inspiring practical projects. Lupton regards DIY graphic design as a means of bypassing commercial uniformity and gaining a sense of self-satisfaction in an increasingly corporate world. For Lupton, design skills are essential tools in modern life. In particular, she identifies a generational shift, pointing out that in the current digital environment the impulses to design and to share your designs are now second nature to young people.

Rozsika Parker’s The Subversive Stitch traces the origins of this shift to the sixteenth century and the split between professional artists and craftsmen.

As Lupton’s book demonstrates, readily available technologies from desktop computers to high street copy shops and digital printing now allow individuals to produce graphic design without recourse to trades such as typesetting, print reproduction and commercial printing. Nonetheless, the amateur design that Lupton’s book is intent on encouraging is not envisaged as a challenge to professional designers or their ways of working; indeed, her aim is to provide amateurs with a set of design principles that are at the core of established design education. In fact, she sees DIY graphics as a first step towards paid design work for some, and she maintains that there is room in the business for many more designers.

In practice, since desktop publishing software such as Aldus PageMaker opened up design to the public in the mid-1980s, professional graphic designers have regularly voiced concerns that the status of their discipline is being undermined. These anxieties were epitomized by the designer and design historian Steven Heller, in an interview with Lupton on the publication of D.I.Y. Noting the ready availability of computer hardware and software such as PhotoShop and Illustrator, Heller argued:

By making our work so easy to do, we

are devaluing our profession. I like democracy as much as the next person, but because of new technologies, the definition of ‘amateur’ in field like graphic design, photography, film and music, among others, is being redefined. With everything so democratic, we can lose the elite status that gives us credibility.

He urged that a rigorous and specialist education was needed to ensure the authority of designers and maintain the respect of their clients. Lupton countered by asserting:

Perhaps our credibility shouldn’t come from design’s elite status, but rather from its universal relevance to daily life. Not everyone is a design ‘professional,’ a person dedicated to solving complex problems and carrying out large, capital-intensive projects. But everyone can design elements of their own life, from their personal business cards or letterheads to their own flyers and wedding invitations.

Noting that huge numbers of untrained individuals undertook media production in their jobs and daily lives, whether these were personal websites, newsletters or PowerPoint presentations, Lupton suggested that helping some of these people to understand the principles and complexity of visual communication would raise design

Cover of D.I.Y.: Design It Yourself (Design Handbooks) by Ellen Lupton

literacy and the appreciation of professional design. She urged that those who needed design take on a more proactive role, while operating within the conceptual and formal boundaries established by the design profession. The debates raised within the graphics industry by the advent of desktop publishing are being raised once more, this time within the areas of industrial design and even craft production, as the emerging technologies of rapid prototyping and direct digital manufacture give users the potential not only to design three-dimensional products but also to produce them at will. Such processes question not only the authorship of the resulting products but also the very nature of craft and design. Modernist principles of professional influence become meaningless. Recur- ring developments such as these are a reminder that notions of professional and amateur are not fixed, but fluid.

Nevertheless, in the Lupton interview, the influence travels in one direction; it trickles down from the professional canon to inform amateur practice. One focus in this special issue is on amateur practice that does not emulate commercial design, but serves instead as a critique of the professional. Since the 1960s, particularly in the sphere of architecture, there has been a call for a greater participation by users in the making of the designed environments in which they live. The essays in this issue suggest that amateurs develop ways of working and aesthetics that exist outside those approved by the experts, and in doing so they can act as models for a revised professional practice. The remainder of this introduction will explore texts that examine this critical role of amateur practice and relate the issues they raise to the contributions in this special issue. The rise of the professions in the nineteenth century was associated with modernity, rationality and scientific progress and was embedded within institutions of control, training and regulation such as universities and professional associations. Professional work is intellectual, based on abody of theoretical knowledge that can be applied above the local and singular in- stance. The professional practice of architectural de- sign, graphic design and product design is tied to the emergence of the designer as a distinct individual, apart from the trades and crafts. The designer is able to achieve an overview of the increasingly complex production processes in industrial society and direct the work of the artisan, the builder, the sign maker, the potter, the printer and compositor. The English Arts and Crafts movement of the last decades of the nineteenth century, inspired by John Ruskin and coalescing around William Morris,

was a response to the tensions and ambiguities that were spawned as mass production both created the role of the designer and also removed designers from direct contact with making. The movement encouraged amateur practice, inspiring men Wand women to produce their own furnishings and decorative objects.

One of the key figures in the Arts and Crafts movement at the turn of the nineteenth century was the architect Edward Prior, a founder of the Art Workers Guild. The title for this special issue is taken from Prior’s polemic ‘The Ghosts of the Profession’, one of the essays in Architecture: A Profession or an Art. The book, edited by Norman Shaw and T. G. Jackson, was published in1892 as a response to the proposed imposition of professional standards by the Royal Institute of British Architects. Shaw and his contributors feared that RIBA’s move would result in a narrow specialization within architecture, accompanied by an inescapable loss of creativity.

The writers called for a hands-on architectural apprenticeship that would enable the young architect to understand the practicalities of construction in addition to mastering architectural theory. Like many of the contributors to the book, Prior was closely associated with Norman Shaw’s practice, having been an assistant in his office for six years before starting his own firm in 1880. Prior’s essay summarizes some of the key objections by the Arts and Crafts to professionalization and was highly critical of the products and practices of an architecture that had become divorced from human needs and society. In contrast, he praised the ‘unarchitectured’ building of the past as proof of the intrinsic design ability within human communities. ‘In the histories of all peoples we find progressive forms of architecture, in which the expression of fitness, instinctively applied to building, shows itself in beauty.’ This ‘instinctive’ fitness and functionality, arising from the people and rooted in place, is something that a later generation of architects in the early decades of the twentieth century would adopt as an inspiration for modernist design.

Prior suggested that it was the commercially driven separation of client, builder and architect that had produced the poor architecture of the day. The dis- connection of the architect from the community as a whole led the majority to take a narrow, inward look- ing careerist approach to design. In Prior’s account, things started to go badly awry in 1834 with the founding of the Institute of British Architects. Prior believed that this professionalization moved scientific, formal and historical

Nevertheless, in the Lupton interview, the influence travels in one direction; it trickles down from the professional canon to inform amateur practice.

theory to the centre of architectural practice, leading to an empty historicism and formalism. According to Prior, architecture started to be concerned with architecture itself rather than being about making buildings for people. He argued that as firms became more prosperous and expanded, architecture developed into a trade in which large numbers of clerks and assistants laboured at segmented specialist tasks. These invisible workers, whose efforts advanced the reputation of the master architect, were the ‘ghosts’ of Prior’s title. This special issue has appropriated Prior’s phrase to describe those outside the design professions whose presence cannot be ignored, figures who are always there in the back- ground whispering that something is rotten with the state of design, that all is not well and that things could be done differently. The strands of non-professional design practice can be broadly grouped under a number of headings, several of which are discussed in the contributions to this special issue. In architectural terms ‘vernacular’ was used by Sir George Gilbert Scott and others in the nineteenth century to denote everyday domestic and secular buildings, common structures that were not designed by architects. These could include the ‘traditional vernacular’ produced by the mostly rural builders and craftsmen whom the Arts and Crafts movement em- braced. They also included the ‘commercial vernacular’ consisting of the furniture and decorative art and the suburban homes that so appalled Scott, as well as Morris and his followers. These were the mass-produced, low brow, brash, mercantile objects that designers from Morris onwards had rejected in favour of the rural vernacular. The commercial vernacular was a challenge to good taste and good design. These vernaculars are associated therefore with traditional or popular culture rather than high culture. There are good and bad vernaculars depending on one’s viewpoint.

