Design

The Key Concepts

D.J. Huppatz

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350068162
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Design General

Design is everywhere. It shapes not only our present but also our future. An essential introductory guide, Design: The Key Concepts covers fundamental design concepts: thinking, service, context, interaction, experience, and systems. Each concept is situated within a broad context, enabling the reader to understand design's contemporary practice and its relationship to issues such as new technology, social and economic development, globalization, and sustainability. Concepts are also explained by use of concise, illustrated case studies of contemporary objects, spaces, systems, and methods such as Uber, the iPhone, Kickstarter and IKEA. Chapter summaries and supporting discussion questions make this an engaging and accessible introduction for students and those new to the field. An annotated bibliography provides direction for further reading.

1

Information

In his 1970 best-seller Future Shock, Alvin Toffler popularized the phrase “information overload” to describe people’s anxiety and disorientation at rapid technological and social change.¹ Fifty years later, the deluge of emails, social media updates, and news posts, not to mention billboards, posters, signs, and paperwork we face daily, makes Toffler’s phrase seem either premature or prophetic. Apps that record and quantify our physical activities, nutrition, and mental health through wearable sensors, their data filtered and arranged on a screen as colorful graphs and dynamic charts, distract our attention from the continual stream of news feeds, celebrity gossip, and ads on smartphones. Ours is a society increasingly driven by overwhelming masses of information.

But what is information? And how do we communicate, absorb, and use it? Colloquially, we understand information as the stuff that flows in bits and bytes through our electronic media and appears magically as words and images on our screens. Most people associate information with facts. More precisely, information is knowledge that is communicated or acquired. To inform is to impart concepts, ideas, or facts on a particular subject. The “in” describes the substance, while the “form” describes the structure.² Structuring knowledge into a useful format—from a medieval manuscript to a modern poster—has always been central to design.

Management guru Peter Drucker defined information as “data endowed with relevance and purpose.”³ That is, information is designed data. Raw data, code, or text is rarely comprehensible, provocative, or engaging. Designers filter, organize, structure, and clarify it to make it readable, attractive, provocative, or inspirational. Ideally, they shape a potential chaos of numbers, words, and images into websites, apps, books, signs, logos, and advertising. In short, information is data packaged into an appropriate format that we can use. And, given our limited processing abilities and shrinking attention spans, design’s crucial—yet often unnoticed—role is as important as ever to help overcome our information overload.

A common assumption among the general public is that graphic or communication designers make words and images attractive, as if design is all form and no substance. Their role is often seen as that of visual stylists, whose job is to shape and illustrate information to make it visually appealing. Designer Beatrice Warde, in a 1930 lecture, “Printing Should Be Invisible,” proposed a memorable analogy of this idea. Printing and typography, she argued, should be “the unnoticed vehicle for the transmission of ideas,” like a crystal goblet that highlights the wine within.⁴ But Warde’s image only captures part of the story: design is almost invisible yet it is always inseparable from the content. Design, whether a crystal goblet or plastic cup, is worth noticing.

Graphic, communication, or information designers organize visual, textual, and numerical knowledge to make it understandable, usable, and stimulating. Ideally, they shape information in an intelligible and appropriate format. The visual organization of a message “serves to establish clear relations of importance, inclusion, connection, and dependence, and serves as a guide to the sequence in the perception of a message, helping the viewer in the process of constructing meaning.”⁵ In a world saturated by visual stimuli, creating a clear and engaging visual message is an ongoing challenge faced by designers, particularly given the wide range of media available today.

But it is worth emphasizing that greater transparency, clarity, and simplicity do not necessarily mean faster communication or more efficient transfer of knowledge. The rapid pace of contemporary life and the expectation of instant communication suggest that designers should design information for optimal efficiency and immediate consumption. One recent study revealed that the subtle aspects of designing a page, such as carefully considering its layout, typography, balance, symmetry, spacing, and hierarchy, increased readers’ comprehension, focus, and engagement but not the speed at which they read.⁶ That is, design does not just order knowledge to enable the most efficient consumption of data. It also inspires, provokes, and delights.

From print culture to cyberspace

Around 1455, Johannes Gutenberg’s workshop in Mainz printed a bible using movable metal type. By adopting a uniform shape and size for each letter, and setting the text on a gridded page format, Gutenberg mechanized book design. With further standardization in printing machines, ink, and paper, these new processes soon replaced the painstaking practice of copying manuscripts by hand. By 1500, printers in over a dozen European cities had produced 40,000 editions of books. The “Gutenberg Galaxy” expanded over the next four centuries to incorporate not only religious, but also political and scientific knowledge, as well as news and entertainment.⁷ Precise, rapid repetition of text meant information was no longer packaged in singular, expensive manuscripts but disseminated in mass-produced books.

