currently sr. art director at AIAIAI, and freelance for music labels, artists, and cultural institutions.
are.na
conversation
©2026
currently sr. art director at AIAIAI, and freelance for music labels, artists, and cultural institutions.
are.na
conversation
©2026
september 17 2026–transcript
[DS]: One thing I was thinking about recently was the Max Bill and Tschichold rivalry, and reading this essay from Experimental Jetset called Design and Ideology, where they talk about ideology, and it references this other essay, Socialism and Print by Debray: how the video era is post-modernism and the print era is modernism, and how ideology was disseminated through print manifestos, how all this cultural, political and philosophical content was happening in those channels.
So when I try to think about where we stand right now, my question is: who designs the ideology now? Is it studios? Is it brands, platforms or is it no one? I understand we are still living in the era of video, but it seems unlikely to me that all of that just died. In an ideal world that should have transformed into something else and I don't know where to find it, buried in commercial work that's produced under the conditions that the work is produced right now.
[DW]: In short: if you follow the lines that Debray and Experimental Jetset are referencing, ideology was disseminated through print.
I think ideology is now, if at all, disseminated through the work and through the presentations of the work. These can take the form of more straightforward forms of documentation, elaborate(and performative) case studies, and more commonly now, actual presentations and keynote speaking engagements that act as advertisements for the work. But I don't if it's ideology anymore as much as its personality that has taken hold of the our attention. It is no longer so much what the person believes in, or practices, as much as it is about how they perform design. The designer is now unfortunately seen as an integral part of the design and the skill set, the craft, and expertise is no longer the priority. It is separated from that now. The context and function of the work has also been flattened, and at times removed from a lot of work in how it is shown. This creates a very confused understanding of design. It is not hard to imagine a case where someone could come to me and be like, "David, I really love this art book that you did. I have a video, could you work on it?" And I would almost undoubtedly say yes, and then go and get a motion designer and someone that I then creative direct, execute, but this is where the intentioned artist, and their relationship to work and labor clashes with the alienated designer. But I think this particular form of alienation is quite new. Before, no one was coming to 8vo to direct a commercial, because that's not what they did, that's not what they believed in, and that's not what they specialized in.
So now the skill set isn't even tied to ideology. The type of work you do isn't tied to ideology. It’s very surface, and the opportunities themselves have more and more dictated the cultural value of design in contemporary discourse.
And the presentations, from the ones I've been able to see online and experience, are largely a celebration of the opportunity, more than the thought or the concept or the ideas or the craft that went behind the work. It's: “Oh great, another tech company being branded by another big studio. Let's clap our hands, this is amazing.” Many aspects of the identities often resemble the algorithmic top layer floating on top of are.na and pinterest. How is that affecting the value of the types of work we do as designers? And how can we change that?
More and more you are seeing studios show “process” in the form of classic pin-ups. Hundreds of icons, various color palettes, and other aspects of traditional brand identity, multiplied and tacked to the wall. The work, so diffuse, and infinite ironically becomes a mood board in itself. The sketch directly replace the blocks of reference or worse—research they come from. It seems to become more about the performance of design as we imagine it to be done behind closed walls, than the discriminating act of design itself. This behavior, at a certain point, threatens to devalue the act of design completely. You start to see common points of reference more clearly jump forward. Rather than constructing something new through dialogue with research, deep exchange with the client, and forming a new hypothesis in which the work is derived you get more or less a distorted reflection of the initial moodboards. Eventually these platforms for “research” like Arena and Pinterest start to have these core blocks that everyone's seen, everyone is responding too, and ultimately using to inform their own work. Professionally we are at risk of a flattened and incestuous visual culture. The ways we are finding references, and using them has all become too familiar.
It used to not be that way—even on platforms like Are.na. If any one singular platform, or common stream of “blocks” becomes the predominant source of visual reference and literacy, then we're all being fed the same thing by the platform, by the funnel. In that respect, Arena—initially acted as a subcultural alternative to the massive platforms, but now through its mass adoption, is really no different than Pinterest. This is largely due to the fact that the platform reflects the action of it’s users, and what the dominant number of users wants, and does on the platform is no longer aligned to the mission are.na set off to achieve in the world. We as designers started to behave and want something different.