Michelangelo Sabatino’s essay examines the ways in which Italian vernacular buildings inspired modernist architects from the 1930s through to the 1960s. His study engages with the complex ways in which the national vernacular was regarded and used by architects and critics at a number of key points. In the 1920s and 1930s, for modernists such as Giuseppe Pagano, the vernacular embodied simple, functional, timeless design, the very qualities that modernism espoused. Vernacular building was placed within a rational discourse of the undecorated, the minimal and the geometric. The economy of means visible in the rural vernacular had, for Pagano, a moral force. As Sabatino shows, this representation was in fact highly problematic and ignored the specifics of economic and cultural change within Italy. He demonstrates this by unpicking the range of terms used in Italian architectural discourse to describe buildings produced by non-architects, including primitive architecture, popular architecture,

Lounge chair by Giuseppe Pagano for Gino Maggioni 1940s

rustic architecture and spontaneous architecture. These terms, with their potential for positive and negative associations, suggest the ways in which the vernacular was deployed by different political and architectural factions over a period of time.

The relationship between the vernacular and the nation is a key to these shifts; for instance, in the 1930s, traditional rural architecture was being employed by Fascist architects as a basis for a national style of building. These rural dwellings provided Italian designers from both the right and the left with a means of combining the site specific and local with the national in the construction of a modern state. The idea of the unchanging rural locality that we can see in Italian and English discourse was in fact essential to the construction of the modern imagined national community. Design is central to ideas of the nation, and locality has been a significant element in the ways in which amateur and professional intersect. Clearly, much work remains to be done in addressing the relationships between amateur and professional design practices in Asia, India, Latin America and Africa, and the subject would be a stimulating topic for a later special issue. Dilettantes are individuals who dabble in a range of activities without dedicating or committing themselves to any one field. The term nowadays has a derogatory implication and suggests those who skim over the surface and do not engage with a practice or subject in depth. Anna Winestein’s essay looks at the historical specifics of dilettante practice in late Imperial Russia. She reclaims the notion of dilettantism as a positive position in opposition to political control and official art, as well as commercial orthodoxies. Winestein discusses the group of highly educated young Russians who came together in the Mir Iskusstva movement, whose practices embraced a very wide field from magazine and book design to advertising and exhibition design, the book arts, stage design and fashion. The breadth and hybridity of their designs for a vast range of media challenged the narrow specialism of establishment practices.

Winestein notes that the educated and urbane Miriskusniki were part of a tradition of ‘amateur participation in the arts in Russia that was largely the product of dominant Imperial institutions and censorship …’. As one response to this authoritarian system, wealthy Russians founded private theatres that avoided official constraints and encouraged experiment and freedom of expression. Many of the Miriskusniki also took

advantage of the growth of private art academies and non-Imperial art schools. The Miriskusniki were the products of an educated upperclass culture of dilettantism, whose members were expected to display a broad knowledge of Russian and European arts.

The essay reveals a number of important ways in which the lack of attachment to a specific practice enriched the Miriskusniki’s approach. The members of the group were not tied to institutional hierarchies or to commerce. The open collaborative methods that resulted from this position allowed for cross- fertilization between different creative fields: design, theatre, music and literature. The dilettante’s ability to dabble, combine and cross disciplines, without attachment to an institution or a professional view- point, encouraged hybridity. This was most notice- able in the production and staging of ballets and plays, most famously in their involvement with the early Ballets Russe. Up to this point, costumes and sets in the theatre had been the territory of separate specialists. Unlike these professionals, the Miriskusniki were ‘ardent and knowledgeable theatregoers, balletomanes and opera lovers’, who saw all these elements in terms of the effect of production as a total experience. Their ability ‘to be both viewers and creators’ resulted in a multi-sensual event in which performance, costume, set design and staging were all considered as a whole rather than being confined within specific technical purviews. All aspects of the production, from the costumes of minor characters to the audiences’ sightlines, were judged to be of equal importance.

Amateur refers to a practice that is not limited or con- fined by the demands of the marketplace. Like the term ‘professional’, the word has both positive and negative connotations. Although the word amateur is now often used condescendingly and pejoratively to imply an unskilled or naive approach, the Latin root of the word is amator, someone who loves what they do and does it for its own sake rather than financial reward. For example, in the 1880s and 1890s, the title ‘Amateur Photographer’ was used by British and American photographers who wanted to distance themselves from the commercial limitations of high street professionals. Amateur practice is nowadays associated with leisure or hobbies, activities that are part-time, occasional and unpaid.

Two of the essays in this issue, those of Roni Brown and Gregory TurnerRahman, use interviews to examine unpaid design practice in a nuanced fashion. In both cases, the work undertaken by their subjects is more sustained and more akin to

professional work than the label of amateur might suggest. Brown and Turner-Rahman’s focus on the motivations of the amateur is in contrast to studies such as ernard Rudofsky’s influential book and exhibition Architecture Without Architects (1964) in which the specifics of the maker and their culture are effaced and their designs are recast as aesthetic exemplars of timeless functionalism. Both Brown and Turner-Rahman use relatively small, focused samples in their attempts to uncover the impulses and social meanings behind amateur practice.Roni Brown’s contribution looks at self-building in southern England in the past twenty-five years or so, highlighting the subjective experience of amateur building. By engaging with a small and geographically specific sample of individuals, she is able to look at the vernacular from within. Her builders are not the local craftsmen that Prior praised but untrained individuals undertaking ambitious self-building projects to produce homes in which they will eventually live. Her case study shows that informants acquired complex new skills, in both designing and construction, a process that was both frightening and stimulating atthe same time. Self-building allows for a flexible design methodology that is far from the norm in architecture and design.

The design process of self-building, alongside other forms of DIY, is far more continuous and iterative than is the case within mainstream product design and manufacture where design in all of its detail generally precedes manufacture. The selfbuilders were able to creatively shape homes that evolved over relatively long periods. Details are planned, designed and completed over time as resources, and the experience of living in the property, in- form the next more detailed set of decisions.

