Short-lived graphic design

What is the typical landscape of short-lived graphic design? Here, in contrast to permanent graphic design, the landscape seen to include diverse and specific acts: narrations and contradictory, divergent or opposite affirmations on posters, newspapers, advertisements, windows, leaflets, programmes, books, exhibitions, films, videos and so on.

This type of graphic design (ephemeral, independent) aims at transmitting specific messages linked to specific situations. Ephemeral, independent graphic design seems to have an operLaucoaii nature opposite to the functional nature of integrated, permanem graphic design. Its products are ephemeral. They attract attencci and then disappear.

If this classification — permanent versus ephemeral and integrated versus independent — is valid, we can conclude that the ideological consensus is linked to socio-graphic stability. That is, people tend to think alike if the visual landscape is structured and unchanging. And the feeling of freedom is linked to the presence of numerous and varied disagreements in live exchanges. However, as Berger has shown us, this “display” of freedom is mere illusion, when the general strategy behind it leads exclusively to consumption. For how long, and to what socially progressive ends, comes the feeling of freedom through consumption?

It is this dead-end situation that has led many high-level graphic designers to abandon ephemeral, independent design for the permanent, integrated projects considered to be more worthy.

Designer and client as co-authors

Let us move from the time frame of graphic design and examine the different participants and their relationships.

In the process of communication, the graphic designer and the client together constitute the transmitter. The message will be the result of their collaboration. Who chooses whom? By nature, the client needs the graphic designer only occasionally, whether the arrangement is repetitive or continuous.

Unlike the graphic designer, who looks for a kind of communication that is in relation to the nature of the message and of the presumed receiver, the client’s concerns and existence are elsewhere, outside of the communication process. The client looks for what would appear to be a solution (a graphic product) to his problems, in a competitive context. It is for this reason that the client tends to consider communication as strictly instrumental, and the graphic designer as a neutral transmitter of his message. The instrumental conception of visual communication is often the one adopted by clients who themselves have a very narrow view of their own role as transmitter.

But can neutral aesthetics exist? Can the message of the client always be unequivocal, never ambiguous? The truth between the client and the graphic designer will always be a complex and subjective truth. Otherwise, this collaboration has no reason to exist and can be advantageously replaced by a mechanical act.

It is through the contact established at the outset of the collaboration with the designer that the client can be brought to widen his perspective and transform his desire in order to obtain, among other things, that result. It is this contact that can make him conscious of his cultural role and his power of decision over the time frame of the communication.

The designer would like to choose a client for his apparent social role. The client — whose pragmatism about cost influences his demands — chooses the designer because of his know-how in relation to the economics of production. The depth of the relationship depends to a considerable extent on the nature of the consideration the client has for the know-how of graphic design. While many small-scale clients in the social, cultural, political, and even economic fields have high expectations of graphic designers, many others with considerable social influence are unaware of graphic design or have a very simplistic conception of it.

It will be absolutely essential, in the years ahead, to make graphic design known in its complete technical, intellectual, and artistic dimension. Then, graphic designers will be in a position to identify and respond consciously to requests that generate social acts that they can support in their role as co-authors.

This notion of co-authorship seems essential to me, from an ethical point of view. The necessary co-operation between client and graphic designer will lead the client to share the aesthetic position (not devoid of ideology) of the designer, and it will lead the designer to accept the validity of the ideological position of his client. It is this particular balance between co-authors that allows the production to be oriented toward a cultural act, which. by definition, is always risky.

If this important notion does not operate in the client-graphic designer relationship, then it becomes a service relationship only. And under these conditions, professional responsibility becomes a delusion.