This is all to say, that as social media became the dominant form of sharing, discussing, and “promoting” design we swapped craft, context, and discourse for a more superficial engagement in the form of likes and shares. We devalued the craft of design while also removing the rigor of discourse, not to mention institutions, and skills that helped maintain a focus on the work, and importantly the contexts in which the work existed. These institutions and forms of discourse helped curb the celebrity formation, and the weight we now seem to place on the commissioner, or at the very least grounded them in a larger theory of the work.
[DS]: Of course trying to find your own voice is very painful and very difficult. When I started as a self-taught designer, my first couple of years were basically being a trend-follower designer. Whatever the trend of the moment was, I was doing that, because I would just replicate, because that's one way you can learn.
But then at some point you have to remove that, turn that off, and be like, okay, what am I gonna do without having all these external references? It's like relearning from scratch. You trip and you fall, and you trip and you fall, and then you find something. And of course it's a lot more rewarding making it happen on the first try because you’re using a set of references.
If you were handed a package of different images that you build like building blocks of what you're gonna do next, it's just like a meat grinder: okay, I grab block one, I put it on top of block two, and then I do this, and then I do that. It's like a recipe. But you're not assembling a burger. You're doing design.
[DW]: Totally.
[DS]: It's just like the other way is a lot harder and a lot less rewarding sometimes, because you're gonna have to bang your head against a wall until you get an idea. I'm not saying an original idea and reinventing the wheel, but an idea.
So I don't know. Going back to the ideology subject, I think about this all the time. Your response answers it quite well, because I'm like, how do you even sneak this kind of ideology into commercial work? You need to do commercial work to survive, especially in this day and age. Is that something that only gets relegated to self-initiated projects? Because it's getting increasingly difficult for me to even find time to do self-initiated personal projects, it's very difficult to balance.
I recently went to a very well-known design conference, and despite there being very good creatives, the modality ends up being showing a portfolio. I’d rather hear how and why you did the work. I can see that the work is good. We're all supposed to be designers here and we can see that the work is good. Even "I was on a walk and I saw this on the floor that made me have this idea", I find it more insightful than just showing the work, because I can see it with my own eyes. And then you hear the classic closing talk, which is [REDACTED], always saying the same thing. "What do you think about AI?" AI good/AI bad, no critical thought whatsoever. Of course, these are brilliant people, but why is everything so bland in terms of critical thought?
[DW]: Your last point about [REDACTED] is my problem with design, it reminds me of that era. The late '90s and early 2000s were a transition period from the height of commercialization and capitalization of design. There were studios that closed in that period, and studios that continued working through it. You can look at those studios and their output, and I'd say the rigour of their output drastically changed in relation to this capitalization.
A primary example of this is North. I have collected, and greatly admired their work—primarily between the 1990s and early 2000s. Without diving too deeply into it I will always be inspired by the avant-garde and modernist notions developed, and put into practice by the Swiss, but as Hollis has written, the British, through an specific exchange of ideas and bodies, really picked up the torch and continued that legacy almost more honestly at times. I model a lot of my typographic practice off the things they've done, tried and tested.
But I digress—you look at North’s work after this period and it slowly, then quickly shifts away from more content-driven projects, predicated on information architecture, typographic systems (even when they are branding and identity projects like Syn Music, or the RAC more notably), and cultural identity to marketable forms corporate expressions. This begins to reveal design’s inherent commercial dependency. This transformation in their work, and the opportunities embraced by the studio that generated the work goes to show what capitalism was demanding of design at the time, and what the clients “needed” or believed they needed. Corporations and Cultural Institutions even no longer desired to tell intense stories through deeper narratives that often rendered themselves typographically. They stopped needing typography, and began needing stamps, wordmarks and logos. And the work just changes. The ecology changed and design had to change with it, and I think that's the biggest problem. I find these particular conditions less inspiring.
And again, not to sound nostalgic, but there are certain core qualities inherent in design that manifests itself physically—largely through print, and at a slower pace, that allows one to create, and reinforce values of time, and friction. What we've done with all these new formats, contexts and media is remove that friction. How do we get that back? And not even just friction, but the space and freedom to express difference.