These practices can be seen as examples of adhocism, a term coined by Charles Jencks to describe a

post- modern approach to architecture that responded to the needs of local communities. Jencks cited New-castle’s Byker Wall housing estate as an example of an approach that puts the user, rather than a pre-existing plan, at the centre of the design process. As with the self-build projects that Brown describes, professional adhocism takes time. The bricolage of local and vernacular styles and modernist elements that formed the Byker estate were put together between 1969 and1982. In effect, adhocism involves the adoption by professionals of approaches that have always in- formed local construction methods. As Brown shows, self-building is closely bound up with individual narratives and self-identity. Her study demonstrates that becoming an amateur builder and taking on the role of producer rather than consumer gives individuals a valuable sense of agency. These self-initiated designs make the personal tangible. In many cases, the plan for the self-build home is informed by earlier local vernaculars, and is rooted in a locality and, furthermore, connected to the life his- tory of the builder. The design of one home in her sample was based on a desire to reflect the perceived stability of the surrounding Victorian villas, in addition: ‘The local topography was also mnemonic, recalling outings and camping in the woodland to the rear of the property’. Brown notes that self-building depends on the support of a range of professionals. In some cases, self- builders use pre-made kits as the basis for their homes or employ architectural firms to draw up their plans. Inevitably, these plans come under the scrutiny of local planning authorities, whose regulations limit the freedom of the selftaught builder. In addition, these building designs and the ideas of domestic life that they embody are influenced by professional design discourse in the media. In this case, it is the profession that is the ghost, always lurking in the background, whether for good or ill. Brown observes that the relationship between amateur and professional in self- building has yet to be satisfactorily resolved; the profession is not yet able to nurture and give shape to amateur creativity.

Back in the 1890s, Edward Prior bemoaned the vulnerable status of the freelance architectural ‘ghost’, who could be laid off when business was slack. Greg Turner-Rahman’s essay examines an equally precarious situation for designers in the 1990s. As we have seen, the coming of desktop computing and software opened up graphic design to a much larger group of participants. This is particularly the case in digital design, such as Web design and animation. Turner- Rahman examines the intersec-

Top: Learning from Las Vegas is a 1972 book by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour.

Bottom: Architecture Without Architects is a book based on the exhibition of the same name by Bernard Rudofsky originally published in 1964. tions of professional and amateur in the design portals of the 1990s and the idea of ‘design as a pastime as opposed to an occupation’. These network communities provided space for an open exchange of software, images and critiques, an ‘electronic gift economy’ where status was dependent on the ‘coolness’ and novelty of the work one posted. The endless playful exploration of technological options became an end in itself. In these design subcultures, the terms amateur and professional were beside the point, what mattered were programming and visual design skills.

Turner-Rahman notes that in the early days of commercial Web design, these talents were in great demand and those who possessed them had consider-able creative freedom. The design press promoted individuals who were able to take complete control of their projects, apparently exercising an artistic independence previously unknown in the design field. This mythology of the ‘design star’ whose practice

was more akin to fine art coincided with the ‘Hollywoodization’ of commercial design where ‘jobs are scarce and finite in length’. Commercial digital design struggled to define itself, after the dotcom bubble burst, as designers fought to make a living. The essay traces the shift from the expressive amateur design aesthetic developed through early online network communities to a corporate grid-based structure informed by the principles of professional graphic design. As we have seen, the traditional and rural vernaculars, whether the chairs produced by craftsmen or the structures created by local builders, were perceived to be in a harmonious relationship with their natural settings. Vernacular designs were characterized as particularly pureand authentic as they were made by man rather than machine Modernity was characterized as sweeping away the traditional and the past, and the rural vernacular became a space of resistance to homogeneity and industrialization, a space from which to critique the alienating effects of modern production. Yet, as Michelangelo Sabatino’s essay demonstrates, these anti-modern spaces were implicated in the rise of the modern. The integrity, directness and simplicity that Prior ascertained in vernacular designs, their fitness of purpose, were to be embraced by European and American modernist architects. The vernacular then, rather than being in opposition to modernism, can be seen as a means of imprinting a sense of place onto modernity. Indeed, Umbach and Hüppauf have recently coined the term ‘vernacular modernism’ to describe the mix of the local and the universal, which they see as an essential element of modernism. ‘It is not the discovery of the vernacular per se, we contend, that makes it interesting. It is, rather, the negotiation between, and the interdependenceof, the regional and the global, concrete locality, and border-devouring abstraction, that can generate a new and more complex narrative of the modern.’ They see the vernacular as ‘one of the generative principles of the modern condition’. Despite the fact that the vernacular is the ‘other’ of modernity and is generally invisible in modernist theory, they suggest that it is an other that is within modernism, rather than being somehow outside it.

Designers continued to alert their peers to the amateur and the vernacular through the 1960s and onwards, choosing different vernaculars and reading diverse meanings into them. Of course these ghosts exist, but their messages are open to the interpretation of those who see them. Take, for instance, just two examples of how the vernaculars were deployed. In Learning From Las Vegas (1972), Denise Scott Brown, Robert Venturi and Stephen Izenour make the point that it had been easier for professionals to accept the ‘primitive vernacular’ of Rudofsky’s Architecture without Architects or the ‘industrial vernacular’ of factories and machines than the ‘commercial vernacular’. Their analysis of the Las Vegas Strip was a means of interrogating modern design practice in order to see more clearly how the formal language of modernism operated. They argued that the study of the commercial vernacular opened up an awareness of the symbolic to architecture, not only the obvious symbolic of the Strip but also of the hidden symbolic in modernist architecture. In an early postmodernist challenge to ‘High-Design’, they saw their methodology as a means of making the architectural profession less authoritarian and more pluralist.

In 1989, Tibor Kalman and Karrie Jacobs condemned the corporate vernacular. Addressing the American Institute of Graphic Arts, the organization for professional graphic designers in the USA, they restated the Arts and Crafts position in a somewhat different form. The commercial vernacular of Learning from Las Vegas had now become a dominant global language. In order to counter the dominance of the market, Kalman and Jacobs urged that ‘We have to learn to listen to our gut instincts instead of corporate rhetoric’. Whereas Scott Brown and Venturi urged architects to look at the Las Vegas Strip, Kalman and Jacobs advised that designers should turn to the local street and its ‘non-corporate, non-designed vernacular’ for inspi-

