Visual Design in the Age of the Network Axel Vogelsang Lucerne School of Art and Design Institute of Design Sentimatt 1 6003 Luzern, Switzerland +41 79 78 387 27
axel.vogelsang@hslu.ch ABSTRACT It is widely accepted that the visual design profession has been heavily affected by the introduction of the personal computer. By contrast, the far-reaching effect on the profession due to the shift towards network computing in the recent years hasn’t been properly acknowledged yet. Whilst digital design has initially strengthened the inherent role of the visual designer, designing in and for digital networks is slowly undermining his traditional selfimage whilst at the same time leading to a radical transformation of the profession, as this paper will outline.
Keywords graphic design, visual design, digital networks, publishing, print, design education
printing press. And with the slow unravelling of the old printing paradigm through the Internet, the whole visual design profession is undergoing huge transformations. These issues matter because the changes have been so rapid and massive, that design educational institutions are struggling to keep up. Many design courses and lecturers still do not realise the impact that digital networks are having on all aspects of visual design and many print designers still prefer to believe that they are working in a domain rather disconnected to digital networks. This short paper is meant to be a position statement that supposes ten important hypotheses relevant to the relationship between visual design and participatory media. It is seen as a contribution to the respective discussion that is slowly emerging [2] and as a starting point for a more detailed research into these issues.
1. INTRODUCTION The graphic or visual designer is mainly concerned with the design of two-dimensional surfaces as in almost every printed matter, packaging or more recently in websites. The concept of desktop publishing, which appeared with personal computers in the early 1980s indicated that pre-press and graphic design could soon be managed by everyone from any desktop, thus presenting a certain danger for the graphic design profession. It turned out that instead of making the design profession redundant, desktop publishing empowered the graphic designer. The 1980s and 1990s saw the rise of design superstars such as Neville Brody and David Carson, who both, inspired by the computer, firmly established design in close proximity to the fine arts. The heroic, styledefining author-designer was as alive as ever. The mainstream designer did profit as well. Whilst desktop publishing made his work faster and more efficient, it still needed highly skilled individuals to do the job. The design profession though in this tradition was still deeply rooted in the Gutenberg galaxy, as McLuhan [1] called it. Until the early 1990s information channels were predominantly onedirectional. They were hierarchically controlled and managed by authors, publishers, TV and radio stations. Graphic designers were part of the accompanying hierarchical production process. With the arrival of the Web and particularly with the Web 2.0 or participatory Web, this model is on the verge of being superseded by a complex, multi-directional, non-hierarchical and asynchronous network where everyone is author and audience at the same time. One of the first industries to be hit badly by these developments, are the newspapers, which owe their rise to the
2. VISUAL DESIGN AND NETWORKS 2.1 The Design of Possibilities One of the main properties of the network is its extreme dynamics. Digital information is in constant flow. Syndication via feeds makes it possible for the same data to appear in any other platform or node for that matter. At the same time digital information is highly flexible. It can be remixed, mashed up, overlayed. Dynamics and flexibility make the visual layout highly unpredictable and unstable. Rather than designing iconic images or collages, the designer’s task is to develop a framework of possibilities in form of templates, rules and grids that produces mere snapshots in time.
2.2 No More Heroes Mass markets need leaders in the form of authoritative and charismatic heroes. Accordingly, generations of design students have looked up to the likes of Neville Brody or David Carson. With the digital network the influence of individual superstar visual designers is diminishing. Participative media have undermined the authoritative role of designers and other authors. Designing for the needs of individuals, asks for a different kind of designer. His strengths are soft skills such as empathy, negotiation skills and trust, combined with the ability to delegate design responsibility not only to his peers, but to the audience itself.
2.3 Print and the Digital Print design is not an island in which the old rules of visual communication remain untouched. Increasingly technologies and materials are developed which, in order to combine the best of both worlds, either try to emulate the properties of paper or otherwise attempt to add digital abilities to traditional paper. And, whilst in the beginning, companies and institutions would use printed information as the starting point for their web presence, printed information now increasingly has its origin in an online database. Thus printed matter turns into another interface for the network. As a consequence, even the hard-bitten print designer will increasingly have to think in terms of the network.
2.4 Individualised Aesthetics Participative media open up new possibilities of highly aesthetisised self-expression in image, text and video, as can be seen on platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Flickr, and many others. These forms of expression are embedded in a technological and cultural framework that feeds back into how we perceive our world and ourselves. Such preconditions in connection with an audience, which constantly attempts to thwart and adapt this given framework, are forming a complex feedback mechanism from which new aesthetics emerge, in which the visual designer’s role is diminishing.
