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James Souttar is a designer, writer and consultant on

the communication. Now is the time for all good men


to come to the aid of the party. Excellence in
Typography
is the result of nothing more than an attitude. The quick
brown fox jumps over the lazy dogs. Polly Cox’ ox ate
eight hollyhocks.
Lorem ipsum this is the time for all lazy foxes to come
to the result of the hollyhock. Aid is excellence over
the lazy dogs. Now is the time. Quick brown fox jumps
over the eight hollyhocks. Polly Cox ate nothing more
than an attitude. a b c d
2 7 6
Good men to come to the aid of the party. Excellence e f g h
in Typography is the result of nothing more than an 9 5 1
i j k l
attitude. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dogs. 4 3 8
Polly Cox’ ox ate eight hollyhocks. m n o p

James Souttar

James Souttar
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Copyright © 2008 by James Souttar
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asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved


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Contents

introduction

1 articles
3 The myth of content
17 The well of clarity
23 The eye of the mind
37 Seven pillars
47 Atalanta Fugiens
55 Drag me! Click me! Read me?
67 Brand or Identity?
75 Imagined histories

83 conversations

259 soapbox

337 references
transforming communication

vi
conversations

Introduction

For some time I’ve wanted to write a book about visual communica-
tion — to express some of the ideas that have inspired me, or that have
emerged out of nearly twenty years of thinking, working and convers-
ing as a graphic designer. It was only recently, however, that I realized
I had already written such a book. The ideas I wanted to share were
there in the series of articles, emails and blog pieces I had composed
over the last fi·een years. Moreover, the form in which these ideas were
presented — a ragged patchwork of interlocking pieces, each framed
by a particular context — was actually much more appropriate for the
kind of book I wanted to write.

But please don’t be misled by the apparently haphazard composi-


tion of this book. The book I wanted to write set itself a pretty ambi-
tious goal: to recast graphic design as a fundamentally human, and
humane, practice. In particular, I wanted to challenge the idea that
it is a ‘problem solving’ activity and to suggest that it is bettter seen
as an expression of our humanity, something that wells up out of the
unconscious to be ‘rationalised’ only later. In that respect, this book
achieves pretty much everything I envisaged. The fact that it is not set
out according to some grandiose architectural plan mirrors one of its
central themes — that the paradigm of human communication is con-
versation, not some carefully contrived and deliberately manipulative
rhetorical statement. Furthermore, every one of these pieces came out
of a real dialogue — either with one of many thoughtful correspond-
ents, or as part of an ongoing and open-ended exploration with friends
and colleagues.

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transforming communication

It seems to me that we are entering a particularly exciting and dan-


gerous time, when many of the ideas that have held us in their grip
are losing their energy and persuasiveness. The great Enlightenment
project of ‘modernization’, with its relentless optimism in the march
of progress and its belief in the power of ‘sovereign reason’, is unrav-
elling fast. Its last great hope of liberation through technology, the
bizarre ‘Information Revolution’, has flashed like an incandescent
meteor through our lives. But in keeping with its meteoric nature, it
seems to have consumed itself in the process.

As I argue in the essay The Myth of Content, it makes more sense to me


to see this episode as the swan-song of the ‘Age of Reason’ rather than
as the harbinger of a new era. Like previous technological revolutions,
its real fruits are yet more disempowerment, deskilling and deperson-
alization. The ‘knowledge worker’, held out as a glorious role model
for us and our children, has turned out to be a call-centre operative, a
data processing clerk or a check-out girl — occupations almost as miser-
able as nineteenth-century mill work. From my privileged position a
designer, I can now confidently reassert an ancient and eternal truth:
that real dignity, satisfaction and self-development in work come only
from occupations that embody the idea of cra·smanship. Of course
there are many new occupations that are, or could be, of this kind.
But cra·smanship doesn’t arise accidentally. Only a deliberate attempt
to bring to one’s work attention, presence, dedication and, most of
all, Love, can turn a job into a cra·. Freed from technological blink-
ers, it is now possible to see (almost for the first time) that machines
won’t — can’t — make work richer, more rewarding or more meaning-
ful. Indeed, as soon as we allow ourselves to be taken over by their logic,
they begin to leach the richness, reward and meaning from our work.
For nearly three centuries, we’ve been paralysed by the thought that
‘you can’t stop the march of progress’ (with its consoling rider ‘but
a·er the initial pain, there will be a life of ease!’). Now, however, there
is a growing recognition that this ‘progress’ isn’t actually going any-
where — that new technologies confer benefits but also have costs, and

viii
conversations

in the end it is up to us to make choices about which of these costs are


or are not acceptable to us. Technology can be a good servant, but a
disastrous master. And if we’re going to make real progress, it’s not
towards ever increasing automation, but towards understanding and
celebrating ourselves, both as a species and as individuals.
This touches on another of the main themes of this book, which is
the way in which a whole ra· of disciplines are presenting us with a
completely new vision of who and what we are. Hardly a week goes by
without some new piece of this puzzle being announced — whether it
be from neurophysiology, microbiology, palæo-archæology, cognitive
psychology or any other of the so· or social sciences. Sometimes, these
ideas sound a little shrill — as in some of the more deterministic pro-
nouncements of evolutionary psychology or genetics — but the overall
tendency is towards a radical and liberating view of the human being.
It is becoming increasingly clear that we’re not the rational, free-willed
creatures envisaged by Enlightenment philosophy. Instead, a picture
is emerging of a very extraordinary if contradictory and frequently
flawed creature: profoundly social, inherently playful and innately
communicative. It shows how constrained we are by our evolution and
our biology, as well as by social and cultural conditioning, but also how
we have previously unrecognized possibilities and opportunities. All of
which is contributing, I believe, to a new humanism.

Putting the human being back at the centre of our world is o·en
assumed to be a kind of arrogance. However this new humanism is fre-
quently humbling: it shows us how much a part of the natural world
we are, and how small a part we play in the scheme of things (at least,
in an outward sense). But these new revelations about our humanity
should also give us cause to rejoice — if we really were the sovereign
creatures of the Age of Reason, we would be consigned to creating a
world of sterile, mechanical perfection. Instead, what we now know
makes a new and powerful case to place human contact and relation-
ships above ‘e›ciency’, delight in making and using above ‘value’,
sympathy for one another above exploitation of ‘others’.

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transforming communication

Visual communication needs to address itself to these new challeng-


es — the challenges of talking to people, and not at them. ‘It’s me you’re
communicating with! Look me in the eyes, recognize that I’m a person
just like yourself…’ By and large, this means we’re going to have to rein-
vent large parts of what we do. The tradition of Modernism (and I’m
reluctant to accept ‘post modernism’ as anything more, yet, than some
self indulgent tinkering at the edges of the Modernist mindset) o‹ers
no useful clues about how to do this.

Visual communication needs to lose some of its certainty — a tendency


that has in the past been encouraged by an over-emphasis on snobber-
ies of ‘taste’ and ‘style’, humourlessness and self-importance, and a
love a‹air with portentous rhetoric. It would be nice to see some ten-
tativeness, some vulnerability, some good naturedness entering in.
But, in any case, it seems likely that an ‘ecology of mind’ may become
the driving force. There is already a widespread reaction against cyni-
cal manipulations of brand and marketing. And I would certainly like
to add my voice to the growing protest against communications that
attempt to influence us against our wills, mostly without us knowing
about it. Having spent years studying the psychology of conditioning
and manipulation, this is something I feel passionately about.

But it is wrong to try and define something by what it shouldn’t be.


I live in hope of a design that is intentionally life-enhancing — whose
purpose is celebratory, delightful, energizing. The hermeneutic philos-
opher Hans-Georg Gadamer, who is frequently invoked in these pages,
once defined the work of art in terms of play, symbol and festival. I don’t
particularly want to take sides on the question of whether design is or
isn’t, should or shouldn’t be, Art. But I do think that it should be all of
those three things. Gadamer’s criteria appear and reappear in these
musings — they are rarely far from my thoughts, and have proved to be
rich and nutritious concepts. Why is it that we can look at a piece of
twel·h century Islamic metalwork, or a picture of a Japanese garden,
and be enraptured by its playfulness, its symbolism and its celebra-
tion, yet are so frequently bored by ‘award winning’ graphic or indus-

x
conversations

trial design? Designers o·en bemoan their public’s lack of interest in


design. But much of the work we do seems spiritless, coercive and shal-
low. What’s there to like?

The first part of this book, articles, consists of nine essays, most of which
were originally commissioned as articles for Critique or Eye magazines.
The second part of this book, conversations, consists of emails respond-
ing to discussions on the graphics-l e-mail ‘list’. The archives of this
list are published on the Internet, and the original messages can be
read in the context of the full discussion. However I’ve not attempted to
preserve that continuity here. The messages I’ve chosen — and in some
cases, lightly edited — are presented as brief, concentrated reflections
on a particular subject. Since I’ve always made a habit of quoting the
part of someone else’s message that I wanted to reply to, the essential
part of the context is preserved. And in some cases, traces of the origi-
nal ‘threads’ can still be discerned.

The third part of this book, soapbox, are a series of blog pieces that I
have written much more recently, as part of an experimental foray into
the world of ‘social media’.

Finally, instead of a bibliography — which I find the most useless and


self-consciously ‘worthy’ part of a book — references contains brief
reviews of books that have been influential in shaping my thoughts. I
hope these reviews will encourage you to explore some of these materi-
als, and that you find them as rewarding as I did.

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xii
conversations

articles

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transforming communication

When I was younger


it was plain to me
I must make something of myself.
Older now
I walk back streets
admiring the houses
of the very poor:
roof out of line with sides
the yards cluttered
with old chicken wire, ashes,
furniture gone wrong;
the fence and outhouses
built of barrel-staves
and parts of boxes, all,
if I am fortunate,
smeared a bluish green
that properly weathered
pleases me best
of all colours.

No one
will believe this
of vast import to the nation.

William Carlos Williams


1883–1963

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articles

The myth of content

Ideas make a strange progress through history. If graphic design


were a more reflective profession, we might better appreciate some of
the twists and ironies of this progress. But for the most part it goes
unnoticed. Nowhere is this more evident than with the advent of new
technologies and new media.

Such is the uncritical hyperbole about the Internet, for instance, that
one might be forgiven for thinking that it represents a wholly new
approach to communications. We’re presented with the dizzy vista of
a ‘wild frontier’ where pioneers — provided they’ve freed themselves
from the burdensome legacies of outmoded thinking —can create a
new world, with novel forms of commerce, entertainment, even educa-
tion. It’s an exciting prospect. If only it were true.

The more one looks into the ideas fueling the explosion of the Internet,
one realizes that, far from being a new paradigm, it represents some
very old thinking indeed. Its energy is less that of a vigourous new
idea than that of an embattled philosophy which has rallied itself and
made one last desperate push for victory. And I make no apologies for
that simile. For reasons I intend to elucidate, it’s the same seventeenth
century philosophy of Modernism, which has been behind most of the
dominant ideologies of the last three hundred years, that is staging its
last ferocious counter-attack on the battlefield of digital media.

We have, I suppose, become used to the idea that we’re living in the
‘postmodern’ era — and to some extent this may be the case. Which
makes it both hard to accept, and to understand, that what seems to be

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transforming communication

the biggest idea of our time is wholly ‘Modern’ (here actually meaning
quite ancient) in its conception. But so it is. To really grasp this, how-
ever, requires us to understand where Modernism came from — and
what it is. And to do this we need to divest ourselves of the view that
Modernism is just a stylistic movement of the mid twentieth century.
In an extraordinarily erudite work, Cosmopolis, philosopher of science
Stephen Toulmin traces the origins of Modernism to the middle of the
seventeenth century. And we need to return briefly to that time to fully
appreciate the context out of which this extraordinarily influential
view of the world emerged. Toulmin explains how, following the assas-
sination in 1610 of the tolerant King Henri IV of France, Europe began
a forty year long descent into religious bigotry and conflict of the most
brutal kind. Against this backdrop a group of highly influential think-
ers — led by Descartes — sought to establish a philosophy that would
once and for all resolve the questions that had been the subject of such
violent contention. But in the process, Toulmin shows how they turned
their back on the Humanist tradition — characterized by a recognition
that ‘circumstances alter cases’, and the belief that the validity of any
kind of knowledge depends upon the context in which it is applied.
The new knowledge required certainties that were universal and time-
less — which in practice meant abstracted and decontextualized from
the messy ambiguities of the world.

I’ll return to Toulmin’s distinctions between Modernism and


Humanism, since they have an uncanny echo in the (almost invisible)
philosophies driving the Internet. But for the moment, I’d like to follow
through with Toulmin’s history of Modernism.

A·er Descartes came Newton and Locke, who defined many of the prin-
cipal characteristics of the ‘Modern’ point of view — Newton with his
mathematical approach to science, which showed how natural phe-
nomena could be understood (and more importantly, manipulated) by
representing them through abstract numerical relations, and Locke
who asserted that the ‘qualities’ of things were secondary, subjective
aspects, and only their quantitative aspect was real. These points of

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articles

view defined, of course, what later became known as the ‘scientific


method’ — but they had equally important ramifications for beliefs
about culture and society. Newton’s universe was set in motion by the
Creator, and ran to clockwork precision, which meant that not only
the motions of the planets, but also the social orders, existed by Divine
decree. A century later, Adam Smith could use a similar model to
describe how the ‘invisible hand’ of the market determined economic
a‹airs — a view that remains remarkably persuasive to this day.

