Design Issues IIInteractive Graphic Design-To serve youth or art?By Cheryl StephensA style of graphic design which prevails in recent advertising (See endnotes) has moved onto the editorial pages of certain "lifestyle" magazines. This design style has been defended, or promoted, as suited to the youth audience when actually it is a style appropriate to attract and entertain an audience of artists and the cultural community. It is a style that rejects the modernist notion that form should serve function in communication and instead promotes artistic form as the greater value. Describing the StyleFor want of a better name, this style will be called "interactive two-dimensional design" (interactive 2D design). Interactive 2D design adopts the some of the conventions of layered computer graphics but within the restrictions of the two-dimensional, static medium of paper. Its main textual feature is its requirement that the reader expend energy to construct the words from the scattered or mismatched letters and collate sentences from random words to establish the basic structure of the writing. Then the reader must begin the process of interpreting, decoding, or even encoding meaning. I believe this interactive 2D design sacrifices legibility for artistic expression, which is an unjustifiable trade-off for communicators. Whether this is a desirable exchange is an issue hotly discussed in design circles: "...especially when one considers the current 'postmodernist' climate within graphic design discourse where not only the relevance of legibility research, but even the importance of legibility per se, is questioned or even denied. 'Legibility' is surely not a fashionable term -- evocative communication towards a small specific audience allowing 'artistic self expression' is the explicit agenda of many graphic designers today."(See endnotes) Categorizing the styleThere are those who claim that interactive 2D design style falls within the ambit of the "postmodern" developments in culture and art: "During the last few years especially, legibility research, or more precisely the notion of legibility, has come under attack from what might be called post-modern, anti-modern or even neo avant-garde modernist positions, exposed in influential graphic design magazines like Éigré ¡nd Eye." (Lund 94) The style is consistent, from a design perspective, with the development of the literary theory that "the author is dead" and the graphic designers' "make the reader work" philosophy. The notion seems to be that if the reader is sufficiently interested, he or she will make the effort to reconstruct the physical components of the message in order to interpret its relevancy and meaning in their own lives. Michel de Boer said of his own work: "This is at the centre of the studio's philosophy -- that design should not be too easy, either to do or to see. The receiver of the message should be made to work, forcing them to think about what they see. 3 I suggest that there are better ways to engage the reader in the text. Maureen MacKenzie, a Senior Research Associate at the Communications Research Institute of Australia, attempts to justify the style by placing its parentage in postmodernism: "Post-modern and constructionist theory allow us to understand that meaning can only be generated when the reader engages with the printed words. We now understand that meaning and thus communication, is brought into being by the interactive relationship between the reader and the document." 4 Post-modernism is manifested in the sphere of art and culture as the unfettered expression of the social outlook of the petite-bourgeoisie. It rejects science and its application to social affairs. Its salient features are promotion of a lack of order or organization and opposition to communal objectives and social purpose. It is anarchic, individualist, and claims to be value-free. Post-modernism cannibalizes and recycles everything old to produce the "new" which is merely recycled. In art and graphic design, the habits of this approach involve removing a central, organizing theme, giving equal prominence to disparate elements, and bringing the background to the foreground. 5 Tracing the history of the styleInteractive 2D design may be postmodern in philosophy, but it is not new. The implicit claim is that this style evokes or arises from the post-modern angst and technological advancement of Generation X. Yet other social strata in earlier times have promoted this style and different explanations of its origins were offered. Discussing graphic design, Ann Ferebee uncovers the history of this style: "Kokoschka, Kirchner and other members of Die Breucke and Der Blaue Reiter, the original Expressionist movements, established a tradition Expressionist graphic design in the first dozen years of the 20th century. In this tradition designers manipulated layouts to enhance their emotional intensity. It was carried forward in the Dadaist magazine, Merz (1923-1932), in which designers placed type in a seemingly irrational way for startling effect. Kurt Schwitters and Hans Richter, who inserted type as a decorative device in Dadaist collages, also advanced Expressionist graphics. To a lesser degree, Surrealism, in which juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated objects is used to suggest the irrationality of the unconscious mind, influenced