2.5 Transdisciplanary Design Paper as an interface is transparent. The conventions of design and usage have been established over hundreds of years and are deeply engrained in literate culture. Also, the role of print on paper is primarily to convey messages and only secondarily to evoke a discussion. It is a one directional medium, like all the other classical media. These two properties, transparency of interface and one-directional communication mean that the print designer has to take comparably little consideration of his audience as long as he remains in the well established confines of the typographic rules and of the brief. As a further consequence he has great control over the visual product. In contrast, design in and for the network is a much more complex undertaking based on the negotiation of many aspects. It asks for the collaboration of different roles and disciplines, such as programming, cognitive psychology, usability engineering, sociology and so on. Even in design itself several overlapping disciplines such as interaction design, graphic design, information architecture are at work.
2.6 Changing Literacies Today everyone is an author. But, other than in print, these authors do not only produce authoritative monologues. More and more conversation, which traditionally would be assigned to the oral domain, is now shifted onto the network in symbolic, iconic and figurative form [3]. This does not only extend these conversations virtually infinitively over time, it also changes the perception of what a conversation and what a text is. At the same time the established norms of visual communication such as orthography, grammar, typographic rules, the dramaturgy of photography are now starting to disintegrate, as the publishing elite, which has been strictly controlling them for centuries, is slowly loosing its grip.
2.7 Co-Design The Web has in the recent years undermined traditional ways of product development and marketing. Today buyers have the means to demand aesthetical, functional and ethical concessions
from the producer. Whilst some companies reluctantly give way to those demands, others embrace the new situation through introducing various forms of co-design in which the customer has part in the design process. On the far end of the scale there are now services that provide the customer with the tools to become a designer, producer and salesman himself.
2.8 New Tools Desktop Publishing is the continuation of an old tradition with new tools. Accordingly the visual interface metaphors of software like Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign are the paintbrush and the pencil, the magnifying glass, the scissors and the sheet of paper. For digital networks like the Internet though most of the old metaphors fail. And whilst over recent decades several attempts have been made to produce programming interfaces on the basis of objects or icons [4], programming based on symbols is still at the core of any net-based digital service. Notwithstanding graphic designers still do work in this field without programming skills by collaborating with programmers. But more and more graphic designers with programming skills and programmers with design skills enter the scene. Thus the tools of the trade are slowly changing.
2.9 Too much Information The Internet combined with portable computers and smart-phones makes huge amounts of information available at any time in any place. This changes the sensibility towards information and its presentation. Information designer Ruedi Baur [5] even claims that in times of over-information the role of the designer is to some extent not to inform but to irritate and to distract in order to make a difference. Whether one agrees or not, visual designers will have to consider the fact that amounts and availability of information will have an impact on its reception and also on the way design affects the reader’s attention.
2.10 Cross Cultural Design The Internet is a mayor factor in globalisation. It brings together the world in one screen. But proximity does not necessarily lead to understanding. It rather generates the need to negotiate between different cultures and their particular understanding of communication. This does not only affect the contents but also the visual design as different cultures have different sensibilities and connotations connected to certain images, symbols and colours.
3. CONCLUSION As this paper has outlined, digital visual design and visual design for digital networks are not necessarily the same. For graphic design practice, the shift towards the network brings with it much more fundamental changes than the introduction of the personal computer did. Whilst desktop publishing is a digital simulation of an analogue process, network computing and particularly Web 2.0 define an information space that is not easily explained with existing analogue metaphors. A highly connected digital world in which everyone is a reader and author at the same time is a totally different setting for visual design practice than the strictly hierarchical late print era. And accordingly the skill-set needed by the designer has changed. The visual designer in such an environment is a designer of templates and highly flexible modular building blocks. The designs have to provide enough leeway for the varying needs of the various actors involved, many of which take part in the design process despite a lack of formal education. Thus, the designer has
to familiarise himself with the fact that he has only limited control over the visual output. A similarly transforming experience for the visual design profession stems from the need to involve with new design tools and strategies in order to compete for attention in a highly competitive information environment. In order to face these challenges, designers will have to reflect on the changes that participative networks have brought with them. This refers particularly to those in the visual design community who still emphasise print traditions. Nevertheless several of the afore listed hypotheses can as easily be applied to other design disciplines. And last but not least, it is the task of design education to acknowledge the impact of networks on visual design practice in order to ensure that students are properly prepared.
4. REFERENCES [1] McLuhan, M., (1962), The Gutenberg Galaxy. The making of typographic man, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London. [2] Wagner, O., (2008). ‘Paradigmenwechsel im Design?’, Oliver Wagners Agenturblog, available from http://www.agenturblog.de/2008-11/paradigmenwechsel-imdesign/ [accessed: 01 November 2009]. [3] Vogelsang, A., (2008), Hyper-Image Network? An investigation into the role of text and image in the design of hypertext networks with specific consideration of the World Wide Web, PhD Thesis, University of the Arts London, Central Saint Martins College. [4] Kay, A., (1990) ‘User interface: a personal view’, in: B. Laurel (ed.) The art of human-computer interface design, Addison-Wesley, New York. [5] Baur, R., (2008), Dés-/Orientation 1/, Lars Müller Publishers, Baden.