What if We Are Not Graphic Designers but Something Entirely Different?
Plus we are on the brink of a new Futurism
Dear Designer:
In my last letter, I wrote about one troubling scenario I see for contemporary graphic designers. (Don’t worry, there are others.)
We have the tools of production — the knowledge and technical infrastructure to support our work: online resources, conferences, webinars and various trainings.
These may not always feel plentiful when building deep expertise in any given area of design (blackletter legibility, color blindness, airport signage), but they are there when you need them.
Take Medium’s Bootcamp, for example, which is a popular resource for designers. A few recent articles:
4 Ways to Increase Your Mobile User Lifetime Value
Essential Design Patterns for Crafting AI-Powered Products and Experiences
Streamlining Multi-Device Presentations in Figma Prototypes
Enhancing User Experiences Through Human-Centered Design Thinking in Narrative Environments
All of these are technical in nature and dive into the complex problem-solving that designers do every day. They are good in intent and content. And they cover important and mildly interesting subject matter.
What about the rest?
Yet, buried in Bootcamp’s collection is a single article on imposter syndrome — something I, and many designers I know, wrestle with every single day.
One article among dozens about an affliction that we designers — nee, artists — have been grappling with for over a century.
Working visual artists, or those who make art on a daily basis, are understood to have a complex relationship with the world. They need to modulate between the project of emotional and intellectual creation and a fickle contemporary art market that demands rigor, consistency and value.
Artists are socially received as complex human beings, constantly interrogating their individual relationships with the world.
It’s a gruelling climb as an artist, finding grants, galleries, and government support. I spent years doing just that in my 20s. There is an understanding among artists and the arts community that their work is emotional and psychic in nature.
In contrast with artists, working designers are fortunate in many ways. Our profession gives us access to an economic infrastructure that pays us to use our skills daily. We are actively in dialogue with others and with each other.
And yet.
Designers lack support systems or even the language for discussing design as an artistic methodology that is also deeply emotional or psychologically rich. While design associations (I see you AIGA, RGD, DesCan, SDGQ) do their best, we don’t have active social networks to talk about our work and the anxieties tied to it.
The pandemic scuttled many local design initiatives. And because many of us are dyed-in-the-wool introverts, we designers often don’t start, build or foster our own design communities.
As well, many of us entered this field for its radical potential to drive social change or make an impact through visual art-making. Meanwhile, most of us don’t get to do that kind of work daily. Instead, we’re asked to build interfaces and instances that support economic growth, not social impact.
Today, designers contend with:
Automation, AI, outsourcing, and job scarcity
Salary stagnation and the rise of template platforms (Canva, Shopify, Squarespace)
Increased speed-to-publish demands plus the persistence of tech-bro culture
Climate, social, and political crises, which are increasingly going to exacerbate one another over the coming years
As we navigate these pressures, we’re expected to retool constantly while producing emotionally powerful, convincing and confident designs. Without the psychic and emotional resources — or understanding by managers —we’re left creating work that is increasingly instrumental, depleting ourselves in the process, and eroding the value of design in an automating society.
This is the non-virtuous cycle for design that actually worries me most. We create templated work for a public that, overwhelmed by political and social turmoil, is inured to feeling unless it’s through increasingly violent video games and movies. Confused and anxious about their personal futures, we consume our culture, hunkering down and tuning out while disregarding the larger crises surrounding us.
Even if a given design or visual project is impactful, it gets washed away into the ether of anxiety and exhaustion and plenitude.
I’m trying to get my footing here. But if you’ll allow me, I think it boils down to this:
Designers are visual artists living in socially liminal spaces. Part technologists, part empaths, we seek shelter in a system that values our practical capacities but not our emotional or psychic ones. And the resources to support our lot are embarrassingly thin.
It’s a strange place to be. Would I trade it? Maybe. Maybe not. That’s the designer in me, figuring it out with you. Thank you for joining me.
Yours,
Image of the Week
In 1909, Italian poet and artist Filippo Tomasso Marinetti published the Manifesto del Futurismo, a fantastic and fantastically aggressive piece of early modernist literature (see excerpts below). Futurism held that the quaint and pretty past was no longer relevant — instead, speed, machismo, violence, youth and technology was the future. Out with weakness, in with strength. This might sound familiar if you’ve heard any recent preachings from our tech bro friends in Silicon Valley like Musk or Andreeson who have bought the ear of the orange man. Like Marinetti, they celebrate velocity, denigrate compassion, dismiss the environment and worship industry. The book cover by Marinetti above uses type to push forward a practical, powerful poem of the possible.
Quote of the Week
Manifesto of Futurism (excerpted)
We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness.
The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt.
Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.
We want to glorify war — the only cure for the world — militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.
We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.
We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt; the multi-colored and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals: the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their violent electric moons: the gluttonous railway stations devouring smoking serpents; factories suspended from the clouds by the thread of their smoke; bridges with the leap of gymnasts flung across the diabolic cutlery of sunny rivers: adventurous steamers sniffing the horizon; great-breasted locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous steel horses with long tubes for bridle, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds.
Credit: The Futurist Manifesto, F. T. Marinetti, 1909
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