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ethics in graphic design
Founded in 1963, Icograda (the International Council of Graphic Design Associations) is a voluntary assembly of organisations concerned with graphic design, visual communication, design management, promotion, education, research and journalism. Icograda promotes communication designers’ vital role in society and commerce and unifies the voices of graphic designers and visual communicators worldwide. The vision, mission and core values of the council are collectively embodied
in the statement ‘leading creatively’ and manifested through our Members’ diverse activities to use design as a medium for progressive change. Communication design is an intellectual, technical and creative activity concerned not simply with the production of images but with the analysis, organisation and methods of presentation of visual solutions to communication problems. The Icograda Foundation was established in 1991 for the advancement of worldwide
Icograda.
understanding and education through the effective use of graphic design. In recent years more than ever sustainability and the way that human beings deal with the earth in general has become an increasingly important topic of discussion. Visual communicators play such an important role in society. They can change peoples habits, be they good or bad. So who is to say that they cannot change the world to make it a more ethical and environmentally friendly place.
Leading Creatively
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First Things First Manifesto By Chris Dixon & Rick Poynor Sustainable Printing By 2008 edition of Print Me Working with Value By Collis Ta’eed Design for Social Cause By Jacques Lange Turn Around: Trends and Sustainable Design By Michael Hardt Why the Nonprofit World needs Design and Vice Versa By DK Holland Debating Design Integrity By Sara Curtis Zappo Sustainability Beer Coaster By Christhard Landgraf
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Designers apply their imagination to sell dog biscuits, butt toners & cigarettes
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First Things First Manifesto manifesto published jointly by 33 signatories in: Adbusters, the AIGA journal, Blueprint, Emigre, Eye, Form, Items fall 1999 / spring 2000
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Foreword by Introduction by Chris Dixon, Rick Poynor Adbusters
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e, the undersigned, are graphic designers, art directors and visual communicators who have been raised in a world in which the techniques and apparatus of advertising have persistently been presented to us as the most lucrative, effective and desirable use of our talents. Many design teachers and mentors promote this belief; the market rewards it; a tide of books and publications reinforces it. Encouraged in this direction, designers then apply their skill and imagination to sell dog biscuits, designer coffee, diamonds, detergents, hair gel, cigarettes, credit cards, sneakers, butt toners, light beer and heavy-duty recreational vehicles. Commercial work has always paid the bills, but many graphic designers have now let it become, in large measure, what graphic designers do. This, in turn, is how the world perceives design. The profession’s time and energy is used up manufacturing demand for things that are inessential at best. Many of us have grown increasingly uncomfortable with this view of design. Designers who devote their efforts primarily to advertising, marketing and brand development are supporting, and implicitly endorsing, a mental environment so saturated with commercial messages that it is changing the very way citizenconsumers speak, think, feel, respond and interact. To some extent we are all helping draft a reductive and immeasurably harmful code of public discourse. There are pursuits more worthy of our problem-solving skills. Unprecedented environmental, social and cultural crises demand our attention. Many cultural interventions, social marketing campaigns, books, magazines, exhibitions, educational tools, television programs, films, charitable causes and other information design projects urgently require our expertise and help. We propose a reversal of priorities in favor of more useful, lasting and democratic forms of communication - a mindshift away from product marketing and toward the exploration and production of a new kind of meaning. The scope of debate is shrinking; it must expand. Consumerism is running uncontested; it must be challenged by other perspectives expressed, in part, through the visual languages and resources of design. In 1964, 22 visual communicators signed the original call for our skills to be put to worthwhile use. With the explosive growth of global commercial culture, their message has only grown more urgent. Today, we renew their manifesto in expectation that no more decades will pass before it is taken to heart.
signed: Jonathan Barnbrook Nick Bell Andrew Blauvelt Hans Bockting Irma Boom Sheila Levrant de Bretteville Max Bruinsma Siân Cook Linda van Deursen Chris Dixon William Drenttel Gert Dumbar Simon Esterson Vince Frost Ken Garland Milton Glaser Jessica Helfand Steven Heller Andrew Howard Tibor Kalman Jeffery Keedy Zuzana Licko Ellen Lupton Katherine McCoy Armand Mevis J. Abbott Miller Rick Poynor Lucienne Roberts Erik Spiekermann Jan van Toorn Teal Triggs Rudy VanderLans Bob Wilkinson and many more.