poster design from the late 1930's until the early 1950's." The Expressionists are said to have found their inspiration in the new scientific discoveries of Freud in psychology and Darwin in biology. Later they were described as "naturalists" for finding their inspiration in the primitive and irrational. Yet the key elements of their approach accord with the postmodern justification for interactive 2D design: manipulating layouts to enhance their emotional intensity, placing type in a seemingly irrational way for startling effect, use type as a decorative device, juxtaposing seemingly unrelated objects to suggest the irrationality of the unconscious mind. Their approach to graphic art was soon followed by typographers, where its practitioners were called "Futurists": "Although Futurists held different views from the expressionists, their 'free typography' was Expressionist in intent and appearance. Growing out of Marinetti's 'free-word' poetry, in which meaning was determined by special relationships between words rather than by conventional syntax, 'free typography' was introduced in the pages of the Futurist periodical, Lacerba (1913-1914). It destroyed the conventional symmetry of the printed page as it had been laid out since the invention of movable type. The editors of Lacerba, Giovanni Papini and Ardengo Soffici, placed type according to emphasis and let pictures and headlines fall at random. They ignored the conventions of using similar type faces on the same page and of placing printing so that it could run only from left to right." 6 The Expressionist and Futurist styles were the opposite of the Cubists who "encouraged order, geometric regularity and abstraction in graphic design.... Two extensions of Cubism--de Stijl and Constructivism--were the primary influence on Functionalist typography and poster design." (Ferebee, 107) The modernist, Bauhaus typographic style was influenced by these latter trends. Sometimes described as minimalist, the work of de Stijl and Bauhaus stylists was consolidated in Die Neue Typographie (1928) by Jan Erick Tschichold. (Ferebee 110) Katherine McCoy, a historian of graphic design, says: "Modernism, especially at the Bauhaus, was a response to the economies of scale and standardization in the new mass societies. This functionalist design philosophy of 'form follows function' is based on standardized processes, modular systems, industrial materials and a machine aesthetic of minimalist form. Universal design solutions were sought to solve universal needs across cultures." 7 The Modernists looked for solutions to communications problems. They sought methods to enhance effective communication. Justin Vood Good and Peter Good are critical of modernism in "Is Functionalism Functional?" where they criticize the modernist striving for "clarity and purity", yet their interpretation does not detract from its attractiveness as a focused problem-solving methodology: "... Massimo Vignelli states that 'Modernism was never a style, but an attitude. This is often misunderstood by those designers who dwell on revivals of the form rather than the content of Modernism.'... Take for example, Jan Tschichold's early manifestos on functionalist typography where he asserts: In summary, I suggest the content of Modernism is to use design and typography to serve the function of communication in the most effective, efficient manner, while the content of Postmodern, interactive 2-D design is to challenge, enthrall, arouse, and entertain by expressing the personality of the artist. Finding a social basis for the styleVood Good and Good describe the ascendancy of modernist functionalism in the Germany of the 1920s and 1930s as the triumph of the "Cult of Utility over the Cult of Subjectivity". They discuss the social basis of this in pre-World War II Germany: "According to the principal theorists of modern and design theory, the economic stratification of society has created, on one hand, a small elitist class of bourgeois artists and intellectuals who spent their time indulging irresponsibly in their own vain subjectivity, titillating either themselves or their wealthy patrons and clients with superfluous decoration. On the other hand, there existed the vast proletariat, the people-- the Volk--which constituted the true essence of Germany; the essence which had been neglected and betrayed by the guardians of culture." (Vood Good 32) Adrian Forty discusses the need for design to be grounded in social circumstances. By implication acknowledging that targeted, lifestyle audiences may require special design approaches: "No design works unless it embodies ideas that are held in common by the people for whom the object is intended. To represent design purely as the creative acts of individuals as Nikolus Pevsner did in Pioneers of Modern Design, temporarily enhances the importance of designers, but ultimately only degrades design by severing it from its part in the workings of society.... Only exploring this process and by shifting our attention away from the person of the designer can we properly comprehend what design is, and appreciate how important it has been in representing to us the ideas and beliefs through which we assimilate and adjust to the material facts of everyday life." 9 Today, how does the use of I2DD design overlap or connect the advertising and the editorial pages of the