The Five Stages of Design Development

Five Stages of Design Development Steven Skaggs It has been over fifteen years since Katherine McCoy’s influential Design Quarterly 149 article which layed out in a clear, insightful way the development of graphic design in this country1; nearly 25 years since the first edition of Phil Meggs’s A History of Graphic Design2, the first in-depth exploration of the history of our discipline. This semester, my design students and I used two excellent recent books – Roger Remington’s American Modernism3 and Rick Poyner’s No More Rules4 – to understand how design has moved from the 19th century, through the 20th, and into the 21st. But in the process of this class, which was something of a seminar in that the students contributed a great deal of research, it occured to me that something profoundly deeper than a transition from Modern to Postmodern has happened in the last century. Indeed, the terms “Modern” and “Post-Modern” obscure a more involved and intriguing process, which, it seems to me, breaks fairly cleanly into five stages. These five stages are divided according to the designer’s and the audience’s relationship to each other and to a dominant culture. Vernacular Vernacular is the native language of a people. Working within the vernacular, the designer is within a relatively long-established tradition. Although taking great pride in his or her abilities, the designer is unconscious of other ways of working or “theories” within which to embed the work. He or she has likely learned the craft as an apprentice working under the tutelage of a master, perhaps in an oral tradition or at least in an imitative manner. Since others are also learning their craft in the same manner from masters similarly trained, the style environment of the entire community tends to be conformative and unified. The vernacular tends to be very stable and to change only slowly. This is because one’s influences are largely due to one’s master and what one sees in the immediate environment which has likelwise been determined by the generations of the group. Disruptions in this unified stylistic environment tend to be causesd by physical displacement such as occurs when two communities are separated from each other and neither has knowledge of the other’s work so that the cultures grow to be very different. Technological change can also cause the designer to search for new ways of doing things. When the communities share a culture and technology and when they interact often, the visual vocabularies tends to converge just as a group of people in the same room, when they begin to clap hands, will soon assume the same rhythmic pulse. Awakening This stage, which seemed to strike Europe before being imported into the United States secod hand, could be called alienation. In the stage of Awakening, the designer is intensely aware of his separation from the Vernacular, or finds himself called upon to question it in some deep way. I use the term “Awakening” here to represent the sense of stirring, of seeing, as if for the first time, the native stylistic environment within which he works or from which he has come. It is tempting to use the metaphor of adolescence to describe Awakening, as this is a process in which home is seennot as natural and universal, but as a choice, initiating a process that requires questioning and assessment. In order to do this, the designer must stand apart from it, treat it as something a little bit foreign, perhaps even railing vehemently against it. Historically, one sees the Awakening in European design with the rise of the Werkbund in Germany and the Arts and Crafts movement in England. Modernism was initiated by the stage of Awakwning brought on by the technological shifts of the industrial revolution and increasing worldwide interaction. Awakening is always manifested as an oppositional impulse, a resistance, a rejection of the past where by “past” what is actually meant is the unselfconscious vernacular. Awakening is leaving home. So one sees the Awakening extend to the various art “avant garde” movements of the early 20th century including Futurism, Dada, Constructivism and so on. Avant garde means the “front guard”, the advancing edge; irrespective of whatever was sensed to be coming, the salient characteristic of each was really a leaving behind, the departing from the innocence of the Vernacular childhood. Professionalism If Awakening involves a certain amount of angst, even the angry manifesto, lashing out as separation is made with the Vernacular, Professionalism represents the winning of acclaim toward the new set of values and the stylistic environment that has been erected in opposition to the Vernacular. In Western graphic design, both in Europe and the United States, it found fruition in the grid, the International Style, the minimalistic efficiencies of late Modernism. It is not an accident that with Professionalism comes the developing of graphic design as a profession. Not only is graphic design distinguished from “commercial art” (again, the banishment of the vernacular), but its inclusion in the academy is evidence of its acceptance by the larger, dominant culture. With Professionalism, a monolithic stylistic norm is established, a single style that is in contradistinction to the vernacular. Perhaps still feeling threatened by the Vernacular, in order to consolidate their power against it, the new professionals portray the vernacular as “naive” and ungrounded on principle. The new professional stage is, incontrast, based on rationality. The visual vocabulary used by the Professional attempts to be as far from the vocabulary used by the vernacular as possible. However, Professionalism requires the co-existence of the vernacular in order to make clear their own more highly developed paradigm. In that respect, something of the vernacular must remain robust although it is no longer dominant. So, for example, in the full bloom of Modernismin the 1950s and 60s, as the Swiss typographic principles of the International Style were adopted by the corporate world as the dominant vocabulary, the Vernacular is considered as inferior and the values placed in the new stylistic environment are pointed to as advancements. The Vernacular represents an untutored past. The Vernacular is required by the Profession in order to make clear the latter’s superiority and imbue the Profession with value in the culture5. Segmentation This cultural process is quite Hegelian in the sense that it suggests a dialectic of sythesis - antithesis - synthesis. However, as it has evolved in the late 20th century, the process has been less one of synthesis and more one of fragmentation. The 1970s were the decade of market segmentation in the economy. Consumer products were directed at specific “target audiences” or market segments. A similar process ocurred in graphic design. The Professional stage, which in the 50s and 60s had been represented quite monolithically by the International Style, becomes, by the late 