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Applying a system of values and ethics in your design practice is almost certainly something you’ve thought about at some point or another, probably in some hypothetical question relating to doing work for a cigarette manufacturer, oil company or the like. However I think a fuller more complete approach is necessary. In this article I’ve briefly examined a few of the issues that all designers should seriously consider. Choosing Projects from an Ethical Standpoint. Touched on in many a university course and perhaps the most obvious ethical issue in the creative industries, this can be quite a dilemma for the struggling agency. In my own experience I was once approached to produce a string of adult sites complete with all the latest bells and whistles and with the prospect of a very large sum of money. I immediately said ‘yes, lets have a meeting!” but as the day proceeded my conscience started to kick in. I tried to convince myself that as long as I wasn’t creating the content I could stay neutral, and that if I didn’t do the job somebody else would. In the end, though, I decided I couldn’t feel right about it and called the whole thing off. While not everyone might feel the same way about adult sites, it’s important to have some general guidelines as to the sort of projects you think are ethically sound. The hard part is sticking to them no matter how much money is waved in front of you. It’s tempting to give in to the money, or the alluring idea that it doesn’t really make a difference what you do, but for your own sake, be prepared to take a stand on issues you care about and to draw the line on projects which you think detrimental to society. In the end, the global community is made up of nothing more than individuals making small decisions every day, but its these decisions that affect us all.
As a designer you have a lot of power held in your hands. You have the power to make almost anything seem desirable or even essential, to change the way people see whats around them. This may sound exaggerated, but consider how important Hitler saw his propoganda ministry. It was paramount to his success in getting Germany to its preWW2 attitudes. While you will doubtless never be involved in anything so overtly wrong, you should bear in mind the implications your work has the potential to have.
Here are some examples of the sorts of projects I personally would stay away from. This is by no means a definitive list, but some areas our practice chooses to avoid: - Anything detrimental to the environment - overfishing, uranium mining, etc. - Gambling, Cigarettes, Alcohol - X-rated adult projects - Marketing aimed squarely at children for products which have little real benefit - Companies on the global offenders list (companies that use child labour in the making of their wares, take advantage of developing countries, or grow genetically modified ingredients)
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This is the real world. There are no friends in business. Its all about the bottom line
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s designers we find ourselves in a field rife with loose ethics. Having worked for the last year in the property advertising industry I can personally testify to the sorts of subtle deceit and exaggerations that we perpetuate every day in our work for what are all too often products, services and ideas of no particular benefit to anyone.
By Collis Ta’eed
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huge budgets are made off the back of child labour or shoddy environmental practices
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have been amazed by how many creatives have sung the praises of certain multi-nationals for their huge budgets and creative thinking without a minutes thought to where this money is coming from. These companies can often seem like a dream client, until you realise that their huge budgets are made off the back of child labour or shoddy environmental practices. Creating value, not just making money This is by far the most subtle issue and involves a bit of mindshift. When considering your business it is very tempting to think of everything in terms of the bottom line, to measure success only in monetary terms. Now I am by no means saying you should forget that aspect of business, particularly if you want to last out the year. However there is more to what you are doing than just bringing in money, there are a variety of benefits that you and your business will be providing for those around you. The best way to illustrate this idea is with an example. Imagine a hypothetical business, lets call it Anderson & Sculthorp Design (ASD) with ten employees in various capacities. Now even if ASD were to only be just breaking even every year the business would still have value, and I’m not referring to the business assets. There are ten people whose livelihood is provided, who are gaining experience and living off ASD, and there are clients who have a relationship and rely on the ASD team and so on. Taking this to its logical conclusion means thinking of a business as an entity interconnected with those around it. Rather like a parent might provide for their family, in the same way a business provides for its employees and clients. My own agency Good spends a significant amount of money for web hosting every year. While we on-sell much of that hosting we also provide free hosting for organisations who we think shouldn’t have to pay, or put another way, who have better uses for that money. Thus our agency is providing a service to the community and regardless of its profitability has created value. Sustainable Materials Interesting designs and formats with unusual materials are probably the highlight of print work. However, its important to bear in mind when choosing stocks, sizes and materials the environmental cost of what you are doing. There are a variety of things you can do in this regard too, for example choosing recyclable materials over non-recyclable, biodegradable over non-biodegradable, keeping paper sizes relatively standard to prevent huge wastage in offcuts, selecting a printer or manufacturer that has a commitment to the environment and so on.