ration. This simple, almost invisible design was clearly not driven by marketing or focus groups but was, Kalman and Jacobs suggested, natural and instinctive. It was commissioned by small businesses taking care of their local needs using neighbourhood craftsmen such as signwriters and print shops. This process resulted in work that had an unfiltered, emotional directness. Kalman and Jacobs described vernacular design thus ‘Vernacular is slang, a language invented rather than taught. Vernacular design is visual slang.’ The designs they invoked were, they claimed, personal, down-to-earth responses aimed at people. Design should not be an exclusive activity, ‘the sacred mission of an elite professional class’, but should connect with the user. Kalman and Jacobs’ somewhat romantic positioning of vernacular design as honest, intuitive, communal and sincere takes us back to Prior’s image of the vernacular embodied within the community it served, generated by that community and effective because it served community needs. Of course, one might point out that the focus groups that generated the new corporate design that Kalman and Jacobs deplored are com- posed of everyday people, non-professionals whose responses help to shape the design of their world. In the twenty-first century, the relationship between amateur and professional design continues to change. Technologies have had, and continue to have, a democratizing effect on design, from the photomechanical reproduction processes that allowed untrained illustrators such as the Miriskusniki and Aubrey Beardsley to make reproducible images, through power drills, photocopiers, IBM Golfball typewriters, to the desktop computer and digital manufacturing. In addition, amateurs are now tweaking and customizing these very technologies, through, for instance, hacker culture. Professional attitudes to these activities have continued to oscillate between fear and admiration. What does seem constant is that the amateur designer, the self-builder, the Miriskusniki and the vernacular maker are intimately connected to the user, indeed they often are both designer and user. In these cases, the fluctuating boundaries between designer, maker and user have disappeared altogether. For professional designers, whether they design buildings, products, information, furniture or experiences, it is imperative that they find ways of accurately envisioning those who use design, in order to become partners in the creation of successful solutions.

Top: Colors cover design and directed by Ttibor Kalman

Bottom: Learning from Las Vegas Book by Denise Scott Brown, Robert Venturi, and Steven Izenour

We Are Designers And We Own Our Design

Those who aspire to write code know that there’s a virtually limitless number of ways to study engineering. Even outside of the halls of “’traditional’” computer science programs, there are countless books and online resources that teach any flavor of coding. Even Apple, perhaps the world’s most successful purveyor of design, actively encourages people to learn how to code using its Swift programming language. On the company’s website, they promote resources for learning Swift with the headline “Everyone Can Code”—a beautifully democratic declaration that belies the company’s desire to engage developers on its proprietary platforms. But that headline is also telling about the way engineering is valued.

If everyone can code, and if Apple, one of the world’s largest companies, is endeavoring to teach us all to do just that, the implications are potentially immense: There are many, many more new engineers on the horizon. Lots of them will likely be hobbyists, but inevitably, lots of them will be entering the field as professionals, too.

The quality of these new engineers will be highly variable. Some of them might become world-class programmers, but many of them will not. Plenty of these new entrants will, as a matter of course, write lots of “bad code.” Yet, as a trade and a profession, the world of engineering hardly seems troubled

by this at all. There’s no sense of alarm that this potential influx of new practitioners will somehow disenfranchise the incumbent professionals. And no outrage at the likelihood of lots more bad code being written.

But designers don’t think this way about design. For us, the prospect of more people everywhere doing design is not something to embrace, but to forestall. Take, for example, platforms such as 99designs or Fiverr, marketplaces where design is inexpensive and highly variable in quality. Most professional designers regard these with extreme disdain, as embodiments of a systemic undervaluing of design. But looked at another way, these sites represent opportunities for those without formal Western design training to log valuable experience. They’re on-ramps, effectively, for a wider population to take part in the design process.

Case in point: If you google the term “tech backlash,” you’ll get no shortage of links about how society is reevaluating its relationship with technology. There are widespread concerns about the access to our personal data, how our devices are impacting our mental health, and the way that our own social activity is essentially being weaponized against us. But if you google the words “design backlash,” the results are like a ghost town, with tumbleweeds of irrelevance blowing through. There’s nothing about design’s role in these challenges, nothing even about design’s culpability in creating these problems. To the world at large, these are classified as technology problems, but the answers to these problems are at least as much about design, about putting humane interfaces on powerful technology.

That, as much as anything, reflects how little the world understands design. The question before us now is: Will designers be satisfied with continued marginalization as the world grapples with problems that we helped create—and that we know we can help to resolve?

Or are we ready to embrace a radical new view of who can practice design, who can take part in it—and what our own responsibility is to help the world at large understand what design actually is? Only if we do can design fulfill its potential to be the difference-making, transformative force for change that every designer believes it

can be. Graphic design history is, generally speaking, a history of professional practice. In text books, at conferences, and for college courses, design historians and educators explain the development of the industry through the example of pivotal figures, canonical works, and dominant styles. And yet, visual communication is not only a professional domain. It’s an active cultural practice shared by all. What would it look like to expand the scope of history beyond professional boundaries, and what might we gain from doing this? Graphic design is now an in-demand college major and it is more visible in popular media. But since the profession was (and still is) mostly white, upper middle class, and solidly situated within Eurocentric ways of knowing and being, when it comes to role models and value systems, the formalist graphic design history we inherited doesn’t offer much diversity. As a result, it delimits our understanding of who made visual communication in the past and what kindsof practices existed beyond the industry’s gaze.

The field’s most pressing imperative today is no longer professionalization; it’s to make design practice a responsible part of building equitable, sustainable futures. But our knowledge of past practices—limited as it is to design “professionals”—carries over to

Through live and asynchronous lectures, readings, and discussions, the class sheds light on moments of oppression and visibility. The series revisits and rewrites the course of design history in a way that centers previously marginalized designers, cultural figures—and particularly BIPOC and QTPOC people.

Brands like Haribo are selling an image of happiness, or childhood. It’s like brainwashing; and to me, that’s the same with religion

the present. The field now needs to overcome its disciplinary reclusiveness as well as its social exclusions if it is to maintain any future relevance. A more expansive history of what graphic design has been could offer a more expansive view of what it could be.

Professional designers have contributed stunning forms and inventive methods to the field, but there is also so much catalytic design that was not made by professionals. BIPOC Design History, an online curriculum produced by educators Pierre Bowins, Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton, and Silas Munro, offers many examples of anonymous, amateur, or otherwise non-canonical design that had a significant cultural impact. Some of these examples, while ignored in their time, have since been acknowledged by the AIGA. Emory Douglas, whose work was discussed by Colette Gaiter in a lesson on protest graphics, became a medalist in 2015. Gaiter also discussed the iconic “I AM A MAN” placard used during the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Workers strike. I have also written about the placard in the AIGA Design Educators Community series “Beyond the Bauhaus,” where others have written about practices like AfriCOBRA and the Gees Bend Quilters. These examples show how everyday people used design to respond to their social lives—and yes, this included solving problems.

The People’s Graphic Design Archive, led by Briar Levit, Louise Sandhaus, and Brockett Horne, is another such attempt to broaden the scope of history, this time by crowdsourcing a digital collection. The archive includes design objects, like posters and packages, but it also includes process work, contextual photos, correspondences, and other sources that help situate design in social worlds. Because anyone can upload to it, with this archive graphic design history becomes something we collectively shape.