magazine? What is the conceptual link? The desire of the advertisers to reach an audience interested in their products drives the industry and the creative and editorial decisions of magazine publishers. In the era when Western "democratic capitalism" was gloating over its contribution to the overthrow of governments in the former Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, while ignoring its role in the propping up of undemocratic regimes in other parts of the world, the postmodern culture of schizophrenia prevails. Keith White may have put his finger on it: "...as the ideology of the counterculture--chaos, revolution, and disorder--became the ideology of corporate America, as evidenced by the corporate antinomianism of management gurus like Tom (Thriving on Chaos) Peters, a major transformation in the public's image of the computer had to take place. Information technology would have to undergo a gigantic face-lift to be accepted in a business world increasingly fascinated with notions of chaos, revolution, and non-conformity. The famous TV commercial that introduced the Macintosh in 1984 as a conformity-smashing implement suggested the course. Wired simply picked up where the TV advertising left off." 10 Current application of the styleToday some scholars assert that this design is used to meet the expectations of a younger generation trained in computer graphical interfaces in video games, rock videos, and computer programs. With an overbroad brush, MacKenzie identifies the style with both youth culture and the "... style magazines pioneering deconstructionist typography, such as Émigré, The Face, Ray Gun and now Bikini began on the margins, but now occupy the mainstream of youth culture. What would have appeared unapproachable, meaningless clutter a decade ago is now a preferred leisure reading material for a particular youth subculture."(MacKenzie 1994) MacKenzie claims, "What our results suggest is that legibility is culturally learned and sub-culturally developed". (MacKenzie 1994). In this respect she confirms what has often been asserted -- that there are no universal rules for typography but that readers are most at ease with the style they are most familiar with. In an environment in which products must be target-marketed, then this is an important conclusion which should influence advertising design and editorial layouts.11 On this point, Katherine McCoy is a prominent spokesperson as the 1995 president of the American Center for Design. She says, "One significant trend is toward specialized audiences, focused messages and eccentric design languages tailored to each audience's unique characteristics and culture. We are witnessing the end of one era of mass communications and the beginning of another: narrowcasting instead of broadcasting, subcultures instead of mass culture, and tailored products instead of mass production.... "Specialized audiences often communicate in vernacular languages or specialized jargon. Rhetorical styles vary radically from low key to 'in your face,' from colloquial to formal. This is true for visual-style languages and symbolic visual codes, as well." (McCoy 148) Will editors and advertisers have to use this style and postmodern philosophy to tailor information for youth? If this style meets the needs of advertisers and communicators who target the young adult population, then we should see evidence of this in magazines aimed consciously at youth. Yet, a sampling of magazines that do use this design style will not support this assertion. From discussions in the design literature, it seems the best known examples of the application of this style to both editorial and advertising copy are Bikini, Eye, Émigré, and Wired, which are not aimed at youth but a more select target audience -- the cultural community of artists, writers and intellectuals. According to McCoy, Émigré's audience is graphic designers themselves: "One specialized audience has always been other graphic designers--design for designers. Paper company promotions and, more recently, cutting-edge magazines such as Émigré have provided graphic designers with opportunities for idiosyncratic graphic expressions." (McCoy 149) Bikini, Eye, Émigré, and others are aimed at a cultural community which seeks to express his own artistic inclinations. I consider it a problem when they then try to impose those tastes on wider audiences when they perform their role as editors, artists, or creative directors. Discussing the arrogance of artists who impose their personal creativity on readers, John Bielenberg says: "Just like an addict creates a lust for drugs or alcohol, the designer develops a craving for the new, the visually compelling and the beautiful. The image becomes an end in itself. The graphic language sometimes takes a dominant role over the message being communicated.... graphic designers have developed a hyperliterate visual sense and a highly refined appreciation for the craft of graphic design. I call it the intoxication of craft. ... Conflict often exists when you combine the intoxication of craft, exposure to and interest in cutting-edge design with the engineering of a client-driven message to a client-defined audience." 