Thoughts on the graphic design profession

Sometimes the graphic design profession feels like the most useless job in the world, like all the job is about is making lame products and companies look good. Being a design student – and a young person – makes me question everything in life: “What’s the point of it all?”, “Why am I here?”, “How should I spend my time?”, “What is good?” and similar unanswerable questions. These questions go for life as well as for the design profession. I like to think of graphic design as not only a job, but as a lifestyle. I believe who you are as a person is reflected in the design you do, just like art is. A piece of your soul goes into every job you do and you define if your soul is being used for something good or bad by the design jobs you chose to do. Graphic design isn’t a neutral thing, opinions and ideas are baked into every tiniest bit, and because of this it is important to think of the impact we have as designers and what we want our design legacy to be.

Like every other designer (I first assumed; but I’m beginning to realize that this isn’t a public opinion amongst designers) I want to spend my life as a graphic designer doing something worthwhile, something I feel gives my life meaning and purpose and which preferably gives something back to the world rather than taking something away from it. My “problem” is integrity.

Integrity
1. The state or quality of being entire or complete; wholeness; entireness; unbroken state; as, the integrity of an empire or territory.
2. Moral soundness; honesty; freedom from corrupting influence or motive; — used especially with reference to the fulfillment of contracts, the discharge of agencies, trusts, and the like; uprightness; rectitude. The moral grandeur of independent integrity is the sublimest thing in nature.
3. Unimpaired, unadulterated, or genuine state; entire correspondence with an original condition; purity. Language continued long in its purity and integrity.
Syn: Honesty; uprightness; rectitude

If I didn’t have any integrity, I would probably find any design job meaningful and feel good about it. But to me integrity is the most important thing I have. As a design student I try to figure out how a design job can be best executed while keeping my integrity and sense of meaning. Everytime I’m faced with the design business my hopes for a job as a studio graphic designer with integrity and meaning vanishes a little bit more. There seems to be no way I can be in this business without comprimising a bit of my integrity, which then will take away some of the meaning of what I’m doing.

If you are a person with strong personal beliefs and principles and want these ideals to be reflected in your work as a designer, you have a huge decision to make. With all these ideals you’ve probably developed an opinion on what sort of clients you would feel good working for, as well as the opposite (I remember trying to write a list of clients I would love to work for, only to discover that the list wasn’t very long). As I see it, there are two ways to approach a client who wants you to do work that you initially don’t feel good about doing:
A) turn down the offer and then leave the job up to someone else, or
B) take the job in spite of your principles, and find a way to do the job in the most responsible way. That ‘someone else’ who will get the job if you don’t take it may not be as responsible in his/hers approach. The million dollar question is of course how to do this in practice – and no one can really give you the answer to that, at least I’m yet to find one. Neville Brody says: “If you have integrity, you say no to things. You must say no to things that are morally wrong. I wouldn’t work for a tobacco company, for example.” But that’s not a very responsible thing to do. You might save your own soul and feel good about yourself, but you are not considering the community.

I’ve noticed how my interest in doing critical/political design work is increasing. I don’t consider myself to be a particularly political person, but I’ve recently discovered that it is when I use my design skills to criticize something I’m against I really love what I’m doing (some work samples will appear on this site soon). It feels like my job actually has a purpose, like I actually have a voice and that I can raise this voice through my design work. These political design jobs are unfortunately only personal non-profit projects and I don’t know how many jobs like that exist in real life. But my desire is still to be able to do that kind of work for a living, and as an ambitious person I plan to set this desire into reality. I still have some pieces left of that childish sense of thinking everything is possible. I see no reason why it shouldn’t be. I just have to keep reciting to myself “Nothing worth having comes easy” and do one battle at a time.

To help myself focus on what’s important in my life/career, I’ve written a personal manifesto (first draft):

It’s personal, not business
Don’t think outside the box, change the box
Ignore everybody
Gaze into night skies
Design with your mind
Philosophize
Be the change
Don’t enter award compititions
Read
Be an original
Stick to your principles
Fight for what you believe in
Carry notebooks
Time is not money
Stop consuming
Search for truth
Be critical
Have fun
Be happy
Be free

You might read this and think this sounds a bit naive, like it won’t work in practice and I will make no money whatsoever. It’s weird how “hope” has degenerated to be equivalent to “being naive”, which is basically saying that people with hope and integrity are idiots. So let’s be idiots then.