Messiah - Art To The Nth
From time to time, for a variety of reasons, and via a variety of sources, Atherton Bartelby is reminded precisely why he enjoys so much the craft that he practices every day. One such reminder was discovered while organizing his email archive database several yesterdays ago.
Here’s to the random reminders of why we exist.
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.
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.
Graphic design is the boldly directional arrows on street signs and the blurred, frenetic typography on the title sequence to “E.R.” It is the bright green logo for the New York Jets and the monochromatic front page of The Wall Street Journal. It is hang-tags in clothing stores, playbills in theaters, timetables in train stations, postage stamps and cereal box packaging, fascist propaganda posters, and junk mail. It is complex combinations of words and pictures, numbers and charts, photographs and illustrations that, in order to succeed, demand the clear thinking of a particularly thoughtful individual who can orchestrate these elements so that they all add up to something distinctive, or useful, or playful, or surprising, or subversive, or in some way truly memorable.
Graphic design is a popular art, a practical art, an applied art, and an ancient art.
Simply put, it is the visualization of ideas.
—Jessica Helfand, from “Paul Rand: The Modern Designer,” an essay included in Screen: Essays on Graphic Design, New Media, and Visual Culture.
I saw paola antonelli, design curator at moma, have a conversation with howard gardner a couple months ago, and she said something that I thought was striking enough to jot down – some words like, “design is applying tools, your eye, and your sense of economy to achieve an idea.”
You may appreciate her TED talks, or a related little book called Machine Beauty. I thought the book was lyrical and romantic primarily about design, much like the quote you shared here.
Nariposa: I deeply admire Paola Antonelli’s work and thought, so thank you so much for pointing me in the direction of her TED talks. I shall also check out Machine Beauty; if it in any way mirrors the lyricism of the Jessica Helfand excerpt I shared above, I am certain to adore it.
Thank you!
[...] 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 [...]