The End of Print
David Carson, Lewis Blackwell 1995
[‌] Content is the big issue in design today. The question is what relationship does the visual language have with the verbal one? We think we are so familiar with our own (verbal) language, it comes as a shock to realize it is never received pure, without being coloured by the transmission. We are used to seeing words as the content and then either as text that is typeset for a layout and perhaps illustrated, or perhaps as a script that is performed live or to a camera, again framed and illustrated in various ways. However, we are increasingly aware that these words change in the telling: the emphasis, the context, the distractions. And we are aware that these words cannot exist in communication without some form of telling: thus the shaping and the shaper of that visual/verbal language inevitably goes beyond the word or the writer. Perhaps this changing perception is one explanation of why the designer has been thrust up as some kind of hero of our age over the past decade: suddenly these former crafts operatives are seen as genius arch-manipulators that can make the world a better or worse place. This hype obscures the fact that any designer is just part of the whole process too, only able to add a personal contribution as an artist may or to abnegate this contribution and simply operate as some technician in the vast message machine that goes on operating all around us. But some people do stand out for expressing matters many thousands every day. [‌] 40