12 I believe that the interactive 2D design style is precisely the expression of this devotion to self-expression for the artists and their desire to show-off for each other. It does not arise from a desire to meet the expectations of younger audiences -- or if it does it shows a failure to recognize the different tastes, aesthetics and visual literacy of the artistic community and the general population of young people. Wired Magazine - An ExampleMedia commentators recognize Wired's design style as representative of this design trend adopted by "hip" magazines, comparing it's creative design to another group of artistic community lifestyle magazines -- Raygun, Sassy, and Inside Edge.(White 79) There is no evidence that Wired is youth-oriented, nor is it the magazine of choice of computer experts, rather it is a business-oriented publication popularizing trends within a particular industry: "In fact, according to Advertising Age, some 84 percent of Wired readers are managerial professionals with median household income of well over $80,000. They may be revolutionaries, but they also happen to be the legions of M.B.A.'s graduating each year from business schools around the country, where Wired is a must-read."(White 77) Wired's creative editor doesn't appeal to the either the "techie" or youth market for justification of his editorial design. He has said, "I sometimes have to sacrifice readability when I'm pushing the edge of the envelope on design". (White 77) Taking a position in the magazine industry on the basis of style and image is more important than providing readable information on the topic. If we accept that the magazine is there to provide a vehicle for the advertisers, then this need come as no surprise. This brings us back to and explains the free play given to the arrogant attitude of designers who see themselves as artists rather than as information designers. Paul Stiff, in "Structuralists, stylists, and forgotten readers", says: "...it seems to me that typographers are weakest when most explicitly looking for style -- when style is foregrounded and laid on thick. Foregrounding occurs not only where you'd expect it, in 'picture-making' typography, but even in journals in which words matter."13 What does the young adult market demand?There are a number of magazines which do target the youth market -- if not specifically, the Generation X segment. These include Details, Swing, Spy. These particular magazines do not use the interactive 2D design style in editorial text. They infrequently or sparingly use it in artistic displays. The only other evidence of the style in their pages is in some of the display advertisements. Their editorial content is delivered in the modernist style -- or functionally, as I would prefer to put it. Readers will select for purchase and loyalty those magazines which provide them with lifestyle connections: advice, guidelines, examples, and a community of tastes. This can even be a self-conscious choice. One young Vancouverite, asked about his choice of magazines, indicated he reads "lifestyle magazines" like ID and Cameo which address the "cultural underground". (These use the interactive 2D design style.) He told the interviewer, "I don't actually read [Cameo]. I buy it because it has ads for lots of cool stuff. My friends and I buy one and we share it. I just look at the pictures to get an idea of what's cool.."14 Those, like Maureen MacKenzie, who mistakenly categorize this as a youth-oriented design style are quick to assert a generational rather than cultural bias to the opposition to the style: "But while younger readers cope well with, and even seem to enjoy the interaction with new fragmented typography, older generations of readers, conditioned to static simplicity of traditional printed pages of continuous text, are disinclined to make the necessary effort to reconstruct a text. In informal exploratory research, older readers dismisses (sic) the multiple, fragmented, disrupted texts of the new typography as 'illegible' and 'meaningless.'"(MacKenzie 1994) Even MacKenzie has to admit that there is no research to support the conclusion that youth prefer this typographic and design style. The best MacKenzie can offer is this: "From personal observation and informal research with educators in secondary and tertiary institutions it appears likely that the 'TV generation' are developing different ways of reading and processing visual information to preceding generations.... To date, little research has been published discussing how teenagers are interacting with deconstructed printed texts. We do not yet understand whether the younger generation is developing new ways of constructing meaning from such texts, or indeed, whether they even do generate meaning."(MacKenzie 1994) Is interactive 2D design necessary to reach the general young adult market rather than the "cultural underground"? There isn't enough, if any, evidence to support this. There is merely the advertisers' belief that this design suits the Generation X lifestyle. Until research and evidence establish that young adults reading processes are so different, I will continue to consider this style a concomitant of the postmodernist artist's personal expression in the field of graphic design. The prior history of interactive 2d design style shows that it is not a product of the telecommunications age but of a social strata unconcerned with the needs of others. Endnotes
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©2000 Cheryl Stephens. All rights reserved.