The graphic designer and the receiver

The relationship between the graphic designer and the receiver can work efficiently only in the presence of the client. The notion of quality shared by the client and the designer will be determined by the respect in which the receiver is held. This appreciation will be expressed in the cultural level of the message (form, content) in relation to the present cultural level of the receiver.

If social and cultural measuring devices can be used to give valuable information about receivers, they can also be used to consider the receivers simply as military “targets”, where the objective has to be achieved by any means. Such measurement can also lead to a communications strategy based on the isolation of the general public into typecast groups. By crystallizing diversity it transforms a group of free-ranging citizens into several small groups of specialized consumers.

One of the major social functions of graphic design is quite the opposite: broadening the cultural horizon of the public directly concerned.

The relationship between the graphic designer and the receiver also works within the mediation of the message. In most cases, this mediation imposes a one-way communication. The communication does not communicate: it soliloquizes. The right to respond on equal terms does not exist.

The situation forces the two subjects of the communication, client and graphic designer, into social isolation. The client’s status is one of power, and his isolation in mediated communication leads him to want more power. The social status of the graphic designer is one of dependence. Confronted with his isolation, there are two directions he can take: one toward greater dependence on the client; the other toward a greater awareness of the balance needed in the communication process. The less specialized they are in a repetitive relationship with the client, the more freedom the designer will have to make the choice to become the receiver’s silent ally.

The graphic designer and the message

It is through the message that the graphic designer as co-author finally confronts his or her knowledge, culture, conceptions and sincerity. The graphic designer must define a strategy and be aware of other existing social strategies, including those that arise from different national situations. In relation to the message, the graphic designer applies pertinent expression codes whether derived from local, national, or international culture — thus producing emotion and meaning. As in Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, this capacity of graphic designers to find paths through the “dark forest of signs” makes them artists in the full sense.

If one conceives one’s work as being based on the status of a technician and an artist, this implies having a general cultural objective that goes beyond merely giving form to an operational discourse.

This “going beyond” tells us we cannot be satisfied with the practice of ephemeral graphic design that has no relation to (or is in disagreement with) a global society. Nor can professional satisfaction arise from a permanent graphic design that remains unaltered despite the struggles and historical changes of the world it purports to reflect.

For this reason, it becomes necessary to link ephemeral and permanent, integrated and independent, in order to assert an articulate, complex cultural conception that is not elitist, populist or reductive. Therefore, social graphic design corresponds to the cultural dimension of the message, to its articulation in a long-term project of cultural development, where the permanent-integrated (strategy) and the ephemeral-independent (tactic) are not in contradiction.

In opposition to the standardized profusion of advertising, we must work from particular social situations — from their specific dynamics and their manageable human dimensions. It is from these that small communications units will be able to build creative works that will regenerate and develop the visual riches already attained by society.

If the moral values that founded graphic design have almost disappeared in favour of those of triumphant marketing, they continue to underlie the awareness of many designers and students scattered around the world. It is this consciousness that must be encouraged and maintained. We can hope to see these values flourish openly within the different social realities to come.