If a client comes in and they're main strategy, and worse, their point of existence is to capitalize off the success of direct competitors, the act of design and making is still-born. They are indeed bad clients, and I believe good, and honest work can not come from bad clients without turning a blind eye, and defiance. But this would be performing design. In any case, the difference is a non-starter. They inevitably want to look similar, and if you don't look similar you are not converting, and if you don’t convert, make yourself relatable, you're failing. Your revenue shrinks, and quarterly returns dwindle. This is purely design as an act of capital optimization. Maybe this is me externalizing my own problem, but I do think it's one that is becoming more and more common due to the mechanics of marketing and analytics that seems to be more and more controlling—especially within design for consumer goods and services, but this is also effecting the cultural sector more and more especially in the states where government grants and support is practically non-existent.
For me that's such an ideological shift: we should create something that feels different, standalone, and excels on its own merits. The design looking different shouldn't affect the profit. But in their minds that is a characteristic of success or failure. When you're the first in an industry it's easier. But as they create the wake, and with precarity, profit, PNL dictating "hey, this looks too different, we need to make this look more like this". And I'm like, no. No, we don't. Quite the opposite.
[DS]: Do you think that has to do with what we were talking about before, about the client coming to the initial meeting with already a moodboard and already predefined ideas? You're not allowed to do your job as a designer: a lot of exploration, because the other person already went to gather these ideas of what they think it should be like when they don't know, and they're already closing the box. You're gonna have a box at some point, but you should start without it. So why would you start with the box halfway closed through? We should be building it, and I think we should be building the box in conversation with them. But much of the initial processes feel like the client thinking "No, it needs to look like this."
[DW]: This is where I use the term appropriateness. I've been really trying to understand the role of appropriateness as a critical device within design history. There's one essay, I have it quoted somewhere. Essentially, in one section they're critiquing the avant-garde design that was happening in the '20s. The example they use is a calligraphy ink ad: the product is sitting in the corner, but all around it is just style graphic design. This is 1928. The writer says the designer is missing the point of the product in and of itself, that it should look like calligraphy, that it should embody those things.
But I think what the designer was doing at that time is embodying the sentiment of their era, what it meant to be making work then. And I think that's the biggest thing. It's a very hard thing to put into design, but if more people just had that thinking: what does it mean to be designing for this thing now? Rather than, “I need to design for this thing within this marketplace and it needs to look visually like this”. I think those are just more interesting things to talk about.
But clients have a lot of power now, because it's so easy for them to access visual culture. They're somewhat visually literate, and their dependency on designers isn't as strong as it once was. An IBM executive actually needed Paul Rand. Now the IBM executive doesn't really need Paul Rand. I'd say now they want us, not out of necessity, but luxury, almost an unnecessary luxury: if you have a budget, spend it.
And that's the other thing that's really frustrating. It's not every client, but there are those clients where you either re-educate and they're able to come around, or you just have to find ways of manipulating through it in order to plant a seed.
[DS]: We have to take on a lot of roles, a lot more than we should. Something that has never happened to me yet, but I read all these horror stories: designers get AI-generated feedback. The client grabs a delivery, processes it through an LLM, and the LLM writes the feedback.
And it goes back to my conflict with this: I don't think a new technology is inherently bad. But when the technology is marketed as this hyper-intelligent thing while it's actually just a database that collects as much information as possible, a very large index of information, it's essentially a copy machine by nature.
I'm receptive to technological advancement. We all love new technologies, if not we would not be here, we would still be setting text in Linotype and Monotype machines. It's good that we can design with a computer, good that we can design our own fonts in an accessible way. But AI is kind of a glorified copy machine, made to seem like a very smart thing. And then clients process the delivery through an AI, the AI writes the feedback and sends it back to you. What are we doing?
[DW]: Yeah, so this is the kind of comparison back to the Luddites. There's a common misconception: the Luddites weren't anti-technology or anti-machine. They were resistant to mediocrity. What they were against was that the looms the factory owners were bringing in, to replace the workers or for them to work with, were creating an inferior product. They were resisting the urge of efficiency in exchange for inferiority of the product more than the machines used to produce the goods themselves.