Yet within a hundred years of Newton’s death, ‘Modernism’ had begun


to unravel — a process that continues well into our times. Thinkers such
as Herder and Goethe were beginning to ask questions about whether
‘science’ could really be seen as independent of the social and histori-
cal context in which it took place (questions that would take two cen-
turies to incubate, before exploding into public consciousness with
Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions). Elsewhere,
new disciplines began to spring up — such as psychology and anthro-
pology — which recognized the impossibility of a ‘value free’ interpre-
tation of their chosen areas of interest.

So from about 1750 to about 1910, Modernism was in a slow decline.


But like many declining ideologies, it became stronger in its funda-
mentalist heartlands — such as technology, economics and politics.
Even so, Toulmin suggests that by the end of the first decade of the
twentieth century there was a real possibility that it might be over-
come. From the 1890s onwards the ‘new physics’ of Einstein, Planck
and Thomson — with its concepts of relativity and uncertainty — chal-
lenged the very basis of a mechanical universe. Freud’s theories were
opening up the possibility of a distinctly contextual exploration of the
human psyche. And Darwinianism was focussing scientific attention
on the question of origins. But in 1914 another assassination plunged
the world back into conflagration and genocide — reinstating the
search for certainty to the top of the agenda. For most of the first half of
the twentieth century ideological conflict, economic depression and
the breakdown of a world order mirrored the conditions of the seven-

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transforming communication

teenth century that had given birth to Modernity. And, predictably,


these conditions produced a resurgence of Modernism — from the ster-
ile, rationalist philosophy of Russell, (the young) Wittgenstein and the
Vienna Circle, to the sterile, rationalist design of the Bauhaus.

The social revolution that might have happened in the first quarter
of the twentieth century ended up being postponed until the 1960s,
when a buoyant ecomomy and the military deadlock of the Cold
War could once again produce conditions in which it was possible
to challenge the ideological behemoth. Kuhn’s book coincided with
numerous other seminal texts pouring from the presses of Europe and
America, which presented a largely bemused citizenry with the begin-
nings of a critique of Modernism. Which is not to say that they were
in any sense really ‘postmodern’, since they still represented a point
of view that had been profoundly, and unconsciously, informed by the
bases of Modernism. And, in fact, it would be their avid readers, the gen-
eration of sixties ‘counterculturals’, who — in their subsequent incar-
nation as nineties ‘digerati’ — would unwittingly deliver the apotheosis
of Modernism in the guise of the ‘Information Revolution’.

But to come back, briefly, to design. One might reasonably want


to distinguish between the way I’ve used ‘Modernism’ — following
Toulmin — and the way it has been used to designate a dominant design
movement of the twentieth century. It’s interesting, in this respect, to
hear what Toulmin has to say about the influence of Modernism in its
‘global’ aspect on the more narrowly focused principles of the ‘Modern
Movement’.

‘In Mies’ principles, we see the man who dominated architec-


tural design in Europe and North America right up to the 1950s
rejecting the diversity of history and geography, and the specific
needs of particular activities, in favour of universal, timeless
principles. This is the step that Descartes and the 17th-century
rationalists took, when they ignored the varied practices and
the ambiguous, uncertain opinions that were endemic to 16th-
century humanism, in favour of pursuing theories and proofs

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that could command consensus. Between the two World Wars,


other fine arts went the same way, wiping the slate clean and
making a fresh start, as witness the paintings of Josef Albers;
and, in due course, the renewed theme of a ‘clean slate’ became
a central theme of culture entre deux guerres. To that extent,
the movement we now know as ‘modernism’ in the arts echoed
the founding themes of 17th-century Modernity as surely as did
the philosophical program for a formally structured unified sci-
ence: so understood, the ‘modernism’ of architecture and fine
arts in the 1920s shared more with the ‘modernity’ of rational-
ist philosophy and physics than we might otherwise suppose.’

Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity,


Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992, p.156.

Two striking points emerge from Toulmin’s analysis. First, that stylistic
Modernism closely echoed the beliefs and priorities of philosophical
Modernism without being aware of its intellectual debt. This observa-
tion is particularly relevant in consideration of ‘new media’, since the
ideologies that are driving it are not always apparent even to its most
vocal exponents. Second, the idea of ‘starting from zero’ is by no means
a new development — even if the way it is framed in relationship to the
brave new world of the Internet is particularly ingenious. Modernism
has been ‘starting from zero’ ever since Descartes climbed inside his
oven, but never more self-consciously than in the series of early and
mid twentieth century experiments in design.

At this point, I’d like to move from the historical background to an


examination of the principles that are driving the form and function of
electronic communications. Having followed the Web from its humble
beginnings as a document management system for — significantly — a
scientific research institution, I’ve been interested in how quickly a
consensus has been reached on what makes for e‹ective communica-
tion in this medium. In less than a decade a pattern has crystallized
with uncanny rapidity. This would be truly remarkable if what we were
dealing with was an authentically new paradigm; but in fact many of

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transforming communication

the features of this emergent consensus show a recognizable prove-


nance, traceable to the very roots of Modernism.

Arguably the most extraordinary of these development is the idea of


‘content’. Content is such a specious concept that it is surprising that
it has attracted so little critical attention. Nonetheless it embodies
the whole philosophical basis of Modernism as new media — in all its
seductiveness and flakiness.

In the simplest terms, the idea of content is that the information com-
ponent of a message can be distinguished from the form in which
it appears, and manipulated quite apart from it. With all previous
media, ‘content’ and ‘form’ could not be conceptually separated in this
way — one had to commit to form as part of the very act of authoring.
To write, or type, a message, one had to put one’s thoughts directly into
permanent marks. Even speaking on the ’phone involved the creation
of electronic signals that could neither be withdrawn nor converted
into another form of communication. ‘Repurposing’, where it was pos-
sible, involved laboriously transcribing words and images from one
medium to another.

But computer technologies appear deceptively di‹erent — authors cap-


ture key and mouse strokes, which can then be ‘flowed’ with apparent
impunity into di‹erent layouts and styles (even converted into synthe-
sized voice). Content, therefore, becomes a way of conceiving of the
abstract essence of a communication — the part that is ‘pure informa-
tion’ — as something quite distinct from form. And seeing it in this
way, its adherents believe, promises to liberate us from the ‘tyranny’
of formal presentation. Form, in this view, is a dead end for informa-
tion— a clinging quagmire from which the vital content cannot easily
be retrieved. The idea of form as the creative embodiment of an idea,
the ‘word made flesh’, doesn’t figure.

Taken further, this persuasive myth of content promises to decouple the


‘from’ and ‘to’ components of communication. It allows information
to be collated from any source and presented to any audience — with-
out any need for dialogue between the two. One major consequence of

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this for graphic design is that designers can now be used to create lay-
outs into which as yet unspecified content is to be arbitrarily import-
ed — as already happens with some web pages, which use information
retrieved ‘on demand’ from databases.

I urge you to pause and think about this for a moment. Imagine a world
in which ‘content’ exists quite apart from any particular form in which
it could appear, and in which design exists quite independently of any
‘content’ which it might ‘contain’. It’s a world in which a writer won’t
be able to visualize how his or her words will appear — one could not
picture them on a book spread, a newspaper layout, or as a magazine
article, since they will exist only as an abstract commodity to be pre-
sented at a future date in any of a myriad of possible forms and combi-
nations. It becomes impossible to conceive of the way they might move
a particular audience, or how they’ll be interpreted in a particular con-
text, since these factors can’t be determined at the time of writing.
What kind of words would these be? Could they be words addressed by
somebody to somebody, risking a point of view, or will they inevitably
be slippery generalities like the ‘soundbites’ of politicians?

But the prospect for the designer is worse yet, since the idea of con-
tent abstracted from form threatens the whole idea of design as an
interpretation of a given text. How can there be a sympathy between
writer and designer, if the design is simply a container for many pos-
sible kinds of content — a kind of all-purpose drinking vessel that is as
likely to be filled with steaming co‹ee as vintage wine? This is a danger-
ous development, since from at least one perspective it is only as an
interpreter, or translator, that the designer can be said to engage with
the real nature of human communication. In his masterwork, Truth
and Method, the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer argues:
‘The translation process fundamentally contains the whole
secret of how human beings come to an understanding of the
world and communicate with each other. Translation is an
indissoluble unity of implicit acts of anticipating, of grasping
meaning as a whole beforehand, and explicitly laying down

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transforming communication

what was thus grasped in advance. All speaking has something


of this kind of laying hold in advance and laying down.’

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, London: Sheed & Ward,


1996. p.548.
The myth of content allows no room for ‘implicit acts of anticipation’,
since it is impossible for the ‘translator’ to know what her or his work
will interpret, let alone to grasp meaning ‘as a whole beforehand’. And
while speaking may possess these qualities, ‘interaction’ with a ‘con-
tent rich’ site is more likely to participate in none of them.

There are already some recognizable, and uncomfortable, parallels


here with Toulmin’s distinction between Humanism and Modernism.
Humanism, with its emphasis on the circumstantial, would insist
that the only proper way to interpret a text is as a translator on a
case by case basis — and indeed this would seem to be the approach
that most affirms our humanity, in all its delightful but messy mate-
riality. Modernism, on the other hand, would recognize in the almost
Platonic abstraction of content from form an equivalence to its own
(Newtonian/Lockean) view of nature, where the physical phenomenon
is seen only a transient placeholder for timeless, universal principles.

It is important, however, to bear in mind that there can be no real


separation of content and form — just as Newton’s separation of mathe-
matical model from optical or lunar observations was only an intellec-
tual conceit. Mathematics gives us tremendous power over the natural
world, because it allows us to predict what will happen if any of the
‘variables’ changes. But there are no numbers in nature. Likewise,
although my computer may store these words as a series of magnetic
orientations on a disk (conceived of as ‘bits’), they must be committed
to a fixed form before anyone — myself included — can read them. Just
because changing the font or the size or the colour on screen appears to
be a ‘reflowing’ of imaginary content does not make it so. In fact, such
changes made to type within a document window is as much a com-
pletely fresh physical interpretation as copying them out longhand.
‘Content’ is only a mental model, if a beguiling and dangerous one.

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If the myth of content only a‹ected the way we explained digital media
to ourselves, it might not be such a bad thing. But, as I hope I’ve dem-
onstrated, conceiving of content in this way inevitably diminishes
the quality of our communications. Text drawn from a database can’t
anticipate the context in which it will appear. It can’t, therefore, form
a part of a coherent narrative or argument, since there is no guarantee
that it will appear as a contiguous whole. At best, it can only appear
as one of a series of ‘bite size’ encyclopædia entries, grouped together
because of a similarity of subject. (This has, incidentally, led some
people to eulogize the supposedly ‘simultaneous’ and ‘non-hierarchi-
cal’ nature of the electronic medium — turning an obvious limitation
into an apparent strength.)

One might suppose that this ‘encyclopedestrianization’ of communi-


cation is a specific, practical consequence of the use of database tech-
nology. Not so. In fact, the opposite appears to be the case — the idea
of atomizing knowlege into data and categorizing the resultant parti-
cles in a database is a concrete expression of a pre-existent mode of
thought. Indeed, the whole idea of the ‘encyclopædia’ — the presenta-
tion of knowledge divorced from context and grouped according to
an abstract structure — is one of the deliberate legacies of the early
Modernists. The first encyclopædia was produced in 1751 by Diderot,
d’Alembert and Baron Holbach as a deliberate attempt to extend the
Newtonian perspective to an abstract, decontextualized systematiza-
tion of knowledge.

Unfortunately, the encyclopædic approach to knowledge is in direct


conflict with the nature of human knowledge and learning. We do not
hold our knowledge in a systematic fashion, nor do we categorize our
memories in a logical, alphabetic scheme. Instead, our knowledge con-
sists of a series of stories — narratives — and stories within stories. This
can be easily seen in a beautiful demonstration developed by Professor
Bruce Brown of Brighton University. Brown asks us to state the number
of doors in our house or apartment — something that usually nobody
is able to recall. He then asks us to imagine ourselves walking through

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transforming communication

our home, counting the doors. Within a few moments, everybody can
provide the exact number. In similar vein, we o·en struggle to recall
dry factual information — sometimes relying on colourful mnemon-
ics — yet most of us can describe the detailed plot of a feature film we’ve
seen only once before, a·er only a few minutes of watching it again,
despite having watched many hundreds of such films.

I’d like to suggest, therefore, that the organization of information in


databases does not reflect the inevitable requirements of the technol-
ogy so much as the inevitable consequences of a particular, discredited
approach to knowledge — the Modernist/Encyclopædist one. I say dis-
credited advisedly, since in so many ways we have already rejected this-
Modernist legacy. Across the spectrum of the ‘human sciences’ — and,
of course, the humanities — there is now widespread understanding of
the role of narrative, as well as a growing sense of the importance of
seeing things as wholes. And, as if evidence was required of the fitness
of narrative form to human constitution, we have only to look at its
continued, universal popularity as a form of culture, entertainment
and teaching.

