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The reason I wanted to read Design Anarchy was to hopefully find some answers to the big questions: How to be a graphic designer without selling my integrity and being a designer without supporting over-consumption. But then again (read my past review of How To Be A Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul), no such thing. It tries at some point, but it don’t succeed.

On their website, Adbusters describe the book as “Equal parts memoir, manifesto, scrapbook, and revolutionary design manual, Design Anarchy is an urgent call for artists, designers, architects and communicators to re-engage with the world.” What is meant by “Design Anarchy” is as Stefane Barbeau is quoted saying in the book:

“Design is traditionally driven by aesthetic, functional, production and marked factors. What if suddenly these parameters were grossly distorted, or even removed entirely?”

The problem with the concept of “Design Anarchy” is that, as I’ve understood it, it wants design to lose all sense of meaning and aesthetic. Quoting Kalle Lasn:

“What design needs is ten years of total turmoil, fuck-it-all anarchy. After that maybe it will mean something again, stand for something again.”

He wants to destroy what design is today and build something new. When I first read it, I thought to myself: that it was a wonderful thought, that we could all build a new way of designing together. But when I thought more about it I realized it sounded more and more like something that have no way of working in practice, simply because people are people and we all want different things; and I’ve noticed a large part of designers don’t care about integrity or design being used for something important. If designers don’t want a change, how can we then change the design business?

It’s difficult to grasp what Lasn imagines design anarchy to look like. If a design has no aesthetic or function, is there really anything left? Looking at the design of the book itself “design anarchy” seems to mean collages, handwriting and spoof ads. It looks like any other Adbusters magazine, a design which in itself is a contradiction: Adbusters’ goal is to clean up the mental environment (getting rid of the ads, systems that doesn’t work, unecessary wars, etc), yet the magazine is designed to look like an anarchic mess. Wouldn’t it be more appropriate to have a clean design, setting an example? But I guess that wouldn’t look rebellious enough.

In the end the book doesn’t really make me understand and be passionate about the concept of “Design anarchy”. I see the desire to revolt against the design industry, and I think it is wonderful to imagine that our society could have some utopian quality to it, but the idea of design anarchy seems far-fetched

The book might wake up some minds (mainly people who follow Adbusters mindlessly I’m guessing), but to those of us who are already waking up, it doesn’t offer too much. It’s still a nice read/flip-through and even has hopeless as it sounds, the book has some quotes to inspire and to make you think (but don’t expect it to find any answers for you). I’ll end this with my favourite quote from the book (try replacing “design anarchy” with “integrity” and it will actually mean something):

“Design anarchy is madness. Choose it only if you’re certain the other options will corrode your soul and give you a bleeding ulcer. Only if you know you are among the chosen few designers who hold Promentheus’ holy fire in your hands. You’ll suffer for years and live like a stray dog, but you’ll have the joy of breaking all the rules, of freely mixing art and politics, of pouring your belifs and convictions into your work. Eventually, if you’re really as brilliant as you think, you’ll have a crack at pushing boundries of global culture with bold new forms and fresh ways of being.”

On one page of the book Design Anarchy (review coming soon!) author Kalle Lasn has drawn a musical note and written the line “Once there was a way to get back homeward” (it’s from the song “Golden Slumbers” by The Beatles). I’ve never thought of using song lyrics to describe my feelings about graphic design, but that quote is perfect (as well as being one of the few things I liked about Design Anarchy). It’s about melancholy; how it seems that the business has lost it’s way and has become impersonal and modern in the negative sense. There seems to be no way of returning back to the time when design and advertising were two different things and when, according to Julie Baugnet, “many designers discouraged work that looked too blatant and showy or full of hype”.

