The Social Role of the Graphic Designer

Pierre Bernard, co-founder of Grapus and Atelier de Création Graphique, delivered this lecture in Minneapolis in 1991. It was reprinted in Essays on Design I: AGI’s Designers of Influence, London 1997.

Artists have for a long time been heading for ghettos, whether rich or poor. Other people have been subjected to a major mass-media aesthetic — or for the most underprivileged — to its leftovers. Our Western society is working at two different speeds. For the minority, a world of calm has come into being in which design means authentic quality. Art can be part of every life. It is a world in which a materialised and human reality can develop.

For the rest — the majority — what is offered is exactly the opposite. Art is something to be visited in reservations, and spiritual harmony is to be found in other realms, religious or chemical.

Inequality is on the increase. The humanist dream of a unification of our planet’s history in the capitalist logic of multinationals has in practice become a reductive standardization. It has thus been deemed legitimate to give arts and artists the function of entertainment and decoration, while techniques and technicians take care of efficient production.

This division of labour amounts to a complete capitulation as regards the principles on which design is founded. The division between the artist as creator and the artisan as technician has been born again out of the ashes of those founding principles. It marks a return to the Stone Age.

I believe that the single identity of the artist and the technician in the person of the graphic designer forms the basis for his capacity to assert his role strongly — and to take his own specific action as an individual who is a part of civilization. I believe that the social function of the graphic designer is a subject to be approached through opinions and persuasion rather than through logic and knowledge.

“Life will always be hard enough to prevent men from losing the desire for something better,” Maxim Gorky said. The graphic designer’s social responsibility is based on the wish to take part in the creation of a better world. It seems simple to declare such a principle, but given the contradictions of real life, the principle does not lead readily to practical rules of behaviour.

A social critique

Any assessment of the social dimension of graphic design must always be made in a specific concrete situation, and this is a most difficult task. We all live in society; but not in the same one. At least, thank God, not yet.

Today, the production of visual communications consists essentially of advertising. Visual productions in advertising are hugely sophisticated and articulated in relation to gigantic mass-media networks. They transcend frontiers and cultural divides. Their basic critique has been developed by the Marxist critic John Berger in Ways of Seeing. He demonstrates that “glamour” is a modern invention in terms of images. It is the expression of the pursuit of individual happiness, considered as a universal right.

Berger goes on to say that “publicity turns consumption into a substitute for democracy. The choice of what one eats (or wears or drives) takes the place of significant political choice. Publicity helps to mask and compensate for all that is undemocratic within society. And it also masks what is happening in the rest of the world.”

There is a difference between advertising and graphic design. Advertising is today more and more centralized, international, generalized and, therefore, standardized — like the economic forces that produce it, and the products it deals with. Graphic design, on the other hand, continues to be created and to structure itself in an autonomous and diversified manner — in direct contact with the specific social fabrics of different societies around the world. It is this diversity that provides the possibility for the development of graphic communication across the world in the future.

If we look at simplified representation of graphic communication, we see that it has transmitting subjects (clients and graphic designers), messages and objects (goals, ends, products), and receivers (audiences and consumers) with their needs and expectations. Second, communication happens in a concrete time frame. The link between these two propositions gives us the social dimension of graphic design.

From the point of view of time, one can classify communication on a scale. At one end of the scale, we find the graphic design that I call the graphic design of permanence, aiming at the medium and long term. At the other end of the scale there is an ephemeral graphic design, aiming at the short term.

From the point of view of space, I also distinguish two major classes of graphic design: graphic design integrated with either a physical structure or an identity; and independent graphic design. We notice that independent graphic design is often short-lived, whereas integrated graphic design is more permanent, both varying according to time and place.

Permanent graphic design

What is the typical landscape of permanent graphic design? It consists of architecture and urban design; newspaper grids; charts, maps and diagrams; reference books such as atlases and catalogues; calendars, notices, instruction forms and signs; plans and pictographic systems. They all work toward the visual expression of a general structural development.

The goal of this kind of graphic design (permanent, integrated) is achieved by integrating the message (form, content) with society. It confirms established values and asks that they be accepted. It transforms the idea, the judgement, and the aesthetic value into tangible “natural” reality. Generally, graphic design is presented as functional, but the symbolic role it plays quickly becomes permanent and takes on a new functionality: ideological integration

In the recent past, permanent, integrated graphic design was a vehicle for many humanist aspirations and major progressive values. Today, in conjunction with the demolition of the mass media and the gradual shrinking of the world, the goal of social consensus often leads such design to forget specific social realities in favour of a higher international model, one that directly produces packaging. Permanent, integrated graphic design is one of the math areas of intervention for graphic designers who are conscious of their social role.