To understand what is happening on the Web, we need to ask why


Modernism so deliberately turned its back on the narrative form, and
embraced the encyclopædia. Toulmin provides part of the story, show-
ing how the Encyclopædists wanted their knowledge to exist beyond
the limitations of its circumstances — giving an entry for their hero
Descartes that quite ignored the circumstantial facts of his life, and
concentrated instead on the supposedly ‘timeless’ truths he uncov-
ered. The ‘Information Revolution’ of the 1990s has taken their project
to its ultimate conclusion, by creating a new commodity out of ‘infor-
mation’. One that is entirely independent of its context as part of a
narrative or argument — indeed, must have a ‘granular’, decontextual-
ized nature if it is to function as a commodity product. Unfortunately,
although many people can imagine this kind of content, it proves to be
far more elusive to create and vend. Which no doubt goes a long way
to explain why the World Wide Web is failing to deliver on its promise

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of a Universal Encyclopædia — and consists, at the time of writing, of


little more than marketing collateral.

The fact that content is proving to be problematic shouldn’t suggest


that this project will necessarily fail — or, that if it fails, it will fail
gracefully and without casualties (the sheer extent of leverage of
Internet based companies means that such a failure would have severe
economic consequences). Modernism has provided the philosophical
underpinnings of some of the most intransigent and stubborn ideolo-
gies — ideologies where ‘efficiency’ had been prioritized above ‘mean-
ing’. And there is an interesting — if not exactly comforting — reason
why this is so.

Toulmin characterizes Modernism as being obsessed with certainties,


of placing the universal over the particular, the timeless over the
timely, the abstract over the tangible. Remarkably, in a popular book
Learned Optimism, clinical psychologist Martin Seligman identifies pre-
cisely these same qualities as characterising the ‘explanatory style’ of
a depressive, or pessimistic, personality. In times of rapid change and
uncertainty, these characteristics are exacerbated — as they were in the
early seventeenth century, the early twentieth century and again, for
quite di‹erent reasons, in the period of corporate ‘restructuring’ at
the beginning of the nineties. In such times people look for certainties,
and the Information Revolution is busily peddling old certainties crea-
tively re-packaged. Because stress and disillusion make us particularly
impressionable, depressive people make up the majority of cult follow-
ers. And we live in a period where depressive illness is epidemic — over-
shadowed by what Theodore Roszak has aptly described as ‘The Cult of
Information’.
I have elsewhere argued that Modernism lives on in graphic design as
‘Information Design’ — a discipline that has seemingly created itself to
provide just the systematized, generic approach required by the sepa-
ration of form and content (and information designers — or ‘informa-
tion architects’ as many like to be called — have enthusiastically taken
up technologies such as sgml that are intended precisely for the ‘multi-

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purposing’ of content.) Modernist graphics, I should remind you, made


use of a restricted palette of graphic elements that could be applied
to every conceivable circumstance. Yet the pioneers of the 1920s and
30s of could not have known how appropriate the idea of a‹ectively
neutral typographic ‘voice’, or the fitting of any kind of material into
a rigorously gridded, consistent layout, would be in the age of digital
communications.

If this prognosis seems gloomy — of a sustained Modernist counter-ref-


ormation that reverses some of the very positive, humanistic gains of
the last two centuries — there is also hope, too. Whereas Toulmin diag-
noses the conditions of Modernism, Seligman o‹ers some of the clues
for a recovery programme. Just as the depressed person in cognitive
treatment is asked to confront the idea that ‘this always happens to
me’, ‘therapy never works’ or ‘I’m no good’, so anyone confronting the
permanent, pervasive and internal aspects of their ‘explanatory style’
is working to undo the bases of Modernism in themselves. Designers
who do this will find themselves challenging the idea that there are
‘timeless’ and ‘universal’ principles which are fundamental to ‘my
style’. Instead, they are more likely to approach each job as a unique
challenge, requiring its own approaches — knowing that the validity
of design principles depends on the circumstances, and that the
human being can work in any number of ‘styles’ without losing her,
or his, integrity. Such people are unlikely to find stimulation in creat-
ing one-size-fits-all layouts for ‘Content Providers’ — prefering to find
their fulfilment in work which requires delicate interpretation of its
specificity, context and uniqueness. As such, whether they know so or
not, they will be drawing close to the spirit of the Humanists.
New media may be in the fervent ideological grip of late Modernism,
but it need not be so. There is no reason why web communications
can’t display the exquisite integration of words, images and layout
characteristic of, say, a William Blake. Ironically, computer technology
has meant that there need be none of the traditional demarcations
between writers and designers — I can frame my words directly into

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type, seeing their resonances immediately reflected in the choice of


font, size and arrangement. This is the antithesis — the antidote — of
the ‘myth of content’, as well as a great vista of opportunity for all who
love the word made visible. Nor is narrative an inevitable victim: the
Web could be a ‘Sea of Stories’ — in Salman Rushdie’s lovely image.
In itself, the belief that technological imperatives are ‘inevitable’ is
just another symptom of the same pessimistic ‘explanatory style’ that
gave rise to — and has continued to fuel — the Modernist world view.
Armed with new perspectives to understand and challenge this mind-
set, we are — as never before — empowered to create a di‹erent future.

This essay first appeared in a compilation edited by my long-time correspondent


Gunnar Swanson. In a nice coincidence, Gunnar himself contributed a piece on
Beatrice Warde’s famous ‘Crystal Goblet’ (and the whole of Warde’s original
text was included elsewhere in the book). My description of templates as ‘a kind
of all-purpose drinking vessel that is as likely to be filled with steaming co‹ee
as vintage wine’ might be interpreted as a deliberate reference to this, but in
fact was accidental — or, at least, as unintended as these kinds of synchronicities
get. The piece was also written at the height of Internet hysteria — within a few
months we began to see the whole dot.com phenomenon unravelling.

Gunnar Swanson (ed.), Graphic Design & Reading: explorations of an uneasy


relationship, New York: Allworth Press, 2000.

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The well of clarity

From the first time I saw it in a photograph, the Zen garden at


Ryoanji fired my imagination. Although I’ve yet to visit it ‘in real life’, it
remains a major landmark of my mental world. Of course, it has been
a popular icon of Japanese culture in Europe and North America for
decades, and has fuelled numerous ‘minimalist’ reinterpretations. But
whereas other designers have seen it as or, perhaps, wanted to see it
as — a kind of analogue to the stripped down style of late modernism, it
always struck me as something quite di‹erent. Ryoanji communicates
some very sophisticated ideas about design: about the uniqueness of
each task, and what it requires, about the many di‹erent ways it can be
experienced, about the relationship and organization of elements, and
how they can make a whole. It does this in an extraordinarily simple
and direct way, but in a way that only yields its meanings to a mind
that is prepared to pay it su›cient attention. Ryoanji doesn’t shout:
you have to be prepared to recognize what it is saying. And above all,
it communicates without words — a communication that’s likely to be
missed altogether in an age that equates meaning with verbiage.

In considering what ‘clarity’ might mean in design, I can hardly think


of a better example than that yard full of mossy stones. Its extraordi-
nary economy of means and striking unity of conception are the very
hallmark of what has traditionally been thought of as clarity. Yet this
word has come to mean something quite di‹erent, particularly with
the advent of new media. In the ‘information age’, clarity is about ‘let-
ting the data speak for themselves’ — and, for many people, is seen as
justification for prioritizing content over form. Ryoanji, powerful com-

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transforming communication

munication as it undoubtedly is, conveys no data (except in the mean-


ingless sense that ‘everything is data’); it is pure form. And it is this
kind of formgiving, as a way of communicating rather than adding
decorative interest, that seems to be su‹ering most from our contem-
porary fixation with data.
Clarity itself never started out by meaning simplicity or straightfor-
wardness. The Latin ‘claritas’ meant ‘lustre’ or ‘splendor’ before it
meant anything like what we mean by ‘clarification’. Indeed, it was the
mediaeval alchemists who first used it to mean the chemical process
of clarification (which we now use metaphorically, when we talk about
‘clarifying’ an issue). But even for them it was more than prosaic refine-
ment, it was the emergence of the splendor and mystery of the ‘Lapis
Philosophorum’, the philosopher’s stone, through separation from its
base constituents. In its original sense, then, clarity was by no means
just ‘cutting through the bullshit’. It did imply a way of honouring
an idea by not compounding it with trivia, but the emphasis was on
allowing the idea to shine forth — not squeezing it into a bland, homog-
enizing template. Compared with this, our contemporary concepts of
clarity appear banal, to say the least.

Ryoanji seems to exemplify this older notion of clarity as revelation


and transformation. Through subtle and purposeful rearrangement,
a few weathered rocks and some raked gravel are transformed from
the ordinary into the extraordinary. And it’s precisely this alchemy
from the commonplace into the sublime which is at the heart of all
good design. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge expressed this beauti-
fully when he said that ‘it is the prime merit of genius and its most
unequivocal mode of manifestation, so to represent familiar objects as
to awaken in the minds of others a kindred feeling towards then and
that freshness of sensation which is the constant accompaniment of
mental, no less than of bodily, convalescence.’

As graphic designers, we’re called upon to invoke freshness of sensa-


tion — and certainly to engage a kindred feeling — not as an added extra,
but as the central intent of our work. If we can’t get people to see the

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products, propositions or personality of our clients, except as part of


the visual wallpaper of everyday life, we’ve failed. Yet the means to li·
something out of the ordinary can only come from deep engagement
with and insight into it; not from ideas that are gra·ed on to it. The
brilliant vision of Wordsworth’s da‹odils is the same in this respect as
Doyle Dane Bernbach’s Volkswagen beetle advertsements — or Ryoanji.
All make you look at something familiar as if for the first time.

It’s only recently that I’ve discovered that the garden is arranged so
that wherever one stands, one stone is always hidden — an idea that is
at once playful and profound. But even without knowing this, it is pos-
sible to recognize that the relationship of every element to each other,
and to the whole, is far from arbitrary. There is a dialogue that goes
on between the stones, and between the stones and the gravel, that
results from the designer’s perception. Nor does one need to be able to
read in the mythological account that the three groups of five stones
represent a tigress and her cubs, saved by the sacrifice of Mahasattva,
to grasp the garden’s genius. Simply by virtue of what it is, Ryoanji
expresses something fundamental about the way we as human beings
interpret our world — things talk to us, and the way they are arranged
changes in an important way what they are saying.

Part of the genius of traditional Japanese garden design is that it works


with the given. That is, it doesn’t try to impose alien or extraneous
approaches on something, but instead tries to understand what the
thing is, and how to bring out its inherent qualities. However, only a
focused, uncluttered mind can really be receptive to the unique quali-
ties of a place, a material, a medium. The busy mind is so filled with
theories, ideas, approaches that it can completely miss this texture,
which may be subtle and unassuming. It is obvious that the kind of
practice that pays close attention to the specifics of time, place and
people will produce a very di‹erent kind of design to that which imple-
ments schemes regardless of their context. In Western graphic design
(which ironically now includes much contemporary Japanese design
as well), it is the busy, generalizing mind that has largely prevailed.

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transforming communication

Over the last century, we’ve seen how modernism has tried to hijack the
idea of clarity as simplicity, and make it its own. To a recent generation
of designers, this association discredited the idea of clarity — spawning
a genre of impenetrable graphic complexity, now mercifully drawing
to a close. But a moment’s reflection will show that dogmatic mod-
ernism has always been the enemy of clarity — at least in the original
and Japanese senses. The modernist designer was the architect of
sameness, applying identical approaches (whether they were glass
and steel ‘Yale boxes’, or grid and sans-serif typographic layouts) to
every project, regardless of its context. A Mies building, or a Müller-
Brockman layout, tell us nothing about the circumstances they are
supposed to reflect — but everything about an inflexible and homog-
enizing school of design. As much as anything, it is three centuries
of ‘modern’ thought, emphasizing the universal, the abstract and the
generic and, that has undermined our awareness of the local, the spe-
cific and the particular.

I believe, however, that the time has come when we can begin to reclaim
a sense of the given, and thus begin on a truly ‘postmodern’ approach
to design. Perhaps the most compelling reason for this is that the forces
pushing us towards a ‘monoculture’ — the universality of various tech-
nologies, global markets and trans-national media — are, paradoxi-
cally, also helping to make us aware of the distinctive texture of our
individual worlds. Even in the commercial sphere, the pressure to find
‘di‹erentiators’ is finally forcing marketeers to look at the things that
really make their organizations unique: their cultures, their people,
their sense of place and history. We recently suggested to a client who
was contemplating an identity change that she go back and take pho-
tographs of her organization. Not glamorous marketing shots, but
reportage pictures of its many di‹erent dimensions: the journeys
people make to work, the co‹ee bars and sandwich shops they hang
out in at lunchtimes, the elated salesperson who has just won a major
piece of business, the furtive smokers outside the fire exits, the angry
meetings where two sides come head to head, the o›ce party where
everyone is friends for a night, the plush executive o›ces and the sub-

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verted clerical partitions. This is the texture of a company; the things


that make it endearing and human and frustrating and irrational and
ultimately di‹erent from any other organization anywhere else. It is
this texture that defines corporate identity — the elusive quality that
we designers are always trying to pin down — and which gives a sense of
reality and uniqueness to communications. Our client was delighted
by the idea, going o‹ to encounter her organization as if for the first
time — having spent years talking about it in abstract rhetorical terms
that could, quite literally, apply to anyone.

