Design – It’s Personal Again (Sort Of)

I’m not a big fan of television commercials (or any other kind of advertising) 99,99 per cent of the time. Not having a television set at home frees me from a lot of exposure, except when I watch the Colbert Report online (several commercial breaks during a 21 minute show; it’s ridiculous).

Anyway, I was watching an episode of the Colbert Report when there was aired a commercial that actually appealed to me. Well, that’s not entirely true; the slogan in the commercial appealed to me. It was a commercial for Hewlett Packard’s new touchscreen computer and the slogan is like this: “The computer – it’s personal again”. What a beautiful slogan! I wish I could say that about design (“graphic design – it’s personal again”). If there is something “modern” design isn’t, it’s personal. A lot of new design (I’m generalizing now) looks cold and dead (wouldn’t touch it with a stick). “It’s personal again” is a slogan everyone should aim for. Like that band Cute Is What We Aim For, except you replace “cute” with “personal”.

Designers have the power to help change the mental environment for the better (same goes for advertising agents) from something cold and lifeless to something personal and meaningful. But to change design we have to understand the designer’s role in the community and try to find out what we want design to be in the future.

My class at Westerdals have a rather large project going on at school at the moment: To decide the content of a graphic design magazine and design it. Basically we are going to produce the graphic design magazine of our dreams that doesn’t exist today. I therefore have chosen to focus on the issues stated in the last paragraph; try to influence designers to consider their role in the community and think about the future of design.

This is by far the most exciting design project I’ve ever been involved with, mainly because of the topic I’ve chosen. But as I do my research I begin to realize that not a lot of designers are concerned with these topics; they are too busy making mindless design to have any time left to spend on thinking critically about what they are doing. Even my classmates, the designers of the future, didn’t show a lot of interest when I presented the idea for my magazine a couple of weeks ago. People just don’t seem to care about the designer’s role. They want to design and make money. End of story.

They would probably say that I think too much and that I take the design job too personal. Here’s another slogan for you: “It’s personal, not business” (I know the slogan originally is the other way around, but this is the only way which makes any sense. I’m not a complete fanatic though, and I understand that there has to be some business elements to it, but even that has its limit). I’m going to leave you with that. Think about it. Thinking is good; it’s what supposedly makes the human race the intelligent species, but we are too busy self-destructing to realize it.