But reading remained an elite pursuit until a truly mass market for printed matter emerged in the nineteenth century. Beginning in England, a wave of mechanization, including steam-powered printing and paper mills, resulted in lower costs and higher volumes. Literacy levels rose and the variety of printed material, including magazines, newspapers, posters, advertising, and packaging, increased. Global communications and transport, including the spread of railways and steam ships, meant faster and wider distribution. This new era of mass publishing required increasingly specialized skills in engraving, illustration, typography, and composition. From within the printing and publishing industries, a new professional known as an applied or commercial artist emerged.

In the twentieth century, printed material became even cheaper to produce and disseminate. From postage stamps to propaganda posters, bank notes to cereal boxes, the variety of printed media that needed to be designed expanded and design became increasingly specialized. Working in advertising, book design, typography, and illustration in Chicago, William Addison Dwiggins was one of the first professionals to describe himself as a “graphic designer.” A founder of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA), Dwiggins wrote regularly on the profession and established early principles for design. “An orderly and graceful disposition of parts,” he wrote in 1922, “continues to be desirable and printed pages are still intended to be read.”⁸ Dwiggins’s principles of order and grace to enable communication isolated the design aspect of an otherwise mechanized printing process.

In the 1920s and 1930s, modernist designers such as Jan Tschichold, Herbert Bayer, and Lazlo Moholy-Nagy sought to codify design’s visual conventions alongside avant-garde art. Tschichold’s influential book, The New Typography, for example, promoted principles for graphic designers, such as truth, fitness for purpose, and economy of means, as well as the importance of “standardization, rationalization, and mechanization.”⁹ Such principles, combined with new design education programs, such as that of Germany’s radical Bauhaus, established professional legitimacy for graphic designers. For modernists, graphic design was a studio-based creative practice, still aligned with drawing and painting, yet also in the service of a mass public.

After the Second World War, graphic design continued to grow, with new professional associations, educational institutions, and publications. Widespread color photography, rapid printing processes, and an increase in advertising and branding meant the landscape of urban life was teaming with graphic images and text. Modern corporate logos, advertising, and typography spread globally (as we saw in the Introduction with Helvetica). Designer and educator Paul Rand, who created the iconic logos for IBM and ABC in the 1960s, argued that “good design” shapes the human environment “to reach and to influence the taste of vast audiences.”¹⁰ Rand ultimately saw the designer as a form-maker who possessed impeccable taste.

In the twentieth century, graphic designers wavered between an identity as service providers and creative artists. Were they simply fulfilling a client’s brief or creating a new cultural form? Ethically, they wondered if graphic design simply encouraged mass consumerism or provided an audience with useful information. Was it ultimately promotion or propaganda? In a 1964 manifesto, “First Things First,” British designer Ken Garland, for example, criticized designers who “have flogged their skill and imagination to sell such things as: cat food, stomach powders, detergents, hair restorer, striped toothpaste, aftershave lotion, beforeshave lotion, slimming diet, fattening diets, deodorants, fizzy water, cigarettes, roll-ons, pull-ons and slip-ons.”¹¹ But even as design’s social and cultural role was the subject of such debates, new technologies offered alternative processes and visual languages.

In the 1980s and 1990s, personal computing, digital printing, and the internet radically changed design practices and processes. The Apple Macintosh, launched in 1984, enabled graphic designers to work digitally. By the end of the 1990s, sophisticated layout and image-editing software, such as Adobe’s Illustrator and Photoshop, combined with desktop publishing programs fundamentally changed design and printing processes. Typesetting, layout, and illustration could now be done at a computer terminal without handling metal type, sketching by hand, or pasting images onto a final proof. Graphic design was no longer the preserve of professionals, as amateurs could now choose fonts, design layouts, and manipulate images to potentially create professional-looking publications.

In the early decades of the twenty-first century, the networked, global, and virtual environment—or cyberspace—also had a profound effect on graphic design. The Gutenberg Galaxy was founded on paper and ink, its knowledge communicated and preserved in books, newspapers, and documents. But in cyberspace, text and images are less fixed than in print, and easier to edit, redesign, and erase. Copying, pasting, and sharing is also easier (and copyright harder to enforce), so that the stability and authority formerly associated with print began to dissolve. For designers, digital type and images presented both new problems and possibilities.

By the 2010s, much of the formerly vast print realm, including newspapers, magazines, and advertising, migrated to online formats or morphed into new forms that incorporated blogs, video content, and social media feeds. From these new forms, designers face new challenges concerning the legitimacy and authenticity of information. Fake news, ads, profiles, and data continue to pose questions as to design’s ethical and political role. As graphic design changed to communication design, information design, web design, or user experience design, it became at once more specialized yet also shifted from two to three and four dimensions (the fourth being time). And, while design for print is unlikely to die out, it now comprises only part of professional practice.

