Ethical aesthetics
By Charlotte & Peter Fiell. Excerpt from the book Contemporary Graphic Design
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To the same extent popular websites such as YouTube, a video-sharing portal which allows easy-to-access selfbroadcasting, have fundamentally changed the nature of user participation by offering media exposure on the audience's own terms. In some ways this digital ascendancy has eroded the professional graphic designer's status-now everyone with access to a personal computer thinks he or she is a design maestro, regardless of talent. After all, many of the younger generation of graphic designers working today grew up with computers and have a detailed understanding of programming. Fundamentally, they are technophiles rather than technophobes. Rather than being intimidated by technology, they are prepared to experiment with and subvert it. Indeed, designers have frequently cracked commercial software codes so as to adapt it to their own requirements. For example, the Scriptographer plugin (designed in 2001 by Jürg Lehni) is a wayward child of the ubiquitous Adobe Illustrator(tm), and uses JavaScript to extend the original software's functionality allowing, according to its website, "the creation of mouse controlled drawing-tools, effects that modify existing graphics and scripts that create new ones". Many of Scriptographer's tools are designed to generate visual complexity-Tree script sprouts seemingly random branches; Fiddlehead script grows fern-like tendrils; Tile Tool script has an engaging block-like quality; Faust script has a topographical 3-D quality; and (our personal favorite) Stroke-Raster script translates the pixel value of an image into diagonal lines of varying thickness.
For many of the designers included in this publication, graphic design is not simply a job but a way of life and a source of identity
This type of advanced software has led to a strong reemergence of ornamental complexity within graphic design, and a post-modern delight in "more" rather than "less". In the past, hard-line Modernists believed ornament itself was linked to immorality. In his 1908 design manifesto Ornament and Crime, Adolf Loos famously asserted that, "the evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament". This current renaissance of the decorative rejects such strictures for an exuberant and playful naivety. In part, this can be seen as an attempt to humanize communications, and to re-connect the audience with the message in an increasingly atomized and
coldly corporate world.
Page [1] [2] [3] [4]
Page [1] [2] [3] [4]
To the same extent popular websites such as YouTube, a video-sharing portal which allows easy-to-access selfbroadcasting, have fundamentally changed the nature of user participation by offering media exposure on the audience's own terms. In some ways this digital ascendancy has eroded the professional graphic designer's status-now everyone with access to a personal computer thinks he or she is a design maestro, regardless of talent. After all, many of the younger generation of graphic designers working today grew up with computers and have a detailed understanding of programming. Fundamentally, they are technophiles rather than technophobes. Rather than being intimidated by technology, they are prepared to experiment with and subvert it. Indeed, designers have frequently cracked commercial software codes so as to adapt it to their own requirements. For example, the Scriptographer plugin (designed in 2001 by Jürg Lehni) is a wayward child of the ubiquitous Adobe Illustrator(tm), and uses JavaScript to extend the original software's functionality allowing, according to its website, "the creation of mouse controlled drawing-tools, effects that modify existing graphics and scripts that create new ones". Many of Scriptographer's tools are designed to generate visual complexity-Tree script sprouts seemingly random branches; Fiddlehead script grows fern-like tendrils; Tile Tool script has an engaging block-like quality; Faust script has a topographical 3-D quality; and (our personal favorite) Stroke-Raster script translates the pixel value of an image into diagonal lines of varying thickness.
For many of the designers included in this publication, graphic design is not simply a job but a way of life and a source of identity
This type of advanced software has led to a strong reemergence of ornamental complexity within graphic design, and a post-modern delight in "more" rather than "less". In the past, hard-line Modernists believed ornament itself was linked to immorality. In his 1908 design manifesto Ornament and Crime, Adolf Loos famously asserted that, "the evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament". This current renaissance of the decorative rejects such strictures for an exuberant and playful naivety. In part, this can be seen as an attempt to humanize communications, and to re-connect the audience with the message in an increasingly atomized and
coldly corporate world.
Page [1] [2] [3] [4]
Contemporary Graphic Design
Hardcover, 19.6 x 24.9 cm (7.7 x 9.8 in.), 560 pages
$ 39.99
$ 39.99
Packing a powerful visual punch: contemporary avant-garde graphic design
Peter Saville/Howard Wakefield, Project: "Loop", fabric hang tag, 2006. Client: Kvadrat