there will be a run of thousands of copies, so a small change will make a large difference. It may cost slightly more (though certainly not always), but you can simply pass this cost on to the client, explaining the reasoning. If you aren t proposing anything outrageous and they are a reasonable sized client, they will more than likely accept, no sweat off your back and you can sleep better at night knowing you ve made a contribution Telling it like it is Now we all know that advertising is about glossing over a product’s failings and focusing on its strengths and this is a great way to market things. Occasionally however advertising falls into the domain of outright lies. I once built a website for a property development billed as being the ultimate in design and location. The property itself, a perfectly ordinary looking building in an ordinary location near an airport with planes constantly flying overhead. Now I dutifully went about my job and listening to the client went about cropping images in such a way as to only highlight parts of the building, zooming in on the view of the coastline to make it seem closer and so on. Who loses out in such a scenario? The average guy on the street who is out buying a home. Maybe he’s a bad guy, maybe he’s a good guy, maybe he’s you. We all hope that once the guy gets there he’ll make his own decision, but this stuff works, so it seems he doesn’t. Why do sports cars have half naked women draped over them? Why do they then sell so well? We are all so much easier to fool than we’d like to admit. The point is, advertising is all well and good, but you should always use your best judgement in marketing products and services and keep things in check, exactly the way I did’ t. Ethically Sound These few points are just the tip of the iceberg, and there will be issues that you believe in as an individual more than others. But hopefully the distinctions that we at Good believe in have got you thinking. If our businesses are ethically sound, we will have a more prosperous community. http://www.thegoodness.com.au
The key factor to remember is that in virtually any print job,
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TURN AROUND: TRENDS AND SUSTAINABLE DESIGN By Michael Hardt
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We move backwards through life, looking at our past. As we don’t have eyes in our back of the head we can’t see our future.
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bove is the way that the Sami people describe the future. There is a lot of truth in it - philosophically. Practically I have never seen a Sami going backwards. They look forwards to avoid getting lost in the woods or destroy the traces of the reindeer. Of course nobody can see the future, but one can estimate it. This estimating process is called a scenario, building on a statistical evaluation. The result is called a trend, a projection of an existing direction within society into the future, basing on mathematical and statistical calculations. Trend is not another word for fashion and a trend cannot be made; it can only be made usable. A mega-trend is a long-term projection of the social development. As designers, we have to be aware of the trend, follow the development and translate it into visible items. Example: The public discussion is dealing with the new media. Politicians discuss legal action against data pirates, downloading music illegally. Copyright laws break down worldwide. The big record companies have a dramatic loss of sales due to the pirates. Innovative and successful products today are small high-tech devices that ensure permanent access to the individual and social information network. People don’t want to buy a CD with 25 songs just because they like one. They like to sample their own individual music program. And they want to listen to their own music wherever and whenever they want. While the music industry called for legal action and politicians began to prepare steps to reduce freedom, Apple assumed that the intention of people is not to do something illegal, but to use the possibilities of new technologies. So their answer was to make downloading legal, easy and affordable.
iTunes and iPod are product developments basing on trend research and decisions following changing consumer behaviour. iTunes had 100 million legal downloads within 3 months. All of a sudden the future of the music industry looks bright again, even brighter than before. They have made the step from a material product to an immaterial product. Designers play a major role in heating up mass consumption and we complain about this capitalistic world - but we helped to make it. We can also play a role in shaping a new and hopefully better world. It is not a secret that if we continue our mass consumption and throw-away mentality we will have used up most of the world’s resources within less than 50 years. Society has to learn to save as many resources as possible. If we could manage to use half of what we use today, we would gain time to find new technologies and materials. Maybe. The era of industrialised mass consumption is on decline. A new mega-trend is coming up but the trend lines have not crossed yet. Experts expect this to happen within the next 5 to 10 years. A change in mega-trend happens once or twice in a century, and we have the privilege to experience such a change: The trend of immaterial mass use. The market structures and routines are not developed yet. But as you can see in the example of iTunes, it is under rapid development. This trend will change the design profession as well. The key-word is: Sustainable Design Until today, a designer is paid to produce the prototypes for the industrial production of communication products. The vast majority of our jobs is connected to marketing and aims at selling more products. Even if you illustrate a children book, the interest of the publisher is to produce a material product that attracts clients to buy it and provides a return in investment. One can look at design from a more idealistic and ethical point of view to see the cultural importance, the artistic aspect. You might not like to hear this but designers often overestimate the importance of this cultural aspect. The majority of our clients see us as executive staff in the preproduction stage of a project to improve the sales. In most of the cases today the designer is not asked to communicate a message. We are commissioned to design a CD-cover, a catalogue, a brochure, a corporate identity, an illustration for a book, a packaging: Material products. Let’s imagine 2 possible scenarios of our future as visual communication designers.