And I think that's the same problem here. All things aside, if environmental factors were no longer a concern, AI is not necessarily a problem for me. If we were to solve the attribution of all this content, the data lakes and data pools, the models and the data they're trained on, if all of that was set aside and everyone's happy, it's how people use it, and how it gets used in the process of design and work. But from my experience, particularly with clients, and upper levels of management, AI has only enabled incompetence to function more highly, and ultimately place more burden on the act of making. Positions that otherwise would support design from content production, copy-writing, and project management to name a few have been off-loaded, and this is only going to become more common.
And that's my problem: it's creating inferior products. It's almost like a lubricant for worse work.
[DS]: Yeah. What I can interpret from what you're saying, and I share the sentiment, is we're all being pushed to be generalists. And that includes almost everything, even copywriting and so many other things. The quality of your work is gonna suffer, because you cannot concentrate on one thing and do it well. The days where you could be "I'm a typographer, and that's it", like 8vo, seem to be gone. You're expected to produce and be the creative director or every aspect, even to the extent of how you show your work.
So the reach is very big, but at the same time you have to be complacent. How do you find a good middle ground where it's good to know how to do a lot of things, being a generalist, without your work suffering through it?
[DW]: This is why I like Octavo’s monograph 8vo: On the Outside so much. They recognized the writing on the wall and at the end, rather “than push through” they decided to close shop.
But the vast majority of all laborers today don't have that privilege. I don’t. I need to keep working. So now I have to change the conditions somehow. We have to question, critique, and change our frustrations as much as possible. There is no other way. We have to reclaim, and architect the future of design we want to see and enact. Nothing should be assumed. Whether it is asking questions like “what it means to function as a designer” or how work is shown and understood? It is up to us to practice new models, and create better platforms for exchange and discourse. I resist the performance of design today, and yearn for new alternative models of working.
We've had a democratization of design technology, but what about design opportunities? And having a better understanding of the ways in which we factor the client's cultural capital into the value of the work itself. Maybe I'm not in the right circle, and maybe this is happening somewhere, but I don't think that it is.
Those are the types of things I've seen change in the last 10 years: leaving grad school, working at a large brand, working in an arts institution, then running the studio for the last five years. Working directly with very commercial clients but also with artists, and seeing this flattening. Even on the arts and cultural side, if it's not performing or looking a certain way then it's not right.
So it's figuring out strategies, even if it's a strategy of retreat? I often find myself losing my mind a bit in the bubble I'm looking out through. From social media one would think I am fairly inactive, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. I've been doing a lot of personal work, and even client work, work that I am proud of, but when the projects are complete invoices sent, and deliverables land I find myself sending it to just a handful of people. I don't “share” it. t's a strange problem that I'm trying to work through: how do you resist the forced function of being a designer on social media, set a different example that's not just "here's my identity case study, here's the logo in the center" but also survive in an honest way? These tropes that are manifesting themselves almost determine how the work gets looked at, and therefore how you get work.
[DS]: I think as designers we have that duty, otherwise you fall into the pit of “The client's brought me a bunch of references that don't make any sense together, and I'm going to distill sense out of this and put it together as some kind of recipe." It's great to take every single project as an opportunity to try something new and see what you can discover out of it. It's something I personally have to work on internally, every single project, to not fall into the complacency of "this is what the client wants and this is what I'm going to give them." It takes a lot of effort.
[DW]: Yeah. I think this just has me thinking about a project that Michael Oswell did for Progress Bar. All of those flyers, I look at those things and really I see the client acting as a patron in that. They're helping to give Michael a platform to make the things that he thinks are interesting in service of them, but they're acting as patrons, and a lot of clients used to be that—and not just the “good ones”. There was respect—they used to be patrons.
I think it's the fact that they have such easy access to generate, in quotes, "their own ideas" that removed that patronage. And it became more transactional and operational. That's the thing I think is worth exploring further in the future: design shifting from patronage to operation. And again, I think 8vo was experiencing that. They became operators cranking out these information architectures and information systems for a very niche kind of client, and they were really good at it, and that was the work that was just coming in.
But you're not necessarily operating in the same way in collaboration with a client as when you're working on a poster series advertising shows or events, where you can inject these other ideas in. You have to either take that control or be given that control, and I think it's that, the willful giving of trust, that's become more and more scarce.