We can try to imagine how the designer of Ryoanji might approach a


brochure or a web-site for this client. Almost certainly, there would be
a lot of careful, attentive looking — of being receptive to the messages,
both intentional and unconscious, given out by the organization. In a
sense, this is the correlate of trying to perceive the ‘genius loci’, the
spirit of place, that our Zen gardener would need to begin with. This
would be parallelled by a similar contemplation of the medium and
the audience, trying to see what they demand — as well as what they
are prepared to give.

Out of the chaotic mass of incidentals, the broad outlines of a picture


would begin to emerge. And these would be marked out with some
significant details — the examples Goethe called ‘an instance in a thou-
sand, bearing all within itself’. These are the rocks of our design; indi-
vidual and distinctive, not trying to pass themselves o‹ as generic,
notional boulders. But by themselves, they resolve nothing. For them to
take their places in the design, there needs to be a great deal of pacing
up and down trying out di‹erent configurations first glimsed in imag-
ination, until the composition starts to sing. No doubt at this stage
some of the elements are seen to be redundant, detracting from the
poignancy of the others. Other elements may be needed, to complete
the harmony. But rather than bring them from outside, our gardener
goes back to see if there is anything else within the organization that
can be used. There’s a sparingness, a parsimony, with materials — of
choosing from what is there, rather than compensating for the lack

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with clever but foreign elements.

We can already see a beautiful structure coming together with almost


salvaged materials — words stolen from a conversation, or o‹ered up
in a moment’s inspiration during a meeting, images taken from the
life of the organization. Onto these are laid down type, and type treat-
ments, that fit the communication as snugly and as naturally as the
gravelly waves lap the stones of the garden. Suddenly there’s some-
thing that people within the organization begin to recognize as reflect-
ing them — something that accepts who they are, but manages to make
it beautiful, extraordinary, surprising. It’s these same qualities that
will speak to their audiences, too — communicating with a voice that
has a ring of authenticity, the grit of texture and the lustre of clarity.
People will look at the resulting design, with its sense of gentle inevi-
tability, and get a sense of Braque’s meaning; ‘Echo replies to echo…
everything reverberates.’

This was the last of the three pieces I wrote for Critique magazine, appearing
in the Spring 2000 issue (which was devoted to the theme of Clarity). Nancy
Bernard, my wonderful editor at Critique, subsequently forwarded a message
to me from an attentive reader. In it, he wrote ‘…I was, however, deflated near
the end. Up to that point, even with the comments about his client, I felt that
I was reading a contemplation/appreciation of the transcendentally ine‹able.
The last three grafs, especially the sentence near the end that begins “Suddenly
something crystallizes,” made me uncomfortable because it sounded like a des-
perate attempt to demonstrate its value. I mean it’s a great way of thinking.
Why ascribe to it some sort of magical/mystical problem-solving power? You
can do all of this thinking and suddenly nothing crystallizes or, more frequently,
suddenly something crystallizes and the people within the organization begin
to ask “What the hell is that?” I dunno. Again, I loved the piece, but the ending
bothered me for some reason.’ I think he was absolutely right, so I subsequently
reworked the piece to have a more satisfying ending. And this is that version.

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The eye of the mind

When we think of graphic design, we think of a conscious, self-


directed activity. The designer makes decisions, and the design reflects
those decisions. And in many respects, the facts seem to bear out the
rightness of this view. We choose a particular colour, or specify a cer-
tain typeface, or crop an image in specific way according to our own
judgment. And as autonomous beings, we feel we are in control of the
judgments we make.

However, as a result of the e‹orts of more than a dozen di‹erent disci-


plines, a very di‹erent picture of ourselves is beginning to emerge. One
that suggests that we are far less autonomous than we like to think,
far more the puppet of our biological and social evolution. It is a pic-
ture that has disconcerting implications for graphic design, since it
suggests that many of the things we think we do for practical, rational
reasons are driven by a quite di‹erent agenda.

a brain like a sieve

One of the most fascinating insights of the last couple of decades con-
cerns the nature of the human brain. For centuries, thinkers have con-
ceived of this as an organ for thinking — the seat of a rational, analytic
mind. But it turns out that evolution le· us with a very di‹erent kind
of apparatus; much less like a sophisticated computer, much more like
a clever kind of filter. Our brains were optimized to si· through moun-
tains of data, bringing things that look important to the attention of
consciousness — as well as carefully filing away more subtle impacts, to
see if they form part of a less obvious pattern.

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transforming communication

This mental architecture enabled our remote ancestors to respond to


changes in their environment — changes that could signal immediate
dangers or scarce opportunities. Roaming the African Savannah, they
needed to know what was new, what was di‹erent, what was better,
and what it meant for them. Of course, as life became more settled and
predictable, this cerebral infrastructure was found to lend itself to the
development of more recondite talents: music, language, mathemat-
ics, abstract thought. But our minds have never become free from the
quick-and-dirty caricatures for which they were primed by evolution,
and our higher modes are still profoundly influenced by the cognitive
machinery on which they depend.

The legacy of this early hard-wiring can be seen in many aspects of our
lives. For instance, we find it hard to register continuous, incremental
shi·s (a principle neurophysiologist Robert Ornstein points out by ref-
erence to the way gasoline prices crept up unnoticed though the 1970s
from 30 to 95 cents per gallon, but triggered a major change in con-
sumption only when they went above the ‘trigger’ threshold of $1).
This means that to signal di‹erence, we need to present it in an exag-
gerated, over-emphasized manner.

In graphic design, this tendency can be seen in the continual tension


between familiarity and novelty that is such an integral part of our
day-to-day work. Brands, for instance, acquire tremendous recognition
value through frequent exposure. But with repetition they also lose
their ‘bite’ — ceasing to signal something new and interesting. So peri-
odic overhauls are required, the secret (or, perhaps, curse) of which is
getting the right balance of ‘same’ and ‘di‹erent’. Similarly the con-
tinual need to revamp packs, literature, even long-term fixtures such
as signage schemes.
Another consequence is the way we quickly become desensitized to
sameness— whether it is an expanse of colour, uniformly grey text or
too much stylistic consistency. The reason contrast works so well is that
it tricks our brains into thinking that something noteworthy is hap-
pening — thus shuttling the contrasting element into consciousness.

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One of the most worrying of our ‘primitive’ mental tendencies is the


way we unconsciously reframe comparisons, using only our most
recent experiences. Ornstein illustrates this with a Henny Youngman
joke. Someone asks Youngman what his wife is like. ‘Compared to
what!’ comes back the answer. And indeed research shows that women
and men find each other considerably less attractive a·er watching
television shows or films populated with glamourous Hollywood stars.
Sometimes we make the most important decisions on the basis of the
most inadequate comparisons. Ornstein discusses an experiment in
which people ‘found’ one dollar bills in a shopping mall. Both find-
ers and a less fortunate control group were later asked to rate vari-
ous aspects of their lives.The finders admitted to being more happily
married, more successful at work — even having appliances that broke
down less o·en. And all because their view of life had been temporarily
distorted by the serendipitous discovery of... a measly dollar.

Comparison plays an o·en unrecognized role in graphic design. Yet


one of our most popular creative techniques, that of ‘bisociating’ a
pair of contrasting images, depends upon this programmed response.
In the famous Ridley Scott/Chiat Day advertisement for Apple, for
instance, the Metropolis-like set positions the screen-smashing rebel
as a hero who dares to think di‹erently. The zombie-like drones con-
jure up images of an Orwellian dystopia — making the act one of val-
iant liberation. Reframe it slightly di‹erently, however, and we’d see
the hammer wielder as a destructive sociopath.

Being ‘built for selectivity’ also results in an instinctive impatience to


get to the point. Faced with an unfamiliar situation, our grey cells are
rapidly engaged in trying to discern what the ‘meaning’ is — and how
it might relate to us. So insistent is this impulse that we can easily fall
into the trap of substituting a meaning for an event without having
bothered to get to the bottom of it. And it is surprisingly di›cult to
reverse this process once we get started.

Our minds are constantly anxious to reach a state of closure. Most visual
communications expedite this process by giving us pre-digested mes-

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sages. We create these, o·en without realizing, through layout and the
use of emphasis. By arranging messages in order along the path taken
by the eyes, as well as weighting them accordingly, we provide clues as
to how they are to be interpreted. It is an approach that is most appar-
ent in advertising and direct mail, whose exponents have taken the
predigestion of messages to a fine art. But in experimental design one
can still discern the need to lead the reader to the point — even if this is
apparently at odds with the theories the designer is trying to apply.

slow minds

It might seem from the foregoing that the solution is to wrest more
conscious control over the design process. And becoming aware of
the forces that drive us will undoubtedly result in a more reflective
approach to design. But consciousness is not necessarily the paragon
we think it to be. Indeed, the brain’s selection and interpretation of
sensory data may make consciousness dumber than we had supposed,
but it also serves to make other parts of our mind smarter than we had
ever imagined.

Over the last twenty years, research from the cognitive sciences has
begun to show quite how clever some of our ‘less than conscious’ tal-
ents can be. In a fascinating summary of this research, psychologist
Guy Claxton points out that they will ‘learn patterns of a degree of
subtlety which normal consciousness cannot even see; make sense out
of situations that are too complex to analyze and get to the bottom
of certain di›cult issues much more successfully than the questing
intellect.’ He then goes on to say something that has quite extraordi-
nary implications for graphic design. ‘They will detect and respond to
meanings, in poetry and art, as well as in relationships, that cannot be
clearly articulated.’

It may be that this kind of ‘undermind’ (as it has been called) evolved to
compensate for some of the obvious deficiencies in the way the brain
preselects information for consciousness. For subtle patterns can be as
critical for survival as more overt impacts, but are far less perceptible.

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They may even depend on the slow buildup of apparently insignificant


clues before they become recognizable at all. So it seems that much
of the data not considered exciting enough for conscious attention is
allowed to percolate through our slower minds.

Most designers — along with many original scientists, and creative


people of all kinds — are familiar with the way that ideas incubate out
of awareness, springing into consciousness almost fully formed. O·en
the most successful concepts are the ones that appear out of the blue,
a·er an apparently fruitless period of brainstorming. But the slow
minds too seem to have their own agendas. Not only is their timing
capricious, to say the least, but the idea that emerges follows its own
rules. In the early part of this century, Hans Silberer, a colleague of
Freud’s, named this the ‘autosymbolic e‹ect’ — referring to the way
that these syntheses are presented in metaphorical form.

Why metaphor? One of the most interesting theories — pioneered by


psychologist Joseph Gri›n — is that metaphors provide templates for
action and interpretation that are independent of any particular con-
text or behaviour. Unlike less complex organisms, Nature can’t provide
us with specific behaviours for every eventuality. But she does seem to
have given us a way of grasping complex patterns of relationships that
can provide important clues for behaviour in unforeseen situations.
Metaphors can be understood in many di‹erent ways according to the
circumstances. ‘One swallow does not a summer make’ tells us in one
situation that we shouldn’t generalize from details, in another that we
shouldn’t be too hasty in anticipating an event. When we allow ideas,
observations, problems to seep into the less than conscious parts of
our mind, it may be that they are fitted against our store of such pat-
terns, analogies, stories.
Because of the nature of our work, designers o·en work with symbolic
ideas in the form in which they spontaneously occur. Without recog-
nizing the reasons, we instinctively use metaphorical and symbolic
treatments — perhaps even believing that they demonstrate a logical
solution to the problem. The fact that the extensive use of metaphor

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in graphic design feels so comfortable — and appears so unremarka-


ble — may testify to its origin in the brain’s ‘language of pattern’.

context and society

The selection and interpretation of data isn’t one of those things where
Nature and Nurture are at loggerheads. In many ways, human societies
amplify the way that the brain works, through the medium of culture.
And as with the mechanisms of mental selectivity, much of the way
that culture determines what we ignore and what we pay attention to
also operates below the threshold of awareness.

Our understanding of this ‘hidden culture’ owes a tremendous debt


to an extraordinary American anthropologist, Edward T. Hall. Over
the last fi·y years, Hall has documented the numerous ways in which
unsuspected aspects of culture a‹ect the way we think, act and com-
municate. Through his work, patterns of cultural di‹erence that had
eluded other investigators have at last become comprehensible.

Like the brain, one of the most important aspects of culture is that
it protects us, collectively, from the dangers of information overload.
Hall shows that the way that cultures do this depends on the extent
to which they make use of the context in which communications take
place. High context cultures internalize or embed significant parts of
this context, making them like the old married couple for whom a few
words conveys a wealth of meaning and association. Low context cul-
tures — of which Northern Europe and North America are good exam-
ples — pay less attention to context. Instead, to avoid overload (and it is
arguable how well we manage to do this) we try to simplify and order
the content of our communications — which tends to be fairly explicit.
The way we communicate is less like the married couple, and more like
a couple of attorneys in a courtroom — working hard to be clear and
concise, but struggling to get across all the minute details too.