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320 pages, format 210x250, CMYK, 100 million issues, split in 20 regional issues and languages, including Chinese. Fee for the design per page 1 000 Euro. Design of the regional versions 500 Euro per page. Total 3.52 million Euro. What if you find out that the project would look better with 40 pages more? Ask for 440 000 Euro more! More pages, more work, more money. Scenario 2 The same client comes up to you and asks you to design their new product communication concept. So far they had a catalogue with 320 pages, format 210x250, CMYK, 100 million issues, split in 20 regional issues and languages. As total design-fee they offer 3.5 million Euro. For every page you need less without loosing communicational impact you get a bonus fee of 10 000 Euro! For every page more your fee will be reduced for 10 000 Euro. Would you propose the additional pages of scenario 1
because the design would look better? Imagine you would save all those pages because you would find a new way of getting the message to the reader - would this be a bad deal for your client? Why would someone be interested in offering such a project where you get more for doing less or less for doing more? The answer is simple: The client would save a lot of money because of your intelligent proposal. Less paper, less printing costs, less weight to transport, less petrol for trucks. The savings would be millions of Euros. Forests would not be cut and petrol would not be spoiled. Time, energy, resources and money would be saved but, on the other hand, you would be responsible for printers losing work, paper mills closing, and truck-drivers becoming unemployed. How could you solve the issue? You need to analyse the communication process: What is important and relevant? What part of the message can be taken out without losing information? How can we use existing media in a more sophisticated way? Identify weaknesses and look for possibilities to improve the
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Communication is a process, not a product
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cenario 1 Imagine a global furniture distributor asking you to design their next catalogue:
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People don’t want to buy a CD with 25 songs just because they like one
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process and reduce costs. This is part of the design project to be visualised, documented and presented to the client. Visualising processes is an important and growing field of activity within our profession [information design]. You will be able to visualise that the weak points of the process are: a. the dissemination of the catalogue and b. the waste of information and material. A consumer who wants to buy new furniture for the sleeping room because he moves together with his girlfriend might not yet be interested in information about children’s furniture at this stage. It takes time to transport the product to the consumer and the catalogue as such has a given lifespan of actuality, including the need to fix prices over this period. If the transport of the information could happen online, many problems would be solved. But some simply want the good old catalogue. Why not make this printed catalogue a beautiful book of inspirations, sold via Amazon or available in the client’s stores, with a link to a pricelist with technical data online? Instead of incurring
costs, you could generate new income. I guess that an issue of 1 million would be considered as a bestseller. And it can be organised to be printed just-in-time, printing on demand. The problem is to assure that the consumer can print out the additional facts he wants with his own facilities: Decentralised printing on demand. If you come up with such a proposal you must be well prepared and have good arguments. To change old habits takes an effort. You will have more enemies than friends. Unfortunately visual communication designers in general are not seen as competent to design the communication process and the emphasis of the design education has so far been more product- than process-oriented. If we want to contribute to the new trend and make design sustainable we have to leave the product orientation and become process oriented. Sustainability means to avoid production. So we have to put the focus on the process. It is not the media that counts but the communication. We design visually perceived communication. Communication is a process, not a product.
http://www.icograda.org/feature/current/articles206.htm
Zappo Sustainability Beer Coaster By Christhard Landgraf
Design and Sustainability
form and aesthetics subject and function semantics
zappo-berlin.de
Good Design Sustainability
Design Repertoire physical and intellectual resources, tools/aids
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Innovation usage production accessibility material technologies intelligibility
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ecological, economic and social factors
Planning
Process Management
design function production use reuse disposal
analysis concept development design management implementation and verification
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Sustainability fits on a beer coaster
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ith it sustainability becomes a handy, easy to understand, constant companion.
The coaster allows you to immediately analyze, evaluate and improve any project during a meeting with clients or partners. The coaster helps you to have an open, goal-oriented discussion and encourages you to find alternatives in design and printing. These 85 square centimeters of cardboard show all the important issues and all factors that need to be considered in a designer’s work and its subsequent realization. How does that work? With the help of the radar or spider chart, it is easy to evaluate and compare a product according to certain criteria. For printing and design we have devised six main criteria each. And each of them is defined by further points of action. So now you can quickly navigate the areas of sustainable design and sustainable printing with little effort.
“Design and Sustainability” facilitates the complex, process-oriented approach to design. It is the basis for the way in which a modern designer works. It is important to remain open-minded and to constantly broaden your horizon, for applying the principles successfully to your work. “Printing and Sustainability“ focuses on the environmentally friendly production. Of course you need a thorough knowledge2 of materials, technologies and processes. The search for alternative options is at the center of both “Design and Sustainability” and “Printing and Sustainability“. How does it actually work?
Solutions with lines furthest from the center are better than those with lines closer to the origin. The area itself has no meaning as it is defined through the individual weighting of various(?) criteria. This process should be interative. You should constantly strive to find an even more sustainable solution. And it’s actually quite fun to do! Try it. http://zappo-berlin.de/content/ zappopedia/beer_coaster.php Christhard Landgraf © 2012, zappo, Berlin
You rate each criterion on the concentric circles (1 = worst to 10 = best), i.e. how well a solution meets or should meet a criterion. This can be based on an objective analysis or your subjective assessment. You need to mark each solution with a different color and connect each point of a color with a straight line. The result gives you rating profiles for each solution. Do not forget to include solutions already realized.
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Pub. 04.11.12 £7.99
issue
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