Michael Beirut - Looking Closer

    Looking Closer     

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Michael Bierut, William Drentel, Steven Heller & DK Holland
Allworth Press, New York
1994

A really useful and interesting book authored by Michael Beirut, a designer closely attached in my mind with modernist and clean advertising in North America - and often quite critical of the stuff before modernism and Swiss design such as Helvetica came over to the US eradicating the need for decorative ads.

'Looking Closer' is a book with a series of essays by leading designers such as Bierut and Milton Glaser, with some topics close to my research. In particular, the following article gives me food for thought about future technology and it's effects on graphic design - technology and the computer obviously being a major factor in todays global culture.

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A lot of the following essay, written in 1986 kind of predicts facets of the modern world of graphic design - such as the rise of desktop publishing, sending work across the world - collaborating.

The over-saturation of pretend "graphic designers" as desktop design is available to everyone, producing rubbish design and eradicating the need for proper designers for the common folk, people having to go out of their way to seek trained graphic designers - who suddenly, to ignorant people seem pointless as a profession.

Also the rejection of technology, with all modern technology at our disposal, more and more people are going back to traditional techniques to give less 'perfect' finishing for aesthetic qualities.


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A CLOCKWORK MAGENTA

AND ORANGE

by

D. L. Ogle

A time in the near future. The graphic industry had collapsed. Most typesetters, graphic trade shops printers and design firms had been forced to close, killed by a combination of amazing improvements in technology, the appearance of thousands of design "Kits" (named after the wealthy designer who had created and copyrighted them all. Kit Hinrich), and an incredible inability to persuade clients that so-called "good" design, typesetting, and printing had any real value at all. 

First to fee the squeeze were the typesetters. Finding themslves in competition with hundreds of thousands of personal computers, they initially tried to save themselves by becoming "Service bureaus", merely providing a printout service to those who wished higher resolutions than what was available on their own laser printers.

The tactic worked for a few years, but, inevitably, laser-printed resolution improved to the point where it was "good enough." At the same time, of course, designers who had their own laser printers began to rationalise that the rough, jagged letterforms they were gaffing out of these printers were actually more desirable, since they were "warmer" nd closer to the early linotype impressions they remember fondly.

The next to go were the design firms. For years designers had been engaging in Talmudic-like debates about the nature of design and the role of the designer. The opposing sides divided themselves into two camps, "good" designer and "bad" designers. At various times the "good" designers were bad and the "bad" designers were good. Clients, not knowing which was which, ignored both.

Armed with their desktop publishing technology and their "Kits", more and more corporations, institutions and agencies brought their work in-house. Coincidentally, the government had just created a new program that made it much easer to create in-house graphics departments; the Pixel-Orientated Operator Program - POOP for short. This program forced thousands of poets, Ph.Ds, and English teachers to learn specialized computer graphics tasks.

These people, who eventually came to be called "para-graphs", were hired by the thousands, at minimum-wage salaries, to staff the in-house graphics departments. 

With the competition for projects getting stiffer, the technology enabling them to turn out work faster and faster and the demand for "good" design getting lower and lower, those design firms which were still functioning began to compete with each other even more furiously, cutting their prices to the bone. Eventually, with the help of their ever-improving computers, they found themselves in the uncomfortable position of doing all their clients' work in practically no time at all and getting paid nothing to do it.

Following the typesetters and design firms into the ranks of the unemployed were the trade shops and printers. When it became possible to go by satellite directly from a desktop computer to a printing press anywhere in the world, without the need for a single human being to be involved in the entire process, the trade shops disappeared. Later, after low-quality printing became not only acceptable, but actually desirable, traditional printing technology was replaced by small, high-speed, digitised, web-fed colour-copiers. All major printers closed their doors, never to reopen.

Hundreds of thousands of typesetters, printers, pre-press specialits, and graphic designers found themselves on the streets. Many formed into gangs of "rowdy-goudys." naming themselves by their colours ... magenta, orange, fuchsia, and mauve. The graphic designers all wore black and preferred to call themselves "brodies" in memory of their martyred hero, Neville Brody, the young British designer who, in protest to mankind's irresponsible use of serif type, impaled himself on a tall ascender in the middle of Piccadilly Circus.


These gangs could usually be found carrying cans of spray paint and airbrushes, looking for unprotected and helpless magazines to kidnap and abuse... filling in counters, retouching photographs, adding serifs to sans-serif letterforms. The situation seemed hopeless.

But, as often happens, history has a way of repeating itself. An unknown computer virus, later identified as the "Black Dot Plague" began to show up in computers everywhere. In only a few short years, every computer in the world had developed a complete inability to spell out anything but the strange word "steviejobswashere."

By that time, since everyone in the world except the "brodies" had completely lost the ability to spell, compute, draw, or, for that matter, handle any hand instruments at all, these gangs suddenly found themselves very much in demand.

Graphic design eventually became the most expensive and well-paid profession in the world, and graphic designers became the richest and most powerful people on earth, controlling all corporations, institutions, agencies and associations, thus assuring the salvation of our environment, all animal life, ethics, and the human race itself.


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Originally published in the AIGA journal of Graphic Design, vol. 4, no. 1, 1986.