While we may have more archives, it’s important to remember that these are not neutral spaces. Archives are based

on private or institutional values governing what should and should not be collected, and because many have excluded practices outside of the profession, we may never know about them.

Everyone designs and design is crucial to the future. Design philosophers Anne-Marie Willis and Tony Fry discuss these matters in their scholarly writing. They see design as ontological, a definition also used by decolonial scholar Arturo Escobar in Designs for the Pluriverse. Ontology, put simply, is the philosophical study of being and existence. To name design as ontological suggests that design has being and acts toward the world. This imbues design with relational and performative potential independent of a designer’s intent. If graphic design were historicized as a kind of cultural activity with determining agency, rather than the output of important professionals, then professionally made design becomes one kind of design in history, not the criterion for inclusion and not the limit of possibility. In Meggs’ time, such an “ontological approach” to design history might have threatened the goal of achieving professionalization. Today, the historicizing of graphic design as collective, adaptive practices may be the transitionneeded to understand what graphic design will be in the future. Including more diverse designers means more vernacular design. “Vernacular” design—or at least trained designers mimicking it—has been having its moment for a while now. It comes under many guises (“ugly” design, “retro” design) and in bright colors, an unabashed mashup of multiple system fonts, ClipArt, and a general throwing of grids and caution to the wind.

You can count designer Jae Ee as a fan, but his work isn’t just born of trendiness. Rather, it’s an integral part of the visual culture he grew up with in Seoul. Both his parents are signboard designers, though neither was formally trained. “They would also use pre-made images, ClipArt, and free fonts,” says Ee. “They do almost exactly the same thing as me, but I’m the one who did a graphic design course.” Now based in New York, Ee works on the brand design team at design agency 2×4, but spends a lot of time working on personal projects for cultural clients, from band posters to promotional imagery for design talks. “I feel like there’s more freedom in designing for cultural clients,” says Ee. “I get to have more authority than with corporate clients.”

One of the strongest pieces for us in Ee’s portfolio is an image (at the top of this article) created to promote a talk by Amsterdam “performance design” studio The Rodina. When it lived

Top: Jae Ee’s work done for Dong Hak.

Bottom: The haribo Cult by Suzy Chan. The concept of “Gummy Bear = Happy” has been successfully left in people’s impressions under their years of advertising marketing. But too much candy isn’t good for health, especially those made of gelatine.

online, the surface graphics on the poster were coded to move, “unlike traditional posters in which everything becomes flattened,” Ee explains. What was both the challenge and the joy of the project was in the content itself. “The Rodina has a really specific, brave aesthetic,” says Ee. “Their graphic language feels raw, with 3D modeling and primary colors, so I used those, but put them through my own filter. I used the typefaces I like using, and my own way of typesetting, so that I would make a weird visual that had their feeling, but also my style.”

Suzy Chan is also using graphic design for personal expression. Suzy Chan’s work is often incredibly, undeniably cute. At first glance it’s a joyful explosion of color, vibrancy, smart use of type, and an intriguing marriage of Western advertising tropes; internet-age lurid palettes; and references to Chinese and Japanese culture.

Sweet things are a recurring motif, but as with anything sugary, after the initial saccharine hit something less cheerful follows. If we follow that metaphor, the tooth decay or energy crash that’s subtly imbued in Chan’s work comes out in the issues it confronts. For all its apparent playfulness, her projects carry a strong underlying political or social message. There are multiple layers at play, giving her work an element that’s not only instantly engaging, but thoroughly thought-provoking as well.

In short, her approach is a little like the spoonful of sugar that helps the viewer swallow problems like gambling culture, consumerism, Brexit, and the UK’s treatment of international students. Chan has completed her studies in graphic design at London College of Communications (LCC). From the age of 12, she grew up in Macau, an autonomous region on the south coast of China that was formerly governed by the Portuguese. Born in Guangzhou, China—a place that remains very traditional in comparison to the more Western-influenced Macau—Chan is used to big life changes, and has seen those changes informing her design practice. “Moving to Macau opened a door for me to see the world. There was so much more connection to Western culture, and I received a lot of new information from outside my country,” she says.Chan initially opted to move back to Guangzhou for her design degree at Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts (GAFA), but left after two years because she became frustrated at the school’s prioritization of commercial branding, logo design, and the technicalities of design. “They taught nothing about creativity or original thought,” says Chan.It was on the plane home from a visit with a friend

who was studying design in London that things seemed to click. She quit her course and applied to LCC.

“I realized I couldn’t just keep doing graphic design with no creative force, making work that didn’t look at the value design can have,” she says. “Here [in London] they’re quite focused on the students and the process— where your thoughts come from, and their originality. They give you a lot of time to experiment and find your own visual language.”

She adds, “It was so different to in China. At LCC they start by teaching you a lot of conceptual theory, talking about things like national identity and how people identify themselves by their country; I had always thought a lot about how women are positioned so differently in western and eastern cultures. Every issue like that has its own content and social connections, which informs a lot of my work now.” Chan’s focus on making playful, frequently performative design work is both a mode of personal expression and a hint that the world of commercial branding agencies isn’t really for her. “At LCC we had lots of opportunities to go to talks and get in touch with big firms like Pentagram, and they talk a lot about how they build systems for brands, and make logos and so on,” she says. “These places make great work, but it’s not the way that I want to use graphic design. That side of the industry makes things so neat and tidy, but real life isn’t like that—the world is messy.” Chan’s multifarious experiences make her work conceptually unique. It’s informed not only by where she’s lived and her views on feminism, societal equality and so on, but also by her experiences working in various jobs in London during her studies. These included manning tills at Asian supermarkets and restaurant work, where she met many migrant workers who’d risked their lives hiding in airplanes to travel, only to come to London and work grueling hours in low paid, cash-in-hand jobs. Still, Chan deftly manages to make her messages universally comprehensible. “For me, graphic design isn’t just about commercial or utilitarian communication, but a public platform,” she says. “I’ve learned that both society and the world are so big, and so many people live in ways we can’t really imagine. As a designer, you have to be responsible to not just for yourself but for society too.” As such, her graduation project, Casino City, looked at gambling in Macau, an industry seven times larger than even Las Vegas. While its casinos bring a considerable amount of money into Macau, gambling has concurrently rocketed property prices and means that the only viable careers for many people are in casinos.

As with most of her work, the project saw Chan re-appropriate the graphic

Plastic in the ocean by Suzy Chan, Using a sweet tone to tell a sad and serious issue in the ocean.

language we’d expect of casinos— gaudy colors, brash typography, and tasteless messaging—and combine it with ideas around traditional Chinese rituals, such as the burning of fake money when someone dies (it’s believed this brings them wealth in the afterlife.) While the project outcome includes posters and what we would expect of graphic design work, it’s also very much about “actions.” For an exhibition of the piece, Chan created and wore a costume bearing the Cantonese lettering one might find on a Macau casino, spelling out “welcome to make a killing in Macau.” It satirizes how such establishments use Chinese language, but in a way that borrows from the parlances of American or European speech. “It aims to highlight the ridiculousness of the whole thing; the way these casinos seem to be building a sort of Disney-like culture, but in a way, they’re doing something terrible.”