Someone from a high context culture — a Latin American or


Mediterranean, for example — will typically communicate on a much
wider ‘bandwidth’ than someone from a low context culture. Gesture,

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intonation, nuance are all part of the way in which the missing part
of the message can be filled in — making the verbal component rela-
tively small and compact. Northern Europeans, by contrast, are notori-
ously unobservant of body language — and, by the standards of their
Southern counterparts, relatively pedantic.
Hall points out that high context communications are o·en aestheti-
cally very satisfying. He says: ‘High context communications are fre-
quently used as art forms. They act as a unifying, cohesive force, are
long-lived, and are slow to change. Low context communications do
not unify; however they can be changed easily and rapidly. This is why
evolution by extension is so incredibly fast; extensions in their initial
stages of development are low context.’ High context communica-
tions require a significant investment of time and e‹ort in learning to
decode them, which accounts for their longevity. Low context commu-
nications, by contrast, may be more prosaic — but they require far less
decoding, and thus are more flexible. Hall was writing well before the
advent of the web, but the expansion of new media can be seen as a per-
fect example of what he calls ‘evolution by extension’. The web initially
has been very low context — its attraction being the rapid turnover of
information — but we can expect that as it matures, it will start moving
up the context scale.

It should come as no surprise, therefore, that there are huge di‹erences


between the ways in which high and low context cultures use visual
communications. In very simplistic terms, high context cultures pro-
duce painters, whilst low context cultures produce typographers. In
graphic design, the high context approach is hierarchical, and the
low context approach democratic, in its treatment of information.
Compare the new Paris transport signage with its Berlin counter-
part — the French use a far wider range of sizes and styles of type than
the Germans, imparting a more emotional feel and lending itself to
more complex announcing. But to a low context sensibility, the French
approach seems cluttered — there’s a need to fill the space available,
rather than to maximize the surrounding emptiness. To the travel-

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ler, however, the French approach can be very helpful — one is liter-
ally bombarded with information of all kinds, in all kinds of ways. In
Germany, on the other hand, it is easy to lose one’s way — giving too
much information becomes an intrusion into the all important sense
of personal privacy.
From the perspective, it becomes much easier to understand the phe-
nomenon of Modernism — it is the predictable outcome of a low con-
text approach to design. All the characteristic features are there — a
desire for ‘white space’, a limited range of sizes and styles of type, even
the choice of typefaces with as few a‹ective characteristics as possible.

Harry Beck’s celebrated London underground map, used as the model


for numerous subsequent transportation maps, epitomizes this low
context approach to design. Beck’s real innovation was to dispense
with the contextual detail that anchored the London underground
system in the city it served. In order to simplify and abstract the pat-
tern of interconnection between the di‹erent lines, Beck regularized
the distance between individual stations and constrained the wayward
routes they followed to increments of 45°. The result was a model of
clarity — if all one wanted to know was the easiest way to get from one
station to another. But for any other question, the map is useless — not
only can’t it tell you what stop you need for Buckingham Palace or
Nelson’s column, but trying to use it to determine distance or direc-
tion can be more than misleading.

In the light of Hall’s findings, what might some of the ‘post modern’
approaches to design tell us about what is happening in contemporary
graphic design? Certainly many characteristic high-context features
are there — a richly textured use of space, the creation of numerous
curious type families to reflect shades of personal predilection, the
need to share the designer’s subcultural world to be able to decode the
work. But there is also a sense of transience, rootlessness and a love of
technological artefact that speaks of its inheritance from a more dis-
tinctly low context tradition.

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time and space

If the ‘contexting system’ is Nurture’s way of extending our own inbuilt


systems for selecting and prioritizing information, does culture have
an equivalent of the ‘slow mind’ — building up a picture of less overt
impacts? And does this too influence the way we do graphic design?
Once again, Hall’s work provides indications as to what this might
be. Fundamental to our reading of the world is the way we interpret
time and space — and culture provides us with shared understandings
of these factors, operating outside of normal awareness. The way we
structure time is dependent on the rhythms of our culture — rhythms
that are passed on to us in numerous ways, from music and dance to
everyday matters such as the way we walk, speak and work. And these
social rhythms are an embroidery on the natural rhythms that drive
us. Space, in Hall’s conception, is closely related to time, and also to the
body’s rhythms.

All cultures have formalized a series of distances around the individ-


ual that dictate the way that we interact with others. We acquire these,
as it were, with out mothers’ milk — and few of us give them much fur-
ther thought. But when we encounter someone from another culture,
our reactions can be powerfully influenced by their di‹erent interpre-
tation of space. For the Arabs — and Middle Easterners in general — a
polite social distance is close enough for someone to smell your breath.
Europeans and North Americans who don’t understand this can feel
most uncomfortable when someone they don’t know well approaches
this close — this space is reserved for those who are on very familiar
terms: parents, children, lovers.

While the exact distances di‹er from culture to culture, we share the
need to define an intimate, personal and social space — thresholds
that determine how far we stand from di‹erent kinds of people. Only
those closest to us are admitted into the intimate distance, friends and
extend family may come within the personal space, whilst colleagues
and strangers are kept beyond the inner boundaries of our social space.
Interestingly, certain cultures have added a public space — a distance

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where a much larger audience can be addressed, despite the fine


nuances of speech being lost.

Our conceptions of space and time act as metaphors for many aspects
of our lives. We talk about ‘getting our hands on someone’, or about
keeping them ‘at arms’ length’. We speak about ‘reaching out’, as well
as ‘cramping our space’. We’re concerned when people are ‘moving in
on us’, but delighted when families are ‘close’. And the same kinds of
usages are found throughout the world’s languages.

Marketers and designers talk about the ‘positioning’ of communica-


tions, and this term proves quite revealing. For it turns out that we
communicate in quite di‹erent ways according to the literal or meta-
phorical ‘proximity’ of our ‘audience’. Intimate communications are
o·en incomprehensible to outsiders, the sheer familiarity of the speak-
ers making them very high context, regardless of culture. Personal
communications are informal, unguarded and comfortable. We take
an interest in our friends because of who they are, not what they
say. Social communications, on the other hand, become progressively
more formalizes. High context cultures rely on complex systems of pro-
tocol, courtesy and manners in these situations, Low context cultures
on reserve and ‘safe’ topics of conversation. And finally, public commu-
nications are rhetorical.

Most traditional corporate communications were presented within


the public space, addressing their audiences in a manner that is not
just formal, but formulaic. New media have begun to change this, how-
ever. Just as television changed the way politicians presented them-
selves, sounding the death-knell for the tub-thumping public speaker
and ushering in the smooth talking interviewee, so digital communi-
cations are using sophisticated technologies to speak to us as if they
knew us personally. Advertising, too, plays fast and loose with our spa-
tial definitions — addressing us as lover, friend, workmate or public
according to what it is trying to sell us.

Graphic design is also showing some discomfort at being kept at a


formal distance. Many designers are edging their work into the social

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and personal spheres. From the time of James Dean onwards, the
social sphere has become in popular culture the arena in which young
men make displays to their peers — and this has become true for the
corresponding kind of graphic design. Female designers seem more
interested in exploring the personal space — and in creating means for
others to do so. Type designs such as Zuzana Licko’s ‘Mrs Eaves’, Margo
Chase’s ‘Envision’ or Kris Holmes’ ‘Lucida’ have shedded much of the
sti‹ formality of traditional letterforms, and seem more at home in
this paradigm of personable design.

evolution of language

At the beginning of his masterwork, typographie, German designer otl


aicher declares: ‘Language is a medium that takes lucidity and preci-
sion, intelligibility and insight as its bearings. The ideals of function-
alism, clarity,straightforwardness and transparency have been able to
come into their own because language is now seen as the optimum
means of conveying content, an act that requires easily comprehensi-
ble plain speaking as opposed to opacity.’ How logical, and yet how
wrong. Evolutionary Psychology, one of the newest and most exciting
cognitive disciplines, has charted the development of language. And
it appears that, far from having emerged as a means of lucid and pre-
cise articulation, it developed originally in a highly poetic form. In his
book The Origin of the Modern Mind, psychologist Merlin Donald outlines
current thinking on the evolution of speech. ‘The most elevated use of
language in tribal societies is in the area of mythic invention—in the
construction of conceptual ‘models’ of the human universe. Even in
the most primitive human societies, where technology has remained
essentially unchanged for tens of thousands of years, there are always
myths of creation and death and stories that serve to encapsulate trib-
ally held ideas of origin and world structure. Stories about seminal
events in history—attempts to construct a coherent image of the tribe
and its relationships with the world—abound. These uses were not late
developments, a·er language had proven itself in concrete practical
applications; they were among the first.’

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These discoveries would have delighted philosopher Martin Heidegger,


who declared more than forty years ago that ‘Poetry proper is never
merely a higher mode of everyday language. It is rather the reverse:
everyday language is a forgotten and therefore used-up poem, from
which there hardly resounds a call any longer.’ In Hall’s terms, early
language was profoundly high context—rich and resonant. By contrast,
aicher’s view seems to echo a modern sensibility, demonstrated by his
own severely low context approach to design: explicit, simplified, func-
tional. This is a view that has given us ‘plain language’ as a model of
clarity, and which posits ‘information design’ (or ‘information archi-
tecture’) as a kind of summum bonum in graphic design. But it’s a view
that doesn’t do much justice to the precious gi· of language, or to the
cognitive evolution that supports it.

In connection with Hall’s work, it is interesting to note that language


is now believed to have developed out of song. As Ethnomusicologist
John Blacking observed, ‘There is evidence that early human species
were able to dance and sing several hundred thousand years before
homo sapiens sapiens emerged with the capacity for speech as we now
know it.’ Thus language arose out of earlier forms of communication
that employed rhythm and—in the case of dance—space too.

But of course language has never lost its connection with rhythm
and space. Spoken language is still the primary form, and we make
it in the same ways as our remote ancestors—as a series of modulated
tones, strung together rhythmically. The only significant development
is written language, which is an entirely spatial form. Yet it is one that
does its utmost to represent its rhythmic origins in spatial form. And
looked at in this way, almost all of our conventions for representing
language pick up on some aspect of its rhythmic nature. The repetition
of letterforms provides the basic rhythm, but beyond that we group
letterforms into words punctuated by spaces, and lines punctuated by
line feeds. Lines become paragraphs, paragraphs sections, sections yet
bigger entities. Even our arrangements reflect basic bodily rhythms:
with each saccadic jump of the reading eye corresponding to one cycle

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of the brain’s Delta cycle. However free we think we have become with
our typographic arrangements, we are still constrained by Nature’s
invisible chains.

communication in patterns
Owen Barfield, one of the century’s most original thinkers and a keen
student of language, observed: ‘To the historical student, language
appears at first sight to consist of what has been well called ‘a tissue of
faded metaphors’. [...] The further back you go in time, the more meta-
phorical you find language becoming...’ As we’ve seen, this finding con-
curs with recent discoveries. But why should language have evolved in
metaphor?

Taking a leap in the dark, it seems not too far fetched to answer
that there was an evolutionary advantage in being able to communi-
cate patterns. Patterns which, embodied in song, story, myth and epic
poem, provided a blueprint for adapting to a much wider range of
situations than could be hard-wired as impulses. And, maybe, which
enriched our slow minds with a treasury of templates, cultivating per-
ceptions that were subtler and more insightful than the brain’s crude
mechanisms for bringing information to consciousness. But our fasci-
nation with pattern goes far beyond a (continuing) fascination with
songs and stories. For millennia, patterns have been an essential part
of our visual language, too. It is only in this century that they have
been disparaged as ‘gratuitous ornament’, derided by the low context
schools that have come to dominate design.

Be this as it may, for graphic design to come to understand itself, it


must take account of the origins of its prime instrument—language.
Our immediate predecessors, convinced that form follows function,
believed that this meant going back to a simple, straightforward form
of communication which drew heavily from the mechanical models
of Information Theory. But we live in a time when the evidence points
in a contrary direction. And, on the basis of this evidence, it looks as
if we might be using language in a far less sophisticated way than our

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remote ancestors. This alone should provide a real challenge to re-eval-


uate our approach to design.

Conclusion

Graphic Design is a very human phenomenon. But in our lifetimes, the


meaning of ‘human’ has changed significantly — from a rational crea-
ture given dominion over nature by virtue of our innate superiority, to
an essentially unreasonable species, molded by nature over millions
of years of evolution. Knowing ourselves in this latter way is a hum-
bling experience, but it is also a liberating one — because it provides
an opportunity to understand aspects of our behaviour which never
fitted the older models. And this is no less true in graphic design as
elsewhere. The last great ideological movement in design, Modernism,
attempted to define what designers did by reference to the supposed tri-
umph of rational thought in twentieth century ‘hard’ science (except-
ing, of course, the already ‘post-modern’ ideas of quantum physics).
But its explanations couldn’t reconcile the persistence of irrational
tendencies in design—except as ‘backsliding’. Nor could it see itself as
a cultural phenomenon. For the first time, we have the opportunity to
look at what we do with reference to the developing body of knowledge
about humankind as a biological and anthropological entity. And we
should take it.