But it's funny, I think time and capital change a lot of these things, even in people. Like Marvin Jarrett, the guy who started Raygun, I've tried to do projects with him, and the freedom and the context that existed for Raygun to become what it became doesn't really exist anymore. He was the person that gave that platform. Now the level of control and trust and foundation of expectation has changed, and the free willing experimentation is being even more controlled.
I can't imagine, and I could be completely wrong, someone like Chris Ashworth back in the '90s getting the kind of comments and edits that would neuter the design, 'cause clearly the design wasn't neutered. That's what I mean, even the conditions of how dialogue happens in design between the client and the designer, something has shifted. And I don't know if it's knowledge, if it's quote-unquote expertise or something, but even in those scenarios it's a miracle when something happens. Every issue that I do for Hypebeast, there's the ideal design in my mind, and then there's the design that comes out on the other end of the process. Sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, but often different. This is the process. Design is a process and dialogue, but great conversations are not one-sided.
I just think it makes great design even more precious. When I see something that is amazing, different, unique, I relish it. It's little tweaks that could open up the potential for all of these things. Going back to the De Stijl advertisement for Clinger Bee, someone in control could've expressed the opinion that the writer is referencing, and then that thing never would've been made. What does that say about visual culture and design?
I wrote a small 500-word piece, posted it on Instagram as a story a while ago, about Cassandre's posters, how those posters were advertisements, and at the same time they existed within this slip between the avant-garde and commerciality that made them historically important. It's that little piece of context that's become rarer and rarer. These are advertisements for wine, not the most culturally heralded aspects of humanity, and yet these types of things could happen. And I just see the potential of that across so many places being ruined. It's the same way so many bad books are made every year. We can make them better, and it's just how do you do that?
[DS]: Yeah. I'm studying The Elements of Typographic Style by Bringhurst right now, because as someone who didn't go to design school, sometimes I feel I have to overcompensate and get myself really educated. Then I speak to my colleagues who went to school, and they tell me, "I didn't see any of that." So I think, what did people even do in art school? I know it's very different in Europe than in America than in Australia and in South America, but it's genuinely such a mystery to me. Is it that much in the abstract? And if it's so abstract, why isn’t design not more ideological today?
[DW]: So I didn't study graphic design in undergraduate school either. I studied painting and digital media. To give you a little bit of context, and it sounds so cliche, and it's embarrassing, but it's real: I didn't know that graphic design really existed until a summer between my junior and senior year, when I took a web design class just for fun. I was like, "Oh, what's this?" And we watched the documentary Helvetica. And I'm not kidding, at the time I'm making typographic paintings, and I'm not even seeing it. And then my mind literally exploded by this documentary. That's when I knew: I do not wanna be a painter. Are you kidding me? So I essentially spent my senior year creating artworks and installations that could kinda lead into a graduate school application.
But when I got to graduate school, everyone I was with almost had zero interest in being graphic designers. They wanted to be sculptors and painters. So I was left to my own devices. I was doing exactly what you're doing right now, and I'm like redoing it all again, 'cause I think you should be revisiting these things every three to five years anyway. I've read Modern Typography by Kinross, like I said, it didn't leave my side one summer during graduate school, but I started kinda rereading it. These things need to be constantly revisited, 'cause you just mine more and more. But I think what happens is instructors, 'cause I've been around them, I've taught and I'm teaching, they're not interested in that stuff anymore.
[DS]: I don't think it was ever glamorous, but I think it's the least glamorous it's ever been. Even the classics. I recently, over my summer break, read Design for the Real World by Papanek, and it's an industrial design book staple. The amount of tools I got from that book. Like when I start a new project, this design matrix: how do you place all these different ideas, you put them on an axial structure, you place all the possible outcomes, and then you explore based on that. It's such a good framework.
And it's not even a graphic design book. You have to read these things, because they're gonna teach you how to work. It's just not glamorous at all, but it's very insightful. And every time you revisit something, you learn a new thing. And I can see it in my colleagues, I can kinda see the ones who do that and the ones who just look at references. It's so clear.
[DW]: Totally. And I think the other thing that's important is, like you, early on, when I was shifting away from painting and starting to do more design, I had no idea what I was doing. I was essentially handed an issue of Emigre and an issue of Dot Dot Dot by a digital media professor, and it was like, "You should read these things, and you should go to one of these grad schools." It's either Yale or Cranbrook. And I was making work that was oscillating between both of them without understanding what makes the work.