A recurring theme in Chan’s work is this notion of subversion and humor in relation to the idea of religion and spirituality. In The Haribo Cult project, a gummy bear becomes a god, transcending his wobbly, neon little frame and seeing him elevated into a deity. “Things like Haribo have this messaging that, ‘Oh, it’s for everyone! Kids and grownups!’ They’re selling it as an image of happiness, or childhood. It’s like brainwashing, and

to me that’s the same with religion: they build a world, and ask you to believe that it’s a positive choice to obey what they say. I wanted the project to be an ironic expression of that,” says Chan. The performative element of Chan’s practice reminds us of the work of The Rodina (it turns out they’re a huge influence, and Chan recently visited the studio in Amsterdam to ask for advice on her post-graduation path). For The Haribo Cult, she created an actual shrine to the gummy god, replete with bespoke “religious” robes and fabric posters hung between two temple-like physical pillars, each with a little bear sitting proudly on top: “It wasn’t enough for me to use a poster or motion graphics,” she says. “I became an actual member of the Haribo Cult, and did these actions using candy to pray, all these ridiculous things.”

Chan’s site design is a very Net Art-esque joy to behold—it’s all about gradients and emojis—but also has an unusual added extra in the Backstage section, which reveals the processes and briefs that went into her final pieces. While her poster work often looks distinctly digital, it’s here that we discover the multifaceted approach she takes to graphic design: her work evolves from very physical beginnings.

What might look like a CG render of a strange sea creature, for instance (part of the Plastic in the Ocean project), began life as a clay model; and she often builds up layers of images and colors using paper cuts, not just pixels. For the Haribo Cult, Chan melted gelatinous sweets to form strangely pretty little globules, and created the pillars for the shrine from hand-cut foam blocks. This way of working is as much practical as conceptual. “With the Plastic Ocean project I’d never used 3D software before, so I wanted to actually build an object to understand how it might work. When I create with my hands first, I can feel around how the object can form.” She also reveals her mood boards and photographs displaying her influences, including snaps of vibrant fruit and veg that were later brought to life in the

Mutant Fruit project. This takes the form of a fake advert, which delineates her discovery that in the UK, much of the delicious-looking, weirdly large, “perfect” produce on sale often has “no taste at all.” She takes this notion of perfect in appearance, disappointing in taste, and uses a riot of color and type to bring “an extreme tone,” she says, to “express the irony of this kind of artificial transformation” of what should really be “natural” foods. Chan describes this approach as “hacking” the existing design language of food and store ads, but “using words and images to embed a third meaning into the content.” The action-based, outwardly social imperatives of her work—and the way Chan often appears in them herself, alongside the more traditional graphic outcomes—seem in many respects to draw as much from the world of fine art as graphic design. So where does she draw the line? “At school in China, the answer was simply that graphic design is helping people solve a problem, but art is self-expression,” she says. “But since I’ve been encouraged to explore my own views and take graphic design into another level, I realized the boundary between graphic design and art isn’t always so obvious. With graphic design, you need to develop a new language to grab someone’s attention. Art and design have a very close relationship with each other and inform each other’s direction. They’re really not so different.

We Are Designers And We Own Our Design

When Jack Roberts started attending Parsons School of Design in the late 1990s, the expected post-graduation path was pretty straight-and-narrow. The internet was nascent, the term “design thinking” had yet to penetrate the glass doors of the C-suite. Companies hired graphic designers to design identities, marketing campaigns, and book covers. “If you were studying design, you were going into a design studio class and hoping to end up on the factory floor of Pentagram,” says Roberts.

Today, tell someone you’re going into design and they’ll probably ask you to be more specific. Do you mean branding? Digital design? The design of systems, behavior, experiences? Roberts now teaches at Parsons on subjects that likely wouldn’t have registered when he was a student there: strategic design, design thinking, creative management, the “storytelling of design.” He teaches them in summer school classes and weekend workshops offered by the college, to incoming students, practitioners, and a range of professionals, some of whom work in other fields but find design applicable to their work.

As technologies change and design principles seep into other industries, what we think of as “design” has undoubtedly broadened over the past couple of decades. In turn, art schools and traditional four-year design programs are feeling the need to provide more specialized offerings and to reach more people. Adding to the pressure are new unaccredited programs, coding bootcamps, and intensive workshops that can teach a highly specified skill quickly, and for cheaper. While they are far from replacing art colleges or universities, alternate education models are pushing elite design programs in new and interesting directions.

According to the 2019 Design Census, the majority of designers working today have a Bachelor’s degree (32%). Seventeen percent said they’ve engaged in online learning and 10% have taken workshops or programs, while only 6% have Master’s degrees, and 0.1% have received Doctorate degrees (participants could pick multiple options). Most surprising: More people ticked the boxes for online classes or workshops than for specialized art schools. In design, online learning and alternate programs come in a range of different forms and

According to the 2019 Design Census, the majority of designers working today have a Bachelor’s degree (32%)

levels of intensity, from online tutorials and weekend workshops to year-long certificate programs. The largest examples are well-funded startups like General Assembly and the Flatiron School, where you can take intensive, multi-month coding, UX/UI, and data science courses for around $15,000. There are also more local options, like the Austin Center for Design in Austin, Texas, which offers a one-year intensive program in interaction design focused on how design can “change human behavior and improve the world,” for $18,000. Its graduates have gone on to work for Argo Design, Dell, Frog Design, and IBM. Seth Johnson, IBM’s program director of designer practices and community, says the design program has hired graduates of both General Assembly and Austin Center for Design (IBM has a large office in Austin), as well as from community colleges and other nontraditional programs. “We actually seek them out and acknowledge that they are just as primed to start their careers as designers at IBM as students who went to a more traditional four-year program,” he says. IBM doesn’t require job applicants to have a Bachelor’s degree, in part, Johnson says, because the company simply has too many positions to fill (IBM has added more than 2,500 user experience designers in the past several years). Finding the best—and finding enough—design talent requires that the company look beyond traditional pipelines.