Making marks

They are everywhere. From an automobile’s dashboard to airport signage, graphic marks instruct us, inform us, and help us in the form of warning symbols, arrows, and bathroom signs. All around the world, people instantly understand the meaning of a sign in a hotel room corridor comprising flames, an arrow, and a person running or a blue sign on a bathroom door with a white stick figure in a wheelchair on it. These images—pictograms—are so ubiquitous that we rarely notice them. Simple, direct and efficient, pictograms may be the simplest form of graphic design. But once you start noticing them, these compact images are a subtle means of communication.

Starting in the mid-1970s, manufacturers and consumers needed symbols for an increasingly global market for technological machines such as stereos, washing machines, and automobiles. Tiny images on buttons and controls could help us operate these machines without the use of text. Pictograms have spread all over our machines and our lives since then. One of the most common is a line within a broken circle: the “Power Symbol.” The Power Symbol is part of a collection of standard graphics—a kind of hieroglyphics for the information age—intended for use on technical equipment.¹² The symbol is a combination of 1 and 0, signifying switching between on and off in binary language. Now universally recognized, the symbol has become a global standard, as the words “on” and “off” are not only English-specific, but also take up precious space on our ever-smaller devices.

We know, perhaps without thinking about it, that pressing the “home” button (a stereotypical pitched-roof house) on game consoles, remote controls, and phone apps takes us to the top menu. But for our grandparents, who grew up in a pre-digital era, the tiny images on the remote control look like Egyptian hieroglyphics. That is, such pictograms constitute a contemporary language that is learned through exposure, repetition, or trial and error. And, while we might understand that an image of a wine glass on a cardboard box means “handle with care,” the same wine glass printed on a street sign means something quite different. So, pictograms are not only dependent on the users’ prior knowledge, but also dependent on where they appear.

Beyond machines, pictograms are used extensively in healthcare, transportation, food retail, and construction. They warn us about occupational hazards such as dangerous machines, fire extinguisher, or exit locations. Ideally, they are not dependent on language to communicate information to people of various cultural backgrounds or education levels. At the same time, the target population must understand their meaning. While the graphic style matters, so do the colors, size, and location—all of this can have an impact on whether they “work” or not.¹³ And, in a visually complex world, some pictograms—warning us of danger, for example—must stand out. The appropriate design can even be lifesaving, as in the pictograms on machine operation instructions, vehicle warning lights, or medication warnings.

These seemingly neutral little pictures can also have a significant social and cultural impact. Pictograms are inclusive and exclusive. In America’s South during the Jim Crow era, for example, designers created signs to distinguish between drinking fountains, waiting rooms, or store entrances for whites or African Americans. In this way, designed signs consciously conveyed information that enabled racist segregation. Although such signs disappeared in the 1950s and 1960s, yet other politically, culturally, or socially constructed differences remain embedded in our everyday pictographic language. That between genders, for example, is inscribed in the pictograms that depict male and female bathrooms. Where do transgender or non-binary people fit in this sign system?

Along with pictograms, word marks are among the simplest and most familiar visual marks created by designers. In them, text and image are inseparable. Or, more precisely, a word becomes an image. Consider Colgate, Visa, Coca-Cola, or Levi’s. These words alone are not particularly distinctive or memorable. But when each is rendered in a particular font and color and surrounded by a decorative border, we recognize them instantly. Coca-Cola’s distinctive white script on a red background, for instance, is one of the most recognized word marks on the planet. Through repetition in advertising and marketing, we absorb such word marks into our memories as wholes in which text and image are inseparable.

A swoosh on a pair of sneakers, an apple with a bite out of it on the back of a laptop, a bright yellow M rising up in the distance on the highway. Unlike pictograms that instruct, warn, or enable, logos—close relations of word marks—typically encapsulate a particular image or ideal of a company, organization, or institution. Logos are not simply compact visual symbols to advertise corporations but are also essential for government agencies, non-profit organizations, institutions, cities, regions, and nations. And, as with pictograms, these simple visual images can embody social and cultural meanings. The swastika, once an ancient symbol with spiritual significance, became “the graphic embodiment of a heinous dogma that encouraged racist-inspired atrocities” after the German Nazi party adopted it as their official logo.¹⁴ Logos can elicit strong emotions.

The iconic “I heart NY,” for example, began in 1976 as a project of the New York State Department of Commerce, Wells Rich Greene advertising agency, and designer Milton Glaser. The campaign was part of a response by the State to New York’s financial ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of images
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Information
• 2. Things
• 3. Interaction
• 4. Systems and Services
• 5. Experiences
• 6. Strategies
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Annotated guide to further reading
• Select bibliography
• Index
• Imprint