It wasn't until after my first year at Cranbrook, and then I thought I needed to act like a Cranbrook designer and do what everyone was doing around me. And it was really a summer of deep reflection: what is it that I'm interested in? What do I actually think is “cool”? What do I think is fascinating? I just need to do that and not care about anyone else. And that's what happened. We had an amazing professor come in while the guy who ran the program was on sabbatical, and that's where I saw things like 032c for the first time. Holding an issue of Butt Magazine, it really opened my eyes: this is actually what I want to be doing. I want to do typography. I want to design books. I want design magazines. I want design typefaces. And there's a certain security in the function of those things that I found solace in.
But right now I feel like students are seeing what studios do and looking at Pinterest, and for them design already has to function within the commercial context. Their final projects are productized. They're making identities for products. And I think the curriculum has completely shifted and removed that abstract thinking in a way that could help create a voice in individuals, and instead it's creating functioning designers that can exist within sectors. And I'm like, "You're gonna be doing that for the rest of your life, and you're gonna be fighting against that for the rest of your life, finding ways of getting out of that." And we're just doing it so early in school, so prematurely defining how design needs to look for these students. I just need to be reminded of, oh no, sometimes you can make something that's different, and try to pitch it, and try to fight for it when it makes sense.
And that's been this year in the studio: okay, we know what the client wants. We know what the audience might want. But what do we want, and what do we think is right, and how do we synthesize those three things? More and more we've been trying to weigh the "what do we think is right" and really pushing that first. Whereas before it could be a fear complex or time: “Oh, we don't have very much time, we need to get this done, what's the path of least resistance without losing all integrity and pride?” And I think more and more people fighting for that in little ways is how you start to change it, at least regionally.
But yeah, I feel like more and more people are all out there operating in silos, fighting the same things, only talking to each other occasionally. Sometimes it's through bringing someone on for a project, or maybe once a month there's a hangout like this. But how do you legitimize that and put a little bit more weight behind it, so people also feel like there's something else to maybe believe in? Those are the things that I miss and the things that don't really exist right now.
[DS]: They don't. And I think it would be amazing to bring that back. I think there's something very interesting about the Kinross essay, modern typography, where it starts with the genesis of the graphic designer. That happened four hundred years ago, when the person doing the printing and the typesetting was operating in obscurity, meaning That knowledge was not shared, it was this very hermetic discipline. The person doing the manuscript had no idea about the production of the printing. The typographer-printer was this one thing. And then when it separates, that's when the figure of the graphic designer starts to emerge.
And I believe all of these grievances that we have would be different if our profession was a little bit more closed again. But at the same time, you don't wanna gatekeep, because you still wanna have people have access to it. Just an access that's a bit more gated in some way. The gate doesn't need to be completely closed. there needs to be dialogue and some thought around it, you know? Otherwise you have the person who's maybe a businessperson thinking they can design, and that's when design gets diluted.
[DW]: And I think that it's this type of dialogue that culturally has also just been cored out. I find myself wrestling with this. Even in the times that I want to say, "No, this is not how things are done. It needs to be done this way," I find myself writing around it and not saying that at all. But that is how you create belief and defend belief. And I also think disagreement is a great thing, and that has been removed. It's not seen as good to disagree with people. But just because you disagree doesn't mean you have to alienate someone. And that's how subcultures were defined and created, through difference.
[DS]: That's what I wanna do with my peers, do the Wim Crouwel and Jan van Toorn "The Debate" and challenge beliefs, and then you sit down at your desk the next day and you're like, "Wait, actually, I might try something different this time."
[DW]: Yeah. I also think it's the thing that I struggle with, and the more I come to it, it's just like I need to find the time. If I really care, I need to find the time. But it's difficult for me to just write 500 words, because I assume it's going to be attacked at all levels and all sides. And I know the expansive argument, I know why the piece should be 3,000 words, but I can't write 3,000 words right now addressing an Instagram story that a major design studio posts about AI data centers, talking about them in the most debased way possible. I can't write those 3,000 words, but someone needs to say something, to check the attitude.