Ironically, “Golden Slumbers” is a part of a medley and slowly becomes the song “Carry That Weight” which is more or less a repetition of the line “You’re gonna carry that way a long time”, which is probably fitting when it comes to me and my design dilemmas. The more I read and think about the issues of my concerns, the farther I come from finding any real answers. Integrity is a heavy load we wear proudly, but sometimes it can be too heavy, pounding us to the ground, dead-beaten. But as a Nada Surf album title goes: “The Weight Is A Gift”.

Several times a year Norwegian designers (and designers in all other countries I assume) get together to celebrate themselves and their work. As a student there are also a bunch of opportunities to get some sort of statue or diploma. Coming up in the spring is Gullkalven, a yearly student competition. I’ve found myself to be thorn, trying to decide whether I should enter or not.

Don’t enter awards competitions. Just don’t. It’s not good for you.
– Bruce Mau

Bruce Mau is probably right, but let’s consider it anyway: When entering a design competition there is of course the fun concept of actually winning an award and then be able to brag about it on my website afterwards. But at the same time the whole ordeal is kind of nauseating. It seems that everyone wants to be a part of the award-winning crowd (show-offs and attention-seekers) and get all the fame and glory they can grasp. And you might ask: “Doesn’t everybody want fame and glory?” Well… There might be more important things in life (which might sound like something only a loser would say, but I’m yet to enter a competition). So after some consideration I have narrowed it down to this:
1) ENTER if you seek fame, glory and attention from the people in the business, or
2) DO NOT ENTER if you feel that there are more important things to life than award shows, like reading a book or gazing at the stars.

But there is actually a hidden third point to this list:
3) ENTER if you want to use an award show/competition to raise awareness about important political or personal issues.

The last point might sound like selling out, but it’s quite the opposite. I think of it as crucial that someone actually shows the rest of the design business that there are in fact those with integrity and who want to use their design skills for the benefit of something important. I have actually made it a rule for myself that I will only enter design competitions if the work I send in is of some political/radical/rebellious character. But when I do that, the important thing isn’t to win. As long as my work gets shortlisted (and therefore will be seen by a many designers) I have done my job: I have put a message out there, both the message portrayed by the content of the design job, as well as the message that design can be used for something imporant if you want it to.
(In two weeks I’ll have the results of the first design compitition I’ve ever entered; the job I sent in of course has a rather strong message, so I’m very excited to see how it goes.)

I don’t think future clients care too much about how many awards you’ve won, that only shows that you are crazy about awards. Many clients actually complain about designers who are working for them who seem more interested in doing work which wins them awards rather than doing something that benefits the client… If you are going to misuse a client like that, you rather do it for a political reason rather to win a meaningless award. I think future clients are more interested in who your past clients were rather than if fellow designers think your work looks good or not, but that’s just how I (a student) see it.

So thank you to all the award-obsessed designers and endless lists of award competitions e-mailing me notices that “the deadline is drawing near!” who made me realize how silly the whole thing is.

Neville Brody once said “When I started out [as a designer] I had a feeling I could change things. There was a sense of revolution.” What he describes is the exact same feeling as the one I have, and perhaps the same as many others. But reading the quote we understand that Brody doesn’t have the sense of revolution anymore. Where did it go? Does it magically disappear for everyone after a couple of years of “growing into” the business?

This sense of revolution is equally exciting and frustrating; exciting because it makes me so passionate about what I do and it challenges my way of thinking about design and life in general; and frustrating because it’s so difficult to find any real answers to the questions I’m asking myself. At the same time I’m afraid that this feeling someday will go away, that I will turn ignorant and apathetic, that I will do any design job just for the money or for the prestige. That is my greatest fear at this point; that I will stop trying. I would rather try to be a designer with integrity and fail, than to give up completely. Because every failure brings new hope and we learn from those failures and when the next obstacle comes along we can say to ourselves: “I will figure out how to do it this time”.

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.

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.