I wrote this piece, which appeared in the Spring 1999 ‘Depth’ edition of Critique,
before I’d read either Robin Dunbar’s Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution
of Language or Tor Nørretranders The User Illusion. Dunbar’s book helped
me make much more sense of the relevance of the evolution of language to
graphic design, especially through the concept of ‘grooming’. Nørretranders
book, on the other hand, brilliantly distinguishes between a reductive and over-
estimated consciousness and a much richer experience of the world that happens
outside of it — a concept I was fumbling towards here.

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Seven pillars

The post-modern age has little time for principles. The idea that there
could be such things in graphic design — axioms which are true for all
times and all circumstances — increasingly strikes us as quaint. For
some, principles are positively disreputable: a relic of ‘logocentrism’,
that doubtful elitism which oppresses all diverging opinions. And for
others, the need for principles has been swept away by a pragmatic
approach which insists that the only thing that matters is e‹ective
communication.

So it is with some foolhardiness that I’m going to assert my conviction


that there are timeless principles of graphic design — principles that
have existed for as long as there have been graphic designers, typogra-
phers, printers, scribes, lettercutters and others who have pursued a
calling to make language visual, and which will survive the multifari-
ous innovations of the technologists. I shall try to stake out a position
that contrasts with both the lazy, licentious deconstructivism that has
displaced design theory and the marketing-led ‘design by numbers’
that has colonized the workplace.

It is my conviction that the designer’s art exists for the purpose of


amplifying meaning. Not just to make a message intelligible — at its
best, good design makes it comprehensible. This distinction may
seem academic, but I think it is profound. A message that is intelli-
gible is one in which the designer has made every e‹ort to let it to
speak for itself — the ‘crystal goblet’ approach, where design becomes
self-e‹acing in the service of meaning. Comprehensible design, on the
other hand, yields a meaning that is a composite of content and pres-

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entation — where both aspects have been carefully judged to work in


concert.

There is a close analogy here with poetry. The poet doesn’t just want
to convey a message, but to create an experience in which cadence and
sonority, metaphor and ambiguity play an equally important role to
the literal meaning of the words. For the graphic designer this multi-
dimensionality is achieved through the expressive power of images,
letterforms, colour and arrangement.

In graphic design, as in poetry, it is important, however, to distinguish


between principle and technique. Techniques change, sometimes in
response to taste and fashion, sometimes as a result of new develop-
ments. Principles, on the other hand, are not methods but frames of
reference — and as such dictate the choice and use of techniques. One
could program a computer to apply an unlimited range of graphic
techniques, but it would do so without any sense of purpose or vision.
A great designer, on the other hand, might use only a limited technical
repertory, yet create with it work of extraordinary subtlety and depth.
The poet Robert Graves, speaking at Oxford in 1962, said:

‘Technique ignores the factor of magic; cra·smanship presup-


poses it. A journeyman, a·er seven years as apprentice, will get
the feel of his materials and learn what quiet miracles can be
done with them. A small part of this knowledge is verbally com-
municable; the rest is incommunicable — except to fellow-cra·s-
men who already possess it. The technician’s disregard of this
inexplicable element, magic, in painting, sculpture, medicine,
music and poetry — on the ground that it cannot be demon-
strated under laboratory conditions — accounts for the present
dismal decline in all arts.’
I like Graves’s choice of the word magic, although some people may
feel uncomfortable with it. ‘Principle’ might easily suggest a dry, aca-
demic approach to design, but the kinds of things I think of as prin-
ciples — things as relevant to the design of a ‘shocked’ web page as a
mediaeval incunabulum — defy close analysis. Principles exist, and do

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their work, largely beyond the boundaries of consciousness. And when


applied they endow a communication with the capacity to transport
its readers in a way that is nothing short of magical. Whatever intellec-
tual fascination the work possesses — which might be considerable — it
has other ingredients that transcend the powers of reason.
Some of the recent discoveries in the cognitive sciences give new sub-
stance to the claim that there is more to the art of the designer than
can be revealed by analysis or deliberation. Whereas a few years ago
this proposition would have been treated with contempt, we’re now
poised on the brink of a revolution, the full implications of which have
yet to reach design. For it is becoming widely recognized — and backed
up by burgeoning research — that the analytical, problem-solving func-
tion of the mind is only one of many modes of intelligence and by no
means the best suited to all the problems of modern life. Many of us
are familiar with the slow incubation of ideas beyond the thresholds
of consciousness — which sporadically erupt in the form of an ‘inspira-
tion’, usually when least expected. But in a climate which demands
‘e›ciency’, we’re made to feel guilty for moments spent idly staring
out of the window, moments when our apparent blankness of mind
conceals a profound — but largely unconscious — process of rumina-
tion. And in a culture of deliberation, we’ve also been made to feel
like imbeciles — or, worse, charlatans — when we can’t show deductive
reasoning to support an ‘inspired’ solution. However, the tables are
being turned at last and — at least for the psychologists and neurophys-
iologists — the knowledge that dare not speak its name is now both
respected and admired.

One of the most interesting discoveries in this cognitive revolution is


the role of the cerebral hemispheres in the processing of language. We
now know that the le· hemisphere is responsible for literal meanings,
selecting and comprehending words and stringing them together in
proper syntax, while the right handles the ‘big picture’, constructing
the overall framework into which the discrete elements produced by
the le· take their place — as well as grasping the metaphorical dimen-

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sions of meaning. Robert Ornstein succinctly describes the objects of


le· and right hemispheres as text and context.

In the light of these findings, my assertion that great graphic design is


one in which meanings are compounded of text and context begins to
make sense. In a cognitive sense, it is a ‘whole brain’ approach — which
may also go some way to explaining its aesthetic satisfaction. Because
it’s rooted in the nature of human perception, it is a true universal.
And while the techniques designers use to achieve this change — and
will continue to change —the underlying principle remains the same.

If the interplay of text and context characterizes what I’ve called com-
prehensible (as opposed to merely intelligible) design, there are three
principles that determine its e‹ect. For these, we can look to the classi-
cal art of rhetoric for a useful analogy.

Aristotle begins his Rhetoric with a consideration of the three kinds of


‘proofs’ a speaker can o‹er. The first is based on the character of the
speaker (ethos), the second on making an emotional appeal to the audi-
ence (pathos), and the third on explanation or demonstration (logos). In
graphic communication, these categories work simultaneoulsy to con-
tribute to the e‹ectiveness of the design.

1 character/ethos

The first principle is concerned with the personality that is vested in


a piece. In the fine arts, this is usually the personality of the artist. In
graphic design, however, it is more likely to reflect the subject — and
in those branches of graphic design that are concerned with the rep-
resentation of a corporate personality, it will be the character of the
client. When an identity manager puts her thumb over the logo on the
cover of a brochure (or even in the corner of the screen) and asks ‘is this
us?’, she is making a judgment about whether the designer has really
managed to capture something intrinsic to her organization. Not how
good the design is, nor how e‹ective, but whether it communicates
that quality — at once palpable and elusive — that constitutes the corpo-
rate ethos.

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2 emotion/pathos

This principle relates to the emotional tenor or resonance of the piece.


Most of us are familiar with the power of design to reposition a com-
munication — to make it seem more approachable or more authorita-
tive — and this exemplifies the role of emotion. However, moving an
audience is not a precise science, and the principle at stake here is
more concerned with creating the right tone than with any putative,
conspiracy-style ‘emotional engineering’. A sweeping sense of drama
heightens the emotions, but it requires much subtler cues to direct
this arousal into a particular mood.

3 rationale/logos

The relationship between the designer’s art and the third kind of
proof is the most tangential, but perhaps also the most interesting. For
Aristotle, logos meant both the explanation of a thing, and the princi-
ple determining that thing (of which only part could be expressed in
words). To later philosophers, it acquired the more metaphysical sense
of the creative principle by which all things are made — the ‘word’ of
the opening verses of St John’s Gospel. As it applies to graphic design,
logos has echoes of both these meanings — being concerned with the
way the meaning of a communication is brought out by visually dis-
playing its inner rationale.

Designers naturally seek to bring out the structure of a text, whether


by emphasizing its natural pauses and stresses, or rearranging it so
that it becomes more comprehensible. At its height, the principle of
logos can be seen at work in the exquisite visual mappings of data that
Edward Tu·e shows in his books.

By articulating the message through the deliberate use of ethos, pathos


and logos, the designer contextualizes it — impressing upon it a sense
of personality, eliciting a suitable emotional ‘set’ and visually explicat-
ing its meaning. Such framing is a natural part of all human communi-
cation, and we mostly do it without thinking; graphic design normally
contains elements of all three principles. It is not necessarily better

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when it is done consciously — o·en an intuitive solution weaves the


di‹erent strands together much better than a deliberate one, but the
correct application of these principles should always result in a con-
gruity between the message and its visual context.

4 memorability

My next principle also derives from the ancients. Aristotle didn’t


include it in his Rhetoric, but believed it so important that he wrote
another work about it — now sadly lost. Quintillian, a Roman orator,
includes it as one of the five pillars of Latin rhetoric — and bequeaths to
us one of the most cogent expositions of its use in the classical period.
It is memorability.

It probably goes without saying that all great graphic design is memo-
rable. But in an extraordinary twist of history, it turns out that our
whole conception of pagecra· developed directly out of the require-
ments of the classical art of memory — which means that many of the
features we recognize as giving a document its characteristic look and
feel actually originated to make it memorable.

In the classical period books were scarce, and the methods used to
produce them slow and laborious. The idea of possessing a library for
one’s own reference was unknown; instead collections of books were
made for the purpose of creating a centre of learning. Itinerant schol-
ars would come to one of the great libraries of the ancient world and
commit the texts that interested them — in their entirety —to memory.
This was not as daunting a task as it may seem, since the memory
techniques they practised were highly sophisticated and extremely
e‹ective. The Greeks had stumbled upon an important fact of human
psychology: that while we find retaining and recalling verbal informa-
tion quite di›cult, we have an extraordinary facility for remember-
ing visual information. They discovered that by imprinting parts of a
text onto images held in the mind, it could be easily remembered by
recalling those images. They also discovered that the most powerful
images involved the coalescence of two contrasting ideas (a technique

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that is still used extensively in advertising) — and that the more bizarre
or incongruous the combination, the more memorable it would be.

With the expansion of scholarship in the middle ages, the pressures


on libraries became more acute. Despite developing more e›cient
methods of production, the scribes of the mediaeval scriptoria could
scarcely meet demand. Consequently the small number of books they
were able to produce had to function as powerful cognitive artefacts,
expediting the process of memorization. To make them more easily
assimilated, texts were broken down into convenient ‘chunks’ — the
sections and paragraphs we know today. Initial capitals, borders and
other illustrative elements were introduced — not as gratuitous dec-
oration, which could hardly have been justified — but to provided a
sequence of unique and memorable images to help in remembering
the accompanying text. The form of the book came about, therefore,
not so much a repository for information as a means of transferring it
to the mind.

With our tremendous capacity for the mechanical storage and retrieval
of huge quantities of information, this mnemonic aspect of graphic
design may not seem to be such an issue. Ironically, however, as we are
deluged in communications from all quarters, memorability has again
become a vital issue again. From amongst the thousands of graphical
messages that confront us each day, it is only the most memorable that
have any chance of success. The principle that visual communication
must engage the memory is thus as important as ever.

5 rhythm

We’re used to thinking of graphic design as a static, timeless medi-


um — although this is being increasingly challenged as new technolo-
gies bring the time-line to the designer’s palette. The way we engage
with graphic communication is, however, anything but static — from
the way the eye tracks around the page (or window) to the reading of
text, line by line. And very o·en we’re engaging not just with a single
surface, but with a sequence — as when we scan through the spreads of

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a magazine or jump through the pages of a web-site. So there is a signifi-


cant time-based element to graphic design which finds itself expressed
in all sorts of ways. On the one hand, there are the sequences of let-
terforms, words, sentences and paragraphs that make up the verbal
components of a piece: on the other, our eyes are led along complex
paths by the arrangement of visual components.

The key to the way we interact with time is rhythm. From the rapid
pulsing of neuronal activity in our brains, through the body’s inces-
sant beat of heart and breath, to the longer cycles of days, years and
generations, we appear to be thoroughly rhythmic beings. Rhythm is
not just a journey through time, but a recognisable pattern of repeti-
tions within it — and it appears that all human activities subtly syn-
chronize themselves with these patterns.

Rhythm is inherent in graphic design, appearing in many guises — from


the flow of text to the use of repeating devices such as grids, borders
or patterns. The rhythms of any piece will likely be the designer’s
own — but hopefully they will also reflect her or his synchrony with
the intended audience. Synchrony of our mental and body rhythms
with the graphic materials that capture our attention may turn out to
be the essential determinant in our comprehension and responses to
those materials: being ‘out of sync’ with some graphic treatments may
explain why we feel alienated or unable to understand them.

6 symmetry

When we think of symmetry, we think of shapes that are the same


on either side of an axis — and perhaps even, recalling high-school
maths, those that remain the same when rotated a number of times.
Its original meaning, however, is concerned with the proper relation-
ship between the whole and the part (and thus applies equally — one
might even say, especially — to what we call asymmetry).