[DS]: I get so inspired reading some of these discourses, but one thought that's recurring is when I'm reading something that's 100 years old: history repeats itself in the wildest ways. The other day I reread The Crystal Goblet, and that text is from the 30’s, and it's so relevant. In some ways it's not, and in some ways it is: you have to make typography legible because it's a vehicle and you have to communicate, which goes back to this very typical case of the person that wants to do fine arts, does graphic design, and then is miserable their whole career because they wanted to be an artist. Graphic design is art, of course it is, but what makes the difference between graphic design being fine art and fine arts: one is an applied art that lives standing behind something else, and fine art stands on its own. Both have their own functions. You get reminded again of these things, and people have been having these conversations for 100, 200, 300, 400 years. It's so interesting to see that and be surprised. I guess at some point we forget and we have to remember again.
[DW]: Yeah. Or redefine the conditions, right? 'Cause I'm personally very interested in the blurry area between the two, occupying that space and that threshold. And something that again, people take design history in through Pinterest. That's the other thing I'm realizing, people's insight into design history has also been flattened. What you don't see when you look at designers like Wim Crouwel, for instance, is the full body of work that he made. It's not 50 posters, there's so much more depth and range and context and content that's just left out of the easy to grab. And when you take that same idea and put it to everyone, if that's how you frame your understanding of design history, you're missing so much more of what it meant to be a designer at those times and to operate in those times.
And I've been mildly obsessed recently with 1920s and 1930s graphic design, partly because in the last 100 years, we haven't really moved, and I think that's so fascinating. People often forget that visual styles and visual cues and motifs have historical lineages. They don't just belong to the last block that you saw on Pinterest. They have histories, they have context, and they have meaning. And even that would go so far in helping frame people's minds: we as designers haven't really shifted much in certain aspects, but then we have in others. And it just goes back to history repeating itself. So what does that mean? If a discipline from a visual standpoint, a surface standpoint, hasn't shifted in 100 years, what does that say about the next 100 years and the responsibility of us practicing now? Anyway, that's a whole other hole.
[DS]: It's a whole other can of worms. Going back to the point of Wim Crouwel, and it somehow relates: I love being in the Netherlands. I'm from Argentina, so I think the ethos there is more similar to North America. Its design is very much rooted in the tradition of advertising, and in Europe it's more rooted in the tradition of typography and bookmaking. Whenever I go to the Netherlands, I see all theseA brand identities that Wim Crouwel did in the '60s, and they're still there, still unchanged, still used.
And it's not to say work in the Americas is commercial and work in Europe is non-commercial. i don’t thing that’s the dichotomy here. Europe has commercial work, but maybe there's a different way of preserving that work, and that's the biggest achievement you can aspire to as a designer: to make commercial work that outlasts decades because it doesn't need to be changed, it's well how it is, and it still serves its purpose in the late 2020’s the same way that it did in the '60s or the '70s. So I don't know when I think about time being circular, maybe that's not a bad thing. If it's not broken, then why change it?
[DW]: No, for sure. And part of me was saying that in the sense that anyone claiming originality is ignorant. They're ignorant of the history that came before the thing. That's my take on a lot of contemporary design that gets held up as original: while yes, it is original and it is great, there is a historical basis to this that people aren't seeing or recognizing or understanding. And I think there's value in that, in knowing how to practice in the future, because Wim Crouwel was standing on the shoulders of designers in the '20s, through De Stijl and the avant-garde moments, and then applying his own context and what it meant to be alive in the '50s, '60s, and '70s, making that work. And I'm like, if we were to repeat that process now, what does that look like, and what does that mean? What are some of the things that we've maybe collectively lost that need to be replanted again, but in a new way? Those are the types of things I'm trying to navigate through my more personal work, or work that's more open-ended, and even some client-based projects.
When all you're doing is going to Are.na or Pinterest or not reading and not looking and not making, it all just gets flattened. Your understanding of it all gets flattened, and the history and the meaning gets removed and corned out a bit and, that's why I think it's really important to have books like What Design Can't Do by Silvio Lorusso being a big hit, we need more of that, but we need more people teaching those things to students and more people, talking about that stuff within the commercial setting and trying to find ways of getting it into the practice.