It is many things, having myriad properties, shifting qualities and overlapping concerns. Designer as Author: Voices and Visions, an exhibition of self-authored graphic design, surveys this interest and direction within the discipline and provides some answers and some questions. Curated by Associate Professor Steven McCarthy and Assistant Professor Cristina de Almeida, Designer as Author: Voices and Visions provides a forum for assessing this activity of self-authored design, and attempts to represent several modes of authorship. Wherever applicable, the works in the exhibition are fully readable by the viewer, and in some cases, developmental materials are displayed along with the finished piece to help understand the designer’s working process. A definition of self-authored graphic design, which is neither a style, a unified methodology, nor yet a genre, will be attempted in the following paragraphs.

Self-authored graphic design is a dance between two central partners with varying degrees of differentiation: the designer as self and the content. The designer as self is recognition of the central presence of the designer as a voice and a vision in the process of form-creation and message-formulation. As an individual who balances emotional and expressive qualities with cognitive concerns, the designer’s personal views and convictions are integral ingredients to the definition of self-authored graphic design. Having a point of view from the vantage point of self is crucial.

The content, the subject, the message – with which the designer must have a strong engagement – is the other central partner in this relationship. The designer’s involvement with the content might come from personal experience, observation, research, collaboration, or an entrepreneurial venture. The designer often initiates the message through articulation of the content; this articulation could be in visual and/or verbal form. Having something to say in which the designer believes is also crucial.

Self-authored graphic design often employs the designer as writer, as both a strategy for furthering the communications paradigm, and as a natural extension of the im/materiality of type (designer’s realm) into the im/materiality of the word (writer’s realm). This allows the designer as author to maintain greater identification with the content; increased owner/authorship also comes with increased visibility and responsibility. [For further reading/looking at “what happens when the worlds of writing and design coincide, overlap and collide?” see Emigre 35, Summer 1995 and Emigre 36, Fall 1995, the Mouthpiece: Clamor Over Writing and Design issues, guest edited by Anne Burdick.]

Written language is the currency of business, culture, government, entertainment, law. Writing and reading are emphasized from the primary grades in our educational system, often at the expense of other forms of visual communication. Author as authority manifests itself in print and electronic media across most disciplines, from serious scholarship to lowbrow tabloids. Designers as authors realize that despite some influence emanating from the domain of visual image and typographic form, a truly powerful weapon is to control the words themselves, and therefore more of the message.

What is enabling this interest in self-authored design? Technological changes and opportunities have certainly played a part, mostly in methodology, process and medium. Working in digital media has given designers more occasion to blur the distinctions between written word and designed word. Many designers create their own typefaces to more fully communicate in voices of their own vision. Technology doesn’t supply soul however, and that’s a critical ingredient in the designer as author equation (consider the modestly inventive efforts of electronic mail users who have created “emoticons” to enhance the typographically impaired exchange that passes for visual/verbal communication).

Cultural and social reasons also exist for redefining designers’ roles. The realization that audiences and markets are not a unified mass, but made up of people with divergent interests and experiences helps account for the shift in approach to visual communications. Experiments involving deconstruction of the text, and investigations of linguistic theory have provided designers with a bridge to a broader language. Influences from related fields have been many: conceptual and word art, book art, social activism, poetry and literature seem especially poignant to the designer as author. The desire to communicate with society (socialize with a community) seems to be at the center of the designer as author’s rationale, especially in light of shifting personal/social space and communications patterns.

Collaborative efforts between designers, writers, editors, artists, publishers, sponsors, markets and audiences can make for a rich and varied form of authorship, where the self is diminished in favor of the selves, and the other. The definition of designer as author is not complete without considering the involvement of the audience, the viewer, the market. Reactions, perceptions and even economic consumption provide closure to the communications loop, with the designer as author as beginning and end.

The Designer as Author: Voices and Visions exhibition shows some of the current work being produced, and now waits to be heard and seen.