Our concept of symmetry diminished somewhat because our under-


standing of what constitutes a ‘whole’ has become so atrophied. It
has become common to conceive of a whole as just an assemblage

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of parts — making the relationship of the parts to the whole simply


a mechanical matter. Sadly, this is even the case in the life sciences,
where the concept of the organism has all but disappeared — and the
most sophisticated notion of wholeness is the quasi-interdependence
of ‘systems’.
To the thinkers and artists of the Romantic period, the ‘whole’ did
not just arise from an accumulation of parts, but was considered to be
immanent within them. They saw the same principle at work in both
nature and human creativity: the plant present in the leaf, a poem in
a single line. Blake’s phrased this idea beautifully — ‘to see the world in
a grain of sand…’ cogently expresses this Romantic notion of symme-
try. While we’ve le· the Romantics long behind, we do live with their
legacy: there’s still a powerful sense in which the whole can be dis-
cerned from each element in a brilliant layout — even if that element is
just expressing a hint of the theme that holds the design together. And
it is also true that that theme can’t just be grasped by looking at the
totality of the elements, but must be understood by considering the
way each of the elements restates and reiterates it.

7 genius

There is one more principle which, it seems to me, has consistently


characterized the greatest graphic design (and indeed perhaps design
of all kinds). It is also the most di›cult to pin down. In part, it involves
eschewing the sensible, competent solution to pursue an inspired but
elusive thought as it dances skittishly through the shadows of the less
than conscious mind. Yet it is also the incandescent combination of
assuredness, audacity and sweeping breadth of vision. The ancients
called it ‘genius’, and attributed it to the sudden and surprising gi· of
a fickle tutelary spirit. I’m not sure I can think of a better explanation.

The garden designer Russell Page came closest to capturing its con-
sequences when he said: ‘In each case there is an exaggeration of
proportion, a pushing of scale beyond the limits of what might
seem reasonable to enforce and enhance our comprehension. “This

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is it” — the maximum and minimum statement. And then there is a


second common element — unity or, more precisely, a symbol or inti-
mation of unity; a simple expression of grass or water or stone or sky, a
definition of form and direction and space; a statement made, in each
case, as economically and fully as possible.’

In conclusion

It’s worth emphasizing the ‘ancientness’ of these principles — they


would have all been recognizable to Aristotle’s contemporaries, even
if our application of them might have been unfamiliar. We’re increas-
ingly so beguiled by the technological aspect of design that we o·en
seem to forget that we’re also part of a continuing tradition. Our com-
puters may be running the latest programs — and help us design for
new and exciting media — but the human context of our work remains
as it always was. Cognition and aesthetics (the Greek word means ‘per-
ception’) are intertwined, even if it is becoming increasingly possible
to unravel some of their threads. And it is they, not the wizardry of
so·ware, that still define what we do.

I certainly never intended to identify seven ‘eternal’ principles of graphic design


when I was commissioned to write this piece for the Spring 1998 ‘Pagecra·’ edi-
tion of Critique. Nor, if I had been asked to do so, would I have chosen these in the
first instance. But as it turned out this way — more by accident than design — I’m
prepared to stick by them. Indeed, I find these seven things a reliable guide when
I’m looking at graphic design and get more from them the more I consider them.
That might sound arrogant for a writer, but looking back I have no idea how this
piece came together. It might as well have been written by someone else.

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Atalanta Flees

Like a Renaissance version of Milton Glaser’s Dylan, the figure of


Boreas — the North Wind — looms over a landscape of lakes and roman-
tic ruins. His hair and hands dissolve into profuse whorls of smoke,
whilst in his stomach the outline of a curled fetus can just be made
out. Such is the first ‘emblem’ of an extraordinary book: the Atalanta
Fugiens of Count Michael Maier, physician and alchemist.

Writing in a preface to the reader, Maier declares: ‘Four things, I say,


are contained once and for all in a single book, destined and dedicated
to your usage: poetic and allegorical; fictive, pictorial and emblematic,
engraved on “Venus” or copper, not without “venery” or grace; the
most secret things of Chemistry, for the exploration of the intellect;
and lastly musical rarities. If this usage should be more intellectual
than sensual, the more useful and agreeable it will eventually be: for
indeed if it is first entrusted to the sense, there is no doubt that it
should be transferred from the sense to the intellect, as through a
portal.’

Atalanta Fugiens certainly does seem to encompass everything from


the sublime to the ridiculous — from emblems pregnant with spir-
itual meaning, such as the geometrician who traces out the squared
circle, with its inscribed Vitruvian occupants, to the bizarre, as with

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the man who holds a ‘chilly toad’ to a woman’s breast in the midst
of a city square. Many of its emblems are familiar, having been exten-
sively reproduced in all sorts of applications — and also been widely
borrowed by other artists (Blake reinterprets Maier’s final emblem of a
dead woman in the grave, encircled by a serpent, in his Jerusalem.)
Its author is not above humour either, as the title of one of his other
works (Jocus Severus, the severe joke) shows. But the overriding impres-
sion of Atalanta is of an intricate multi-layering, which lends it an
enigmatic quality. Perhaps it was this that prompted the eminent his-
torian, Dame Frances Yates, to declare: ‘I am entirely unable to under-
stand all this, nor how it would be possible to work out a mathematical
problem in terms of this kind of alchemy. But I believe that implica-
tions of this kind are present in the Maier emblems…’

The basis of the book is the Greek myth of Atalanta and Hippomenes.
For those whose Classical mythology is rusty, Atalanta is a chaste and
feisty maiden who has been told that she can only marry a man who
is able to beat her at some activity. Unfortunately for her suitors,
she proves unbeatable — and the hapless swains are all ruthlessly des-
patched by an arrow from Atalanta’s bow. Hippomenes, grandson of
Neptune, is determined to succeed, however, and to this end acquires
three enchanted golden apples from Aphrodite. Challenged to beat
the swi· footed Atalanta in a running race, he throws them at her
feet — causing her to stop to pick them up. Hippomenes wins, but the
goddess’ apples have already turned Atalanta’s head. Indeed, so lusty
has the race made them both that they slope o‹ to a local temple
to sample a foretaste of marital bliss. Unfortunately, it turns out to
be a temple dedicated to the goddess, who is outraged by such sacri-
lege — and she promptly turns the lovers into a pair of lions.
For Maier the story of Atalanta’s flight is allegorical of the processes
of ‘chemistry’ — Atalanta herself represents the elusive philosophical
Mercury, Hippomenes the spiritual sulphur, and the apples the third
part of the hermetic trinity, salt. And it is really the alchemical proc-
esses of transformation that the book celebrates. The myth is however

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echoed in the series of haunting fugues for three voices that accom-
pany each emblem (the choice of the ‘fugue’ form being an elegant
pun characteristic of Maier). These consist of a lead soprano voice
attributed to Atalanta and a tenor voice attributed to Hippomenes,
sung over a ‘cantus firmus’ that represents the apples. Musically, this
is an extremely demanding and mathematically precise form of com-
position — the crystalline nature of which only becomes apparent from
studying the scores.

Published in Oppenheim in 1618 by Johann Theodor de Bry, whose


hand shaped the fi·y exquisite engravings that form the visual com-
ponent of the book, Atalanta Fugiens immediately established itself
as one of the most collectible examples of a genre that we still find
hard to comprehend: the alchemical allegory. Yet it is hardly a work
of naive, pre-scientific superstition — indeed, it is difficult to imagine
a more consciously designed and erudite work. Not without reason is
it described as the first work of multimedia, combining images and
words with music for eye and ear. And Maier’s use of mixed media
is arguably more sophisticated than our own, employing the qualita-
tively di‹erent languages of poetry, imagery and music to indicate
meanings that apparently do not lend themselves to any simpler form
of communication.

Nor does Maier easily fit our stereotypes of the mediaeval magus. Born
in 1568 in Kiel, on what is now the border between Germany and
Denmark, he studied philosophy and liberal arts at the University of
Rostock. Subsequently he travelled to Padua, where he was awarded
the title of Poet Laureate for his prodigious abilities to versify in Latin
(as well as in his native German). He completed his education with
a Doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Frankfurt and a
Doctorate in Medicine from the University of Basel (where the maver-
ick genius Paracelsus had lectured half a century earlier).

For several years he practised as a physician in Rostock, writing trea-


tises on the treatment of various conditions. As a doctor, he followed
the example of Paracelsus, whose conception of the ‘whole person’

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anticipates the complementary medicine of our own times. Sometime


a·er the completion of his studies, Maier witnessed a remarkable cure
by the use of alchemical — or ‘spagyric’ — medicines, and it was this
that apparently redirected the course of his life.

In 1608 Maier presented himself to the court of Rudolf II — Holy Roman


Emperor — in Prague. The court of Rudolf II contained a galaxy of
extraordinary people: the Emperor was fascinated by both science and
occultism, as well as being an assiduous collector of curiosities (his
‘Weltzkammer’ was the prototype of the modern museum). Here came
the esotericists John Dee and Giordano Bruno, the painter Arcimboldo,
the astronomers Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler. And the great Rabbi
Loew — supposed creator of the ‘Golem’ — ministered to the Jewish com-
munity in the Old Town. Rudolf appointed Maier to the role of his per-
sonal physician (simultaneously ennobling him with the title ‘Count
Palatine’).

But Maier entered Rudolf’s court in its twilight years. In 1611 Rudolf
was forced to abdicate in favour of his brother Matthias — and died the
following year. Maier headed for London, and presented himself to the
court of James I. And this marked the beginning of his flair for unu-
sual multimedia presentations — his ‘visiting card’ (preserved in the
Scottish Record Office) consisted of a large parchment,and contains
the first indication of themes he would return to in ‘Atalanta’.

There is a great deal of speculation that Maier’s visit to England may


had a covert political or diplomatic dimension. He appears to have been
centrally involved in the project to get James I’s son in Law, Frederick V,
elected to the throne of Bohemia as Matthias’ successor. This was part
of a larger game plan to see Frederick, who had become the champion
of the Protestant cause, become Holy Roman Emperor. Frederick him-
self, as well as his principal advocate/lieutenant, Christian of Anhalt,
were both interested in alchemy — and there is evidence that Christian
was a patron of Maier’s.

Atalanta Fugiens was one of a series of eleven books Maier published in


the three years from 1616 to 1619, while Frederick reigned in Heidelberg.

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This phenomenal productivity has led historians to believe that most


of these must have already existed in manuscript form, dating perhaps
from the years Maier spent in England. What caused him to burst into
print at this time, however, remains a mystery.

A·er the collapse of the fortunes of the Protestant cause at the White
Mountain, and the initiation of the brutal Thirty Years War, Maier
moved to Magdeburg. We know little of his life there, except that he
continued to practice medicine and to write. His books slowed to about
one year, until his death in 1622. Unfortunately Magdeburg was sacked
in 1631, destroying any evidence of Maier’s final years.

Although Maier wrote on alchemy, and undoubtedly practised a form


of laboratory chemistry, it is wrong to think that he was seeking to
transmute base metals into gold. In a work published a year before
Atalanta called Examen fucorum pseudo-chymicorum (‘Examination of the
pseudo-chemical drones’) he explicitly condemns those who claimed
to make gold, and exposes some of their tricks and deceptions. Maier’s
is a spiritual alchemy, where the substance to be transformed is noth-
ing other than the being of the alchemist. But to the hermeticist, the
world of spirit and the world of matter are not di‹erentiated — in the
‘Emerald Tablet’, Hermes himself asserts that ‘that which is above is
like that which is below’, that there is a correspondence between psy-
chic and physical matters. This is a notoriously tricky point for a con-
temporary sensibility to grasp, conditioned as we are by dismissive
attitudes towards alchemy engendered by two or three years of high-
school science. Of the modern commentators who have grasped it, few
have expressed it better than Carl Jung:

‘...it remains an obscure point whether the ultimate transform-


ation in the alchemical process are to be sought more in the
material or more in the spiritual realm. Actually, however, the
question is wrongly put: there was no “either-or” for that age,
but there did exist an intermediate realm between mind and
matter, i.e., a psychic realm of subtle bodies whose character-
istic it is to manifest themselves in a mental as well as a mate-

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rial form. This is the only view that makes sense of alchemical
ways of thought, which must otherwise appear nonsensical.
Obviously, the existence of this intermediate realm comes to a
sudden stop the moment we try to investigate matter in and
for itself, apart from all projection; and it remains non-exist-
ent so long as we believe we know anything conclusive about
matter or the psyche. But the moment when physics touches
on the “untrodden, untreadable regions,” and when psychol-
ogy has at the same time to admit there are other forms of psy-
chic life besides the acquisitions of personal consciousness — in
other words, when psychology too touches on an impenetrable
darkness — then the intermediate realm of subtle bodies comes
to life again, and the physical and the psychic are once more
blended in an indissoluble unity. We have come very near to this
turning-point today.’

C.G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (Second Edition), London:


Routledge, 1968. pp.278-9.

