(published in slightly different form as “Tinker Tailor Designer Author”, Agenda column essay for Eye magazine, no. 41)

Note: all text in this color is directly quoted from note (4), available in its entirety from here.

My Son, My Executioner, a poem by Donald Hall, refers to the realization that the birth of one’s progeny – substitute here the birth of a movement within a discipline – is indicative of one’s own mortality. The renewed interest in self-authored graphic design, as expressed in Eye no. 38 and the recent School of Visual Arts (NYC) conference The Designer as Author: Entrepreneurism in the Digital Age, has this quality: the kid has killed, so to speak, his parents. While the designer as author, as artist, as critic, as producer, as entrepreneur, as activist, as collaborator, as curator, as teacher, as editor, is alive and, as rumor has it, well, he has a shallow memory. And not knowing history, he’s doomed to... he’s doomed too... and he’s doomed two.

Five years ago, two projects arrived at a confluence around the idea of self-authored graphic design. One, a nationally juried exhibition, Designer as Author: Voices and Visions, organized by myself and Cristina de Almeida, was held at Northern Kentucky University. The second project, Mouthpiece: Clamor Over Writing and Design, published as Emigre issues 35 and 36 and guest edited by Anne Burdick, asked “what happens when the worlds of writing and design coincide, overlap and collide?” (1)

Designer as Author: Voices and Visions’ call for entries asked for works that “are involved as thoroughly with literal content as they are with visual form”, and that “pose problems and questions as readily as they seek solutions” (2). In this regard, projects by some better known American designer-authors were displayed, and the venue provided an opportunity for emerging voices to exhibit their investigative projects. Michael Beruit’s ReThinking Design publications created for Mohawk Papers, Emigre magazine, books researched, written and designed by J. Abbott Miller and Ellen Lupton, a series of social issue posters by Jager DiPaola Kemp, artist’s books by Johanna Drucker, Speak magazine as art directed by Martin Venezky, and Stephen Farrell’s large scale experimental visual narratives were some of the exemplary pieces in the exhibition. We invited Ms. Burdick to give the keynote address at the exhibition opening, which she did with great enthusiasm and to strong reception.

Because these endeavors were born at the margins of the graphic design profession, they were perceived as amusing sideshows, barely worthy of engaging criticism by the mainstream graphic design press, and yet now they seem oddly prescient. Michael Rock’s 1996 Eye article The Designer as Author dealt with the topic insightfully, but his reliance on post-structural literary theory and film auteur theory served more to retro-fit a definition of self-authorship in graphic design than to discuss why this movement is born of the present moment.

Concern about the emergence of celebrity-heroes and their iconic graphic artifacts is always cited as an undesirable effect of self-authorship’s acknowledgment of the designer’s ego.

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. (4)

However, increased responsibility and accountability are benefits to this heightened engagement with content. Acknowledgment of the designer’s actions and choices in the process of creating material culture and economic consumption become a welcome part of the equation (as you clean your mailbox of all the anonymously designed junk mail this evening – and I use the word ‘designed’ with broad interpretation – think about it). Yes, this does happen to ill effect, whereby fame and fortune are the motivating factors in some designers’ quest for monumental status. In descending order, here are the four most recent press releases from California-based designers Cahan & Associates (who are those unnamed associates, anyway, Bill?):

2.26.01 Cahan & Associates Sweep Annual Report Shows in 2000

1.12.01 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Displays Work of Cahan & Associates

12.07.99 Princeton Architectural Press releases monograph on Cahan & Associates, entitled “I Am Almost Always Hungry.”

09.27.99 Cahan & Associates Helps Pottery Barn Launch Its New Kids Division (5)

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. (4)

At this point, to show that self-authorship graphic design was not invented recently, merely posited conceptually as a way of working, thinking and teaching, it is important to credit the many acts of self-authorship that contribute to the history of graphic design in the Twentieth Century. Works like Jan Tschichold’s New Typography, Willem Sandberg’s experimenta typographica books, Alexi Brodovitch’s art direction of Portfolio magazine, the Pushpin Studio’s creative output, Quentin Fiore’s visual manifestation of Marshall McLuhan’s writings, April Greiman’s synthesis of personal content and technology, and Katherine McCoy’s pedagogical impact at Cranbrook and beyond have helped influence successive generations of design practitioners and theorists, instilling the notion that authorship is not anecdotal, but vital.

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.

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. (4)

The Designer as Author: Entrepreneurism in the Digital Age, a “symposium that examines the next evolutionary stage of graphic design: authorship, entrepreneurism, and content creation” (6), continues an investigation into the topic, now that the notion of self-authorship is safely middle-aged. Steven Heller’s article The Attack of the Designer Authorpreneur awkwardly attempts to reign in the concept by naming it, thereby exerting his own author as authority-figure status (can a co-authored book on the subject be far behind?) (7).

The measure of the state of self-authorship in graphic design today can be best analyzed not by opportunities to codify the discourse, but by looking at the movement’s influences and their trajectories for the future. The success of ‘culture jamming’ – a term coined by Adbusters editor Kalle Lasn – as a philosophy is partially attributable to the Situationists, to early Ralph Nader-style consumer activism, to Abbie Hoffman’s 1970 Steal this Book (available from Amazon.com for $8.95) and to the notion that as creators of the branded landscape, graphic designers ought to be empowered to help dismantle it. Culture jamming involves self-authored graphic design as a social, political and economic tool rammed into the spokes of manipulative corporations, unresponsive governments and staid institutions. Perhaps the next opportunity to design an election ballot will benefit from this heightened engagement with the political process, whereby effective typography and page layout will be perceived as integral to democratic expression, and not something used to make pretty ‘vote for...’ bumper stickers.

Despite the obvious contradiction between opposing the dominant segment of capitalism and seeking entrepreneurial opportunity, some self-authoring designer-entrepreneurs have chosen this route as a means of economic sovereignty and self-determination. Not only do they fill the needs (and desires) of new markets, they create competition by offering alternatives to corporate mass consumption. Independent digital type foundries, alternative publications, off-beat design products and services, and heightened client-designer-user collaborations founded on shared values are some of the benefits to an entrepreneurial approach.

The spaces for personal expression have widened somewhat through self-authorship in graphic design. Curatorial projects like educators Kali Nikitas’ And She Told Two Friends and Soul Design exhibits and publications, and Kenneth FitzGerald’s Adversary traveling exhibition have enabled designers to ‘pose problems and questions’ independent of typical restraints. While not solving the issue of the poorly designed voting ballot, the advantage to this kind of pure, speculative, basic visual research, is that it expands the intellectual horizon, readying the designers (many of whom are also teachers of design) for tomorrow’s problems in ways that are unforeseen today.

New media technologies offer possibilities for self-authorship by allowing further access to channels of creation and distribution, an evolution of the democratization of graphic design started with desktop publishing. As interactivity includes the viewer in immersive experiences, the concept of authoring is extended to the realm of the end user, a generally held good idea. Some online works, however, seem to be more about a celebration of the technology, in the form of electronic gymnastics, than about meaningful content. An analogy, in some cases, is offering a reader a dictionary and calling it an interactive novel.

No doubt that ideas around self-authorship in graphic design have caused the discipline to be expanded: it’s more inclusive, it’s more multifaceted, it’s more engaged... just a big, happy family with the occasional patricide.