Johnson also points to diversity as a key reason they don’t require that employees have a degree. “We want to make sure that our design teams are not all staffed with people who have come from the same socioeconomic background,” he says. This means opening them up to people who might not be able to afford the tuition for a four-year undergraduate degree (in the U.S., public universities cost an average of $20,000 a year and private schools cost an average $45,000 a year). The most important thing, Johnson says, is not the applicant’s educational background, but the work in their

portfolio. This hiring approach is a growing trend in software engineering, where prospective employees are often asked to show their code in Github. But in the design industry, requiring a degree is still common, says Lee-Sean Huang, AIGA’s design education manager and cofounder of creative consultancy Foossa. That’s especially the case when it comes to big agencies and strategy companies like McKinsey, where coming from a prestigious school is part of the culture. For smaller studios that lack the resources of a company like IBM, it’s easier to hire through their own professional and social circles. But Huang says he sees that shifting in tech environments, where the tools and trends cycle out quickly. Hiring managers are becoming more savvy about what prospective employees need to know coming in, and what tools they can learn on the job.

At this point, comparing online learning and alternate programs to four-year undergraduate programs can feel a bit like comparing apples to oranges. They’re distinct experiences, and many people do both. Programs like Flatiron School and General Assembly are popular with people who want to change careers or learn a new skill for professional development. Some already have degrees, design or otherwise, or plan to get them. But where does that leave design degree programs, if prospective students are able to learn the tools and gain specific skills for the workforce elsewhere? How are they responding to this new crop of hyper-specialized nontraditional education?

One the one hand, this question is just one aspect of a larger challenge around specialization that design degree programs face. Incoming college students today have a higher level of exposure to design than in the past—they grew up with Instagram and the internet, and many already know their way around the Adobe suite. “People used to come to design schools to learn how to use design tools, and that’s not the case

any more,” Roberts says. “They’re coming to design schools to learn what to do with those design tools in the world.”

John Caserta, an associate professor at Rhode Island School of Design, echoes that sentiment. “So many of our incoming undergraduate students have been feeding off design for half their lives,” he says. “They come to school already with strong opinions about design and what they want to learn.” At RISD, this sense of early design literacy has led the design program to expand elective options to include more classes in specialized skills like UX design, software development, interaction design, and form-making. They’ve also added to the curriculum four-week-long workshops that meet once a week to learn things like Risograph printing, calligraphy, or digital design.

It’s also important to the RISD faculty that incoming students take a foundational year and a half, where they’re exposed to different kinds of design and gain a more expansive understanding of the field, before they go straight into a specialized path. “A four-year undergraduate degree is a significant commitment, financially and timewise, but there’s so much that comes along with that in terms of community and finding yourself,” says Caserta. Caserta sees the intensive workshops and bootcamps like Flatiron School being used more in a post-baccalaureate way, but colleges also realize that online learning and other alternate modes are flexible, affordable, and thus more accessible to more people— and they’re taking note. Caserta says colleges can be better at harnessing the medium of the internet, taking advantage of video or sophisticated chat technology to offer classes online that are the same caliber as those on campus. CalArts has been doing this with its “Open Learning” initiative, which offers free, no-credit online courses to the broader public, in partnership with Coursera and Kadenze. The courses range from typography to digital arts to game design. “There’s no reason why there

OOMK (one of my kind) is an art publishing collective run by Sofia Niazi, Rose Nordin and Heiba Lamara.

can’t be a pallet of offerings from established schools that look and act more like what you’re seeing in that kind of niche space,” says Caserta.

At Parsons, the summer school courses and workshops that Roberts teaches are part of an effort to diversify their offerings and reach people beyond those getting a four-year degree. This includes business students, for example, who see design thinking as a skill that can strengthen their careers, as well as people who want to go into design, but don’t know what kind. It also includes those for whom traditional design education is too steep a price to pay. While Parsons’ summer school classes cost between $7,000 and $10,000, and the workshops between $500 and $2,500—a high barrier to entry for many—Parsons offers full scholarships to these programs to people from low-income and non-traditional backgrounds.

“College shouldn’t be the only way to start doing design, because it’s potentially a very egalitarian discipline,” says Caserta. A clear benefit to more nontraditional design programs entering the educational space is that there are more options, which opens design to more people. Whether they’ll lessen people’s appetite for paying tuition for degree programs is yet to fully be seen. But they’re awakening colleges to expand their offerings and meet students where they are. And as design both broadens and specializes, the more diversity in terms of backgrounds, modes of thought, and skill, the better.

Since more and more people are becoming designers, and everyone has a direction they are interested in, then why don’t we build a community that belongs to them? Where should designers find their partners and learn the skills and techniques they are interested in?

Surrounded by biryani restaurants and betting shops in the North East London borough of Newham sits a quaint terracotta-colored building. A library in a former life, the building was transformed in recent years into a Risograph print studio. Walking into Rabbits Road Press (RRP) on a Wednesday afternoon is like happening upon a secret party: friends collage letters together on tables, art students design prints, and siblings help one another lay their work onto the printer beds. Always standing nearby are Sofia Niazi, Rose Nordin, and Heiba Lamara, the co-creators of publishing collective One of My Kind (OOMK), and the founders of this space. Their open access sessions offer the community a chance to learn Risograph printing for free, and they’re specially designed to make the press as accessible as possible.

Are you one of my kind? asks Conor Oberst, frontman of indie band Bright Eyes, in a 2012 song written about feeling distanced from the people in his hometown of Omaha, Nebraska. The song might appear to be a surprising choice of inspiration for the title of an independent publication created by a group of young Muslim women, but then it shouldn’t be. The questions that London-based collective One Of My Kind (aka OOMK) explore are those of identity and belonging—issues that are experienced by everyone regardless of whether they grew up defining themselves based on the music they listen to, the hobbies they enjoy, or the religion they practice.

At its core, OOMK is Sofia Niazi, Rose Nordin, and Heiba Lamara, three women from London who produce a highly visual, hand-crafted biannual zine under the same name. (Collective member Fatuma Khaireh is also pictured above.) Although its three founding members are Muslim and the publication looks to be particularly supportive of Muslim women, it is by no means exclusive. Established in 2013 and with content that “pivots on the imagination, creativity and spirituality of women,” OOMK’s four issues have included a diverse raft of contributors, with each zine centered on a different creative theme (to date: ‘Fabric,’ ‘Print,’ ‘Drawing,’ and ‘Internet’). In recent years, OOMK undertook a residency at the central London artists’ workspace Somerset House Studios, where it curated the zine fair PROCESS!, and has worked with institutes including London College of Fashion, Kingston University, and the Peabody Foundation. Niazi also co-curates DIY Cultures, an annual independent publishing fair in the UK, focused on marginalized voices and histories.

OOMK plays an active role part in London’s small-press publishing community: as well as producing the printed zine and running a collective, they host regular creative events in the city, such as DIY Cultures, an annual day-long festival of zines,comics, talks, animation, poetry and workshops “in the spirit of independence, autonomy and alternatives.” Through their work, OOMK encourages representations of Muslim women that challenge the one-dimensional depictions of us as the silent victims of a draconian religion. At a time when the climate of Islamophobia initially generated by 9/11 is becoming an ever more terrifying problem both in the U.K. and globally, navigating life as a young Muslim can feel like an onslaught of stereotypes, abuse, and alienation. Against this backdrop, a platform for us to express and define ourselves on our own terms feels more important than ever.

