What design means for me

As a typographic designer I think of myself as a designer of the printed word. Which isn’t to say that the spoken word is in good hands with me.

Mankind has divided the branches. In the course of history a great number of occupations have come into being, from which each person can choose according to interests, disposition and opportunities. Each of these occupations finds its expression in form. In this sense we are all designers and makers of the forms in which things present themselves to us.

Form is the condition through which a common life becomes possible: through which a relationship between people comes about. Design determines the quality of our common life. It is extremely important to stress this.

In some cases, when knowledge and insight are missing from a particular field of expression, a collaboration is attempted with people who explicitly concern themselves with the design of given material: ‘form givers’. I prefer to call them designers, because an essential process needs to go on prior to the form. Design should be able to be seen fittingly inserted into a desired social structure.

Graphic designers act as intermediaries. They maintain the relationship with the graphic industry, for which some specialist knowledge is necessary. There is always talk of a given message (the job) and of the one who is to be informed (the public). Between them stands the designer with a specific outlook and knowledge of things.

For good things to happen, there has to be a dialogue, with mutual respect, between the client and the designer. Each one should understand and trust the other, and should above all have a social desire. Further, the designer should see the import of the job and be alert to those to whom it is directed, to come to the right choices. Because - like much in life - designing is making choices.

Choices from an often large number of possibilities and in the light of an analysis of the job and an idea of the audience. Yet even after this selection there are sufficient possibilities remaining to establish uncertainty. Each choice always shuts out other possibilities. This process of choices has to continue until there remain the essential ingredients, which for the designer at that moment, for that purpose, are essential in coming to the final form.

During this process both rational and emotional considerations are in play. Rational factors tend to be distilled out of the job itself and can also be determined through the constraints and possibilities that the techniques of production offer. Emotional aspects are a more delicate matter, because more subjective.

In good design, I suggest, the expression must exhibit a certain tension and or harmony between functionality and the qualities of attraction. The content of the message has to come over, but the way in which this happens - the melody is important, not least because in itself it carries communicative value. It is through form that content comes to us.

My thoughts about matters of this kind have their origin in the time when I trained, when there was a prevailing beliefin the good of functionalism and in the beauty of the constructed, which the application of this idea led to. In reaction to the time that preceded, there was a sense of a social need in purification. Rational considerations had the upper hand. Every redundancy served only to be eliminated.

Designers had to let their personal vision come as little as possible to expression in the message, so as to safeguard the objectivity of the information.

Out of this concerted desire, which turned into a convinced dogma, there arose a formality and thus a uniform expression of different kinds of content. This overestimation of rationalism became monotonous, and a reaction was bound to occur.

And under the influence of the changing context, with its needs for difference, assumptions were overhauled. Uniformity gave way to diversity. The designer took another, more personal approach to the content. The content should come to expression in the form. And so, through the individualization of the person, a social style has to make way for a multiplicity of individual voices with expressions to match.

Among other things, this entails the strong upward estimation of the image at the expense of the word: text is often deformed so that the reader becomes a looker.

Through the mutual influence of designers, in which the outer form gets imitated over and over again, a game with form is played, in which form is untied from content. And whenever form itself comes to be the starting point then a levelling happens. What was originally intended as support for content has come to be free and has decayed into ornament: form about form. A meta-language, deployed to amaze colleagues and to please the parvenu.

This phenomenon now threatens to overwhelm us.

This kind of levelling design is certainly a reflection of distinct tendencies in our social life. But I do not want to believe that these are the only values. To assert this, another kind of design is necessary. To work with this assumption is the thing that most fascinates me, and fills me with a desire to make a contribution that is answerable. And the fact that this involves the use of a printing press doesn’t leave me unmoved.

Thus it seems good to me to formulate the premisses freshly and clearly, so as to reach a form that values content and has respect for the receiver of the message. There is no recipe for this. It is a matter of mentality. It is a process of repeatedly weighing up aims, means and method. The criteria for this can be -just as Vitruvius, the Roman theorist of architecture, stipulated as the values of building - ‘commodity, firmness and delight’.