In Praise Of The Pixel Pushers

Design by Hannah Ljung - Grafisk Utbildningsfonden - Uppsala Sweden

I first became aware of the significant importance of visual communication the day I helped banish all art on my college campus.

It was during my sophomore year of my undergraduate schooling, when, as a member of both the lesbian, gay, and bisexual student group, as well as the AIDS awareness student group, I assisted in the implementation of Visual AIDS‘ Day Without Art, in observance of World AIDS Day. Launched on the first day of December in 1989, the observance (since renamed “Day With(out) Art”) was intended to make the public aware that AIDS can touch everyone, and in order to inspire positive action, some 800 art and AIDS groups in the United States participated, shutting down museums, sending staff to volunteer at AIDS services, and sponsoring special exhibitions of work about AIDS. On my college’s campus, we raided the theatre department’s stash of black fabric, and covered nearly the entire campus with it, draping every sculpture, every art installation, and every painting (even the portraits that were displayed in the administration building of our college’s founder and of his wife, our school’s namesake) in the heavy black cloth.

On a campus such as ours, noted for its art and artists, it was a visually arresting display of how much a part of our daily lives art actually was; it was profoundly compelling, to see all of those expansive swatches of black fabric obfuscating the art that was all around us.

Years later, having graduated from college and fallen rather unexpectedly into a career of graphic design, the importance of visual communication was made abundantly clear to me once again, upon my first reading of what is still one of my most treasured essays on the practice of graphic design, by designer Jessica Helfand. Although excerpts from this essay appear in many places throughout this blog, it seems fitting to repeat them here, again, today, on the anniversary of the founding of Icograda, the International Council of Graphic Design Associations, and on the 15th annual observance of World Graphics Day.

Graphic design is everywhere, touching everything we do, everything we see, everything we buy: we see it on billboards and bibles, on taxi receipts and on websites, on birth certificates and on gift certificates, on the folded circulars tucked inside jars of aspirin and on the thick pages of children’s chubby board books.

Now, as a jaded designer who has practiced the craft of graphic design for nearly fifteen years, this passage may read like a no-brainer. Of course graphic design is everywhere, all around us, communicating its messages to us either explicitly or, if it is done very well, implicitly. However, as a designer who was relatively new to his field when he first read this essay, its message was one of awesome importance; it is not every day that one realizes what a profoundly privileged place one inhabits, when their career is entirely about the effective communication of messages, both textually and visually.

This realization was almost as powerful for me, if not more, than the realization of how profoundly important art was in my everyday life, on that first Day Without Art of years before.

Graphic design is the most ubiquitous of all the arts. It responds to needs at once personal and public, embraces concerns both economic and ergonomic, and is informed by numerous disciplines, including art and architecture, philosophy and ethics, literature and language, politics and performance.

It is this power, this special, ubiquitous nature of graphic design and visual communication, and its ability to effect change in the world around us, that Icograda’s World Graphics Day celebrates. Informed by and informing countless disciplines and practices, design and its designers wield the power to effect change in equally countless arenas of daily life. We see this power in TEDTalks that link design to technology and innovation; in the branding and rebranding of corporations, products, and services; in the efforts of designers to practice their crafts with gazes toward the future, and sustainability; and in the work of experience designers, designing to effect change in the way in which an audience interacts with content on the Internet.

Graphic design is a popular art, a practical art, an applied art, and an ancient art. Simply put, it is the visualization of ideas.

Ideas that, when executed effectively, may facilitate real change. Everywhere. And all around us.

I am aware, on a nearly daily basis, of how fortunate I am, and of how proud I feel, to be able to call myself a designer, and to practice the art that I practice.

But it is on this day, every year since I first became aware of this design “holiday,” that my pride swells just a little bit more than usual.

Happy World Graphics Day!

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NOTE: The above-quoted passages are excerpted from Jessica Helfand’s stellar essay, “Paul Rand: The Modern Designer,” which appears in Screen: Essays on Graphic Design, New Media, and Visual Culture.

Filed under: Art, Books, Design, Editorials, Events, Personal , defining moments, egreetings, history, Icograda, Jessica Helfand, linkage, memories, needful reminders, World Graphics Day