1970s and 80s, splintered into competing sub-groups, and this fragmentation has continued. We see this happening across the board in Europe and America. One finds reactions against the corporate (ie: Professional) Swiss style in the work of Herb Lubalin, The Richards Group, Push Pin Studios; April Greiman and Wolfgang Weingart weakened the “authority” of the grid from within, so to speak, by introducing improvisation into Swiss-oriented structures; Charles Spencer Anderson re-introduced the vernacular in a conscious way; Rick Griffin’s and Kelly Mouse’s posters of the San Francisco counter-culture explicitly rejected the look of Professionalism. But this was not a return to the vernacular. Each of these artists worked with full awareness or consciousness of the dialogue between Vernacular and Professionalism. They were aware that the style in which they were working was itself making a statement. Furthermore, each of these artists was speaking to a particular segment of the culture, not to the entire mass culture. Indeed, as the 1980s move to the 1990s, “mass culture” becomes a misnomer in a way. What you have, instead, is a cluster of cultures, large in terms of numbers to be sure, but fairly discrete. There are parallel cultures speaking within themselves; the “external” cultures are often scarcely aware of the others’ conversations. It is as if each stylistic environment is directed toward a specific target culture that will be activated and receptive to the look it has to offer. It is no coincidence that some of the leading designers at the end of the 20th century came from “hip hop”, “beach culture”, “tattoo culture.” These segmented cultures served as the breeding ground or laboratory for new forms of visual design. Many of these subcultural segments share with the Vernaular an opposition to the the corporate Professional stylistic norm and a status, at least initially, of being “low brow” (from the quitessential Professional perspective). Yet, Segmentation cannot be said to be a return to the Vernacular, or some kind of multiplicities of Vernaulars. Unlike the Vernacular stage, the segmented visual environments do not represent unselfconscious design acts. The segments are each highly selfconscious, indeed, and in their idiosyncratic stylistic features they find a way of differentiating themselves from both the Professional idiom, the Vernacular, and other sub-currents in the larger culture. Even if, within a segment, a designer porports to adopt a wholly Vernaular idiom (as was the case with C. S. Anderson’s French Paper campaign in the 80s), it is done with a wink and a nod to the viewer. Segments may or may not be respectful of the other stylistic environments, but the key feature they share is that of separation from blind adherence to the Professional model. The Lattice The final stylistic environment, the one we have entered with the 21st century, is the Lattice. In much graphic design since the 1990s, one sees a conscious adaptation and mingling of many different segmental styles. Think of Rick Valicenti. Think of Chip Kidd. We now see a meshing of many stylistic strands which interconnect, so that the whole beomes a system of interconnected parts. Like the Segmentation stage, a designer working within the Lattice stage knows the idiom is not coming from one’s native cultural environment or, more likely, rejects the notion of a “native” environment. But unlike Segmentation, the Lattice stage’s defining characteristic is the failure to stay within a consistent single cultural segment. Rejecting the limitations of any single cultural group, but open to them all, the Lattice designer appropriates, blends and mixes them, churns them, before releasing them to an audience which also shares an openess to the fluidity of the symbolic visual structure. This hyper-saturated audience, obtaining its visual stimulus from so many sources – print, the web, video and games – is not only open to alien stylistic codes that are uncertain or ambiguous, but often shares with the designer an awareness of these sources and influences. The audience recognizes and embraces the hybridity. In this way, the visual tropes6 reference aspects of culture that are external to any one time or space. They establish multiple references between themselves (as tropes), and also between the cultural groups which they associatively connote. The Lattice amplifies the transitive nature of visual culture while and the same time dilutes the power of any given stylistic environment to become a monolithic Professional style. Where Next? Perhaps the Lattice is moving to a new stage in which the division between designer and audience, maker and consumer, sender and receiver, creator and public, is being dismantled. Everyone is creator and audience: the receiver determines the shape of the message and therefore, in some degree, the message’s content. In the Lattice, visual communication is happening on many levels at once, dialogue becomes multilogue, everyone is asked to handle not only complex visual messages, but also the comprehension of the stylistic environments in which they are embodied. Perhaps th next stage will be one in which there are no more specialists, where everyone is a designer of creative messages as well as intelligent receivers. But there is no going back to the unconscious Vernacular. Even when one chooses to use it. The Five Stages and their characteristics: Vernacular slow development over many centuries passed on orally or by apprenticeship strong ethnic or cultural identity Awakening self-questioning sense of dischord rejection of the past struggle to find identity Professional sense of superiority stability discovery of fundamental principles monopolization by cogniscenti institutionalization in the academy and in corporations Segmentation individualization rejection of the professional fundamental principles (selfconscious) reunification with vernacular multiplication of styles discretely targeted stylistic audiences Lattice complete evaporation of naivete selfconscious appropriation homage assumption audience is aware of multiculturalism emerging breakdown of sender/receiver distinction Notes and Bibliography 1. McCoy, Katherine. “American Graphic Design Expressionn: The Evolution of American Typography”, Design Quarterly 149 , The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1990, pp. 3-22. 2. Meggs, Philip and Alston Purvis. A History of Graphic Design, Wiley, New York, 2005 3. Remington, Roger. American Modernism: Graphic Design 1920 to 1960. Yale University Press, New haven, Connecticut, 2003. 4. Poyner, Rick. No More Rules: Graphic Design and Postmodernism. Yale University Press, New haven, Connecticut, 2003. 5. An identical process can be seen at work not only in graphic design but also other professions: for instance, medicine, music, law and architecture have each passed through a similar separation from the folk forms, eventually finding constitution within the academy. 6. Visual tropes are recurring symbolic motifs.