Let me start by saying what you probably are wondering about the most: No, the book doesn’t give an answer to the question given in the title. Or maybe it does. It all depends on how you interpret the title. If you interpret the title to be: “How to be a graphic designer without selling your soul to the devil for doing work that is against your principles”, then no, no answers here, sir. But if you interpret the title to be: “How to be a graphic designer without losing your head trying to figure out how to be a designer in practice”, then yes, you will have answers. (The author himself writes that the book originally was going to be called “How To Be A Designer Without Losing Your Shirt”. The decision to change “shirt” with “soul” in the title makes it misleading.)

This book is about how to function as a graphic designer: How to find a job, how to work freelance, how to set up a studio, how to run a studio, how to win new work, how to work with clients, how to self-promote yourself and how to do the creative process (there’s basically the whole index for you). And it’s a great book one those subjects; lot’s of handy tips for the new designer as well as the established. And there is actually a sentence here and there about not selling your soul to do a design job, but they are limited and the book still doesn’t provide any answers, like almost all texts on the subject of design vs. soul. I find them to be all about words; telling you how you should use our design skills for the benefit of the community and other fine statements like that, but no one is saying HOW that is achieved. At least I’m yet to find a text that does. But I’ve got some promising books coming in from Amazon over the next couple of weeks, so I’ll be back with some reviews on those.

To me graffiti is the most honest form of design. Everyone can do it and what matters is what you write not who you are. I wish those values could apply to graphic design as well, but graphic designers aren’t supposed to have personal opinions and strong political belifs. We are supposed to obey our clients and do what they demand (which is what they pay us to do).

What annoys me is that cities like the one I come from (Oslo) has a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to graffiti; they think graffiti results in more drugged up kids (at least that’s their excuse). I don’t have much knowledge in this field, but to me it seems like it would be the other way around, that graffiti actually make kids focus on other things than drugs and make them find a meaning and purpose in life, and a chance to express their frustration with society. We are a democracy and everyone is entitled their opinion, but the city is trying to control the form of how these opinions are generated. Why should large corporation be allowed to pollute every single wall space in a city with commercial messages while we, the people, are robbed of our right to free speech? It’s ludicrous. Money talks, democracy walks.

It should be argued that graffiti destroys public property, a problem the city could help prevent by setting up walls that are allowed to spray on (even if that diminish the revolutionary feeling of putting graffiti on something illegal). Wouldn’t it be wonderful if half the advertising billboard stands could be used freely by the community to hang up posters, spray, draw and write on?

When I visited Liverpool during my autumn holiday – the European Culture Capital of 2008 – I came across some fascinating urban art projects. The great thing about these projects is that they are done in collaboration with the city. Oslo could and should learn from this.

First I came across the project called The Writing On The Wall with sentences like this one painted on walls all over the city. See all of the pieces at a-ape.org.

The wall pictured below was covered with English traffic signs with the words: security, thanks, stability, money, certainty, success, status, power, attention, access, authority and respect.

Typography I drew for a t-shirt. The text “Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts” is something I’m a firm believer in. The text is quoted from Henry David Thoreau’s (my hero) wonderful book Walden; or Life in the Woods.

To defend the simplicity of how the word “thoughts” is illustrated (as someone once commented that the word should be illustrated more vividly than just adding some colors), I wanted it to look simple as the quote encourage the reader to get rid of belongings and go back to the basics; the simple life. At the same time even thoughts have their limitations (according to Immanuel Kant), and even if we find ourselves having some fantastic thoughts we often fail to get them across because we lack the medium, the words or the audience. Therefore it felt right to illustrate “thoughts” with the limitations it has, even though that may be a pessimistic approach. I would of course love to think of thoughts as limitless and that there is no stop to where we can go with our minds, but we should be realistic and portray things as they are rather than building a false fantasy image.

The colors represents the whole spectre of thoughts; we all use our power to think differently and different colors have different meanings, like the color blue is steadfastness, green is growth, red is revolution, and so forth. But no matter what you spend your thoughts thinking about, it is more important to be pursuing new thoughts rather than pursuing new objects and things.