In a city becoming increasingly inaccessible, SSHH offers an affordable alternative that privileges community and open dialogue for designers.

If you’re wandering around in the East Village in New York City and your phone picks up a wifi signal called Jennifer Aniston, you know you’ve reached SSHH, the design studio and creative event space founded by graphic designer Bráulio Amado and his partner, Nick Schiarizzi. The walls are lined with items for sale, like a Ouija board set in Comic Sans, a USB stick with student work from the School for Poetic Computation (the product description reads, “Maybe it’s a virus, maybe not!”), undeveloped film shot by “actual photographers,” and an “ancient wellness talisman” made of a large resin cube embedded with a picture of Meg Ryan, hanging from a gold chain. By day it’s Amado’s work space, and by night it hosts all manner of events, from readings and workshops to language classes (French, Arabic, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, and Portuguese), as well as launch parties for unusual products. It’s not typical for an independent designer to pay pricey East Village storefront rent for their own studio space, but then again nothing about Amado and Schiarizzi’s plans for SSHH are typical. They’ve said that New York City would be better if it were “1,000 times weirder,” and SSHH is their solution.

While New York is large enough to house pockets of fresh, creative

Left: One of the examples of SSHH poster

Right: By day, SSHH is Amado’s work space, and by night it hosts all manner of events, from readings and workshops to language classes, as well as launch parties for unusual products.

energy and areas that are more affordable, Schiarizzi notes that “the surge in luxury developments—all the glass condos and SoulCycles— is reaching an insane cartoon level, with all these villainous, super skinny towers popping up in Midtown and that sore-thumb glass cheesegrater-looking building by the Manhattan Bridge.” In a city that’s becoming increasingly inaccessible, SSHH offers an affordable alternative that privileges community and open dialogue. “We’ve all become so obsessed with making rent and paying the bills that we have no time to explore and be weird and do something that isn’t specifically output-oriented.” When the private studio transitions into a public space at the end of every day, one of the many classes you can take is the regularly-occurring Gay Graphic Design Workshop, which promises “fun tips to come out of the closet at your design studio,” as well as topics of conversation such as: sex, PrEP, typefaces, BBS, bottoming, STDs, kerning, the 2014 La Roux album that everyone tends to ignore, and whether Michael Bierut is kind of hot. You will also make some graphic design. Led by Amado and Ben Tousley, an art director and graphic designer, the class starts with a quick gay design origin story, of sorts. Amado shares how he came out at his job at Bloomberg Business Week,

where he says he wanted to eroticize his work and make his “editorial spreads more gay.” They’re both quick to acknowledge that BBW was quite an inclusive environment at the time, which isn’t the case for many designers who feel closeted at work. That’s one reason Amado and Tousley say they’re always trying to up their “gay game” when it comes to their graphic design work. They figure the more visibility of work by gay designers, the better. Beyond working with gay musicians— Amado has worked with Frank Ocean, Roisin Murphy, and Robyn, and Tousley with Nico Muhly and Grizzly Bear (frontman Ed Droste is gay)—Amado (along with Schiarizzi and two friends) recently started a gay travel project called For Bottom, and Tousley started publication called Buds about queer people that smoke weed.

Playing around with Photoshop might be one thing that brought these people together, but the main thing is the community that SSHH is building. “How many big shot designers like Bráulio would invite their participants to get drinks and hang out after?” an attendee told me the next day. “There was no sense of a networking script because I think they really care about getting to know people in order to build a community that extends beyond design. To me, this creates a more accessible environment for designers and artists across a broader spectrum.” If SSHH had been around 20 or 30 years ago, it would have been just another one of NYC’s weird, welcoming spaces. But as developers continue to swallow up more and more creative pockets in the city’s never-ending land grab, it stands apart as a haven for designers and artists who feel left out of the “new” New York City, and it sends a bat signal to other likeminded folks to start similar ventures—not for profit and not for productive output, but just for fun.

In the spring of 2017, Eva Gonçalves had just returned to Berlin from North Carolina, where she was attending a school-slash-residency program called School of the Alternative. The

Ellipsis is an experimental school that takes place in the broader context of a temporary community.

program is housed on the original campus of Black Mountain College, the experimental school famous as much for its influence on art education as for its faculty and students, which included Anni and Josef Albers, Ruth Asawa, Buckminster Fuller, Cy Twombly, and Robert Rauschenberg. Much like its predecessor, the new Black Mountain School blurred the lines between faculty and student with shared accommodations, student-designed curriculums, and teachers attending classes.

It was the closest to a truly non-hierarchical environment that Gonçalves had experienced, but she still thought it could have gone further. “I felt like every participant could have also been a teacher,” says Goncalves. “I wanted to learn something from every person attending.” Back in Berlin, Gonçalves decided to start her own summer school. The first session of Ellipsis Open School, held in the summer of 2017, was made up largely of friends and people in her network of designers and illustrators. Recently, Ellipsis finished up its third year, with eleven participants from six countries all living together in a house in the South of Portugal for ten days. Though still heavy on designers and illustrators, participants have also included architects, writers, urban planners, and activists, each of whom comes prepared with a class or other

activity. In effect, every person learning is also teaching, with no traditional faculty-student divide. “I think we can really learn a lot from each other horizontally, sitting at the same table as equals, sharing what we know,” says Gonçalves.

Like most of the people who have attended Ellipsis so far, Gonçalves has a university degree, but believes education isn’t something that should stop at a certain age. She also feels that there’s a lot of information that can’t be accessed, or that slips through the cracks, when there’s a degree of separation between those teaching and those learning. But core to her decision to start Ellipsis was also the simple fact that many of her friends, particularly those who are also designers, work freelance, and spend much of their working day alone. “[Ellipsis] is a way of building community, meeting people, and countering some of the isolation that it sometimes feels we’re locked into because of what we do for work,” she says.

This year, the group held workshops in writing poetry, making sourdough bread, and embroidery. Participants wrote a group manifesto to guide their time together, and went on a silent walk in the countryside surrounding their shared house. They made a community quilt, which they then used for picnics and star-gazing at night. In a past year, someone put on a wood making workshop, which has since inspired Gonçalves to take up furniture making. The point, she says, isn’t specialization or really honing a skill or developing a course of study—there are other venues and institutions for that. By allowing for an informal structure and diversity of disciplines, Ellipsis wants to be a place for sharing knowledge and being exposed to other areas of study. Like any type of self-guided learning, gaining new skills and knowledge inevitably feeds back into your own work, not to mention makes you a better, more rounded, and in many cases, more empathetic person.

Some images of Ellipsis Open School. For 10 days, participants live together sharing day-to-day tasks in parallel to teaching workshops and organising lectures.