One of the most astonishing results of recent researches into the her-
metic movements of the early seventeenth century — prompted by
Frances Yates’ seminal The Rosicrucian Enlightenment — has been the dis-
covery of just how much Maier and his circle were involved in the birth
of the scientific revolution. We now know that the Royal Society, syn-
onymous with orthodox scientific enquiry, was originally founded as
an ‘invisible college’ by hermeticists such as Samuel Hartlib and Elias
Ashmole. Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton, whose names are closely
associated with its illustrious beginnings, were both practising alche-
mists — for twenty years, Newton rarely stirred from his laboratory
experiments in his rooms at Trinity College, except to deliver a statu-
tory lecture as Lucasian professor (usually to an empty hall). Newton
le· 88 pages of notes, in his tiny crabbed hand, to Maier’s Atalanta
Fugiens — which he believed was a work of the utmost importance. But
such enquiries run up against what is perhaps the last great taboo
in our society — the suggestion that science might not be an a priori,

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empirical process, but a social and cultural construction.

For many of us, the only way to appreciate Atalanta Fugiens is as a


work of conceptual art — and as such, it no less remarkable. Alchemy
has been used as a theme in twentieth century art, but as a vague meta-
phor for the processes of transformation. But to a hermeticist, how-
ever interesting a critical or semiotic analysis of Maier’s work might
be, it is an exercise in futility — the work conceals a mystery that is
there to be discovered, and any other approach is beside the point. And
this highlights one of the most awkward questions it raises. Like many
alchemical texts, Atalanta can only be properly understood a·er years
of patient study — it exists as a communication at the very margins
of comprehen-sibility, deliberately (or perhaps inescapably) concealing
its secrets under layers of allusion and symbolism.

In his study of alchemical engravings of the seventeenth century, The


Golden Game, Stanislas Klossowski de Rola writes:

‘Several Hermetick Philosophers have provided a method for


the diligent seeker which can be used as a kind of Ariadne’s
thread to find one’s way through the labyrinth-ine obscurity
of alchemical literature: select the best books, read and re-read
them, carefully compare the places where they agree and how
they agree, for there the truth is to be found. Also compare
where they di‹er and how they di‹er, for further discoveries
will still be made. Be suspicious when they appear to speak most
clearly and candidly; and meditate upon the places where they
are most obscure. Thus little by little the pattern of truth will
emerge, like the watermark in paper held up to the light.’

Stanislas Klossowski de Rola, The Golden Game, London: Thames


& Hudson, 1988. p.18.
This is the true hermeneutic method — significantly, the other of the
sciences of Hermes (even if this attribution is forgotten by its philo-
sophical exponents). It is fashionable to believe that communications
must wear their meanings on their sleeves, and that even then we exist

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in a universe of multiple readings. Atalanta Fugiens asserts, on the other


hand, that communication can be just as e‹ective and striking when
it hides its meaning (it is interesting to compare it with the examples
of ‘information design’ that Edward Tu·e showcases in his books, and
wonder at its similarities and di‹erences). And diligent students of
Maier’s claim to have come, eventually, to the common understanding
that its author intended — but to which he could only point through
the use of the three media from which it is composed.

Atalanta Fugiens is a true virtual world — a world that doesn’t just enter-
tain a passive imagination, but actively engages it and exercises it to
its limits. There is no sense of closure, no easy resolution for the lazy
mind. On the contrary, if nothing else it is Maier’s genius to have cre-
ated a work of art that challenges us on every level like an exquisite
puzzle. There is food for thought here for everyone who seeks to design
for the media rich environments of our own virtual worlds.

This is the longer version of the piece Maziar Raien and I wrote for the Autumn
2000 issue of Eye magazine (the published version was cut down to 750 words,
to make room for the images, and thus sacrificed most of the historical back-
ground). We’re both fascinated by the alchemical engravings of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, and Maier’s work represents the high point of this
tradition. But why do we find Maier’s work so fascinating? Perhaps because
it comes from a time when what we now think of as Modernism was being
born, very much as a result of what Dame Frances Yates’ called ‘The Rosicrucian
Englightnement’. Somehow, though, we only ended up with half of what was
envisaged — a kind of lopsided empiricism without the profoundly spiritual way
of ‘reading’ Nature with which it was originally balanced. Consequently, now
that Modernism is more or less over, it is interesting to revisit this era to discover
what we missed.

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Drag me! Click me! Read me?

In front of me is a ‘window’ with seven icons and one button ranged


across the top. On the le·, there are three squares with a drop shad-
ow — the first is empty, the second has a fuzzy scribble that looks like
the initials ZH transcribed into an early version of MacPaint, in the
third the words bin hex are neatly arranged one above the other like the
sign for a fashionable eatery. I know what Binhex means, though, so of
the three I can at least grasp its intention. The other icons, which don’t
appear in squares — but instead are evenly spaced across the top of the
window (in distinction to the first three?) — are, if it is possible, even
more opaque. One has a tick with the initials QP. QP? Nothing comes to
mind. Its neighbour depicts a miniature Mac Plus — a machine I remem-
ber with some fondness — juxtaposed on top of the familiar ‘document’
icon with the folded corner. I wonder if this is what Koestler meant by
‘bisociation’, but this doesn’t help its meaning to become any clearer.
The next has another tick, this time against a document with a curving
arrow that seems to suggest it should be turned back to front. Still no
clue. The last has two documents, one above the other. Their pages are
as delightfully empty as my mind. ‘Go on then’, I think, ‘switch on bal-
loon help’. I’m looking at the composition window of Eudora Light — a
popular mail program for Macintosh.

Sometimes design seems to be more about some sort of Freudian exter-


nalizing of a dark, mysterious interior than it is about rational prob-
lem solving. Composing and sending e-mail is — like other computing
operations — a straightforward, logical operation. Why then did the
designer of this particular program, like so many others, choose to rep-

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resent its functions by such a bewildering array of images when a few


well chosen words (like those I’m forced to summon in balloons) could
make them immediately clear? I can only account for this by reference
to a deep, perverse streak of human atavism.

Icons are a ubiquitous feature of the computer landscape, one of


the four pillars (together with windows, mice and pointers) that
underpin the whole notion of the graphical user interface.The conven-
tional — and largely unquestioned — wisdom sees them as synonymous
with warm adjectives like ‘intuitive’ and ‘user friendly’. But are they
really what they’re claimed to be? Or are they the flying ducks of the
information age — gratuitous ornamentation that intrudes into both
the usability and aesthetics of the computing environment. Certainly
few applications, from operating systems to web-pages, seem complete
without several shelves of this virtual bric-a-brac, like decorative china
in an olde worlde tea-shop. And yet we continue to talk as if this unstop-
pable urge towards the twee was a breakthrough in the ergonomics of
the human computer interface.

An article of faith among interface designers holds that there are


‘verbal’ and ‘visual’ people — the latter something of an historically
oppressed minority who, through the graphic potential of new media,
are at last being given the opportunity to engage in the ‘information
revolution’. This view, held with extraordinary tenacity in the interface
and information design communities, is behind much of the vigorous
promotion of icons for interactive applications. Yet here am I (presum-
ably not alone), a graphic designer by trade and temperament, finding
myself increasingly ‘visually challenged’ by the iconic language of the
programs I use. How come?
Like most unexamined assumptions, the basis for the idea that people
respond to computer applications in such profoundly di‹erent ways
turns out to be a concatenation of anecdotal evidence, popular misun-
derstanding and wishful thinking. I’ve long wondered where the hard
science to substantiate this arbitrary division of humanity into visual
and verbal might be, since nothing I’ve come across in the cognitive

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sciences comes anywhere close. There are echoes of Howard Gardner’s


1983 Frames of Mind — but not in any form he would recognize — as
there are of the right brain/le· brain dichotomy popularized in Robert
Ornstein’s 1973 Psychology of Consciousness. But even Ornstein is con-
cerned that these ideas have been taken out of context, and totally
exaggerated. In his latest book, he is at pains to point out that instead
of people bifurcating into ‘le· brainers’ (verbal types) or ‘right brain-
ers’ (visual types), many of those categorized as ‘right brainers’ simply
have undeveloped or atrophied le· hemisphere skills — pointing to
the failure of our education system to achieve adequate levels of lit-
eracy, rather than any enlightened encouragement of visual thinking.
‘The right-hemisphere specializations develop to their fullest when
informed by a fully developed le· side. Otherwise we get form without
content.’

Even if we credit the visual/verbal idea as a hypothesis — which strikes


me as over generous — it raises some di›cult questions. Since most
computer use is concerned with manipulating alpha-numeric infor-
mation (word processing, spreadsheet calculation, database interroga-
tion and e-mail), doesn’t this suggest that most of the users will tend to
come from the ‘verbal’ camp? So shouldn’t images be the alternative,
rather than the default means of calling functions? And why are icons
the answer for those who see themselves as visually inclined — surely
the di‹erent organization of their dominant mode of thinking needs
to be catered for by something better than a skin deep sign? In the
dizzy world of new media, however, such questions appear deeply het-
erodox.

difficulties with icons


There are a number of objections to an iconic approach: functional,
semantic, aesthetic and philosophical. Before exploring these, how-
ever, it is worth considering what icons are. Despite the name, with its
resonant overtones of the sacred and profound, icons are surprisingly
prosaic.

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By and large — although this is not an exhaustive taxonomy — icons fall


into three categories. There are those that represent the encapsulation
and organization of data: documents, folders, disks etc. These could be
called ‘nominal’ icons — icons that present di›cult to conceptualize
or largely intangible things in terms of familiar items. Then there are
icons that represent tools, o·en by turning the cursor into a parody of
a physical tool like a scalpel or a pencil. For the sake of classification,
we can call this small but significant group ‘functional icons’. Finally,
there are icons that represent destinations — although this is some-
thing of a conceit, since nobody actually goes anywhere. This latter
category, thanks to the explosive growth of the web, is now the largest
and most diverse.

The kinds of visual treatment are correspondingly simple. Icons are


either symbolic, associating an abstract function with a familiar, phys-
ical equivalent, or they are heraldic, carrying the impress of propri-
etorship. Signposts and trash cans are examples of the former, whilst
application icons (and their accompanying document icons) are exam-
ples of the latter. Interestingly, the principle that ‘a picture is worth a
thousand words’ does not seem to apply here — icons invariably repre-
sent only one thing; ambiguity being equated with loss of clarity.

functional problems with icons

In a wired interview with Jimmy Guterman, information design guru


Edward Tu·e describes computers as ‘just about the lowest resolution
information interface known to humankind, compared to the map,
the photograph, printed text, or the brain. You have to do special things
in a low resolution world: not waste pixels, use anti-aliased typography,
give all the space to the user, because it’s so precious.’ Tu·e goes on to
say that ‘icons are pretty ine›cient’ — explaining how, in one instance
(the opening screen of Norton Desktop for Windows) the repetition of
a single icon wastes 4,000 pixels on the screen to present ‘…one piece of
information, one single noun…’.

Although the screen is not entirely kind to text, words are o·en more

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e›cient than images in terms of the amount of space they take up.
Many icons, however, are also accompanied by a caption — this is invari-
ably the case with what I’ve called nominal icons, which are the icons
that inhabit our desktops and file management windows. In these
cases, the image is almost completely redundant. Its only residual
functions are to di‹erentiate it in kind from other similar entities (a
function some computing environments achieve more e›ciently, but
slightly less elegantly, with file extensions) and to give it a sense of
‘thingness’.

Presenting the same information twice, visually and verbally, smacks


of a profligate redundancy in an environment still constrained by
coarse resolution and limited image area. It can only really be justified
by the visual person/verbal person theory — where one is supposedly
translating the same information for two di‹erent kinds of minds.
However, the constraints mean that screen designers are constantly
having to make compromises and sacrifices. Many find the wasteful
but decorative icon harder to let go, and it’s more common in interface
design to find rows of icons without captions than unadorned hyper-
text links — a clear signal of where the designer’s sympathies lie.

Semantic problems with icons

Edward Teller, in his celebrated critique of the downside of technol-


ogy, Why Things Bite Back, describes how iconic representation has gone
from being what he considers a radical and brilliant way of enhanc-
ing usability to a virtual Babel. ‘The recomplicating e‹ect is that while
some commands and programs are much clearer as symbols than as
words, others are resolutely and sometimes inexplicably nongraphic.
(The world has at least two serviceable Stop designs, but still no decent
Push and Pull symbols for doors). […] It probably doesn’t matter too
much that Apple Computer has copyrighted the Macintosh icon of the
garbage can as a symbol to which unwanted files can be dragged for
deletion. Windows so·ware uses a wastebasket instead. But what does
a shredder mean, then? Does it discard files, and/or does it do what

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paper shredders are supposed to: make the original text impossible to
recognize or reassemble? And some symbols mean di‹erent things in
programs written for the same operating system. A magnifying glass
can call for enlarging type as it does in some Apple so·ware, but it can
also begin searching for something or looking up a file in Macintosh
as well as in Windows applications. A turning arrow can mean Rotate
Image, but a similar arrow can denote Undo; Microso· tried a hundred
icons for Undo and finally gave up.’

Donald Norman, on the other hand, can’t see what all the fuss is about.
‘Icons. Lots of people worry about the design of icons. I can’t under-
stand them. What does that symbol mean? What does this symbol
mean? Bad design they say. No, no, I don’t think it’s bad design. There’s
no reason why a visual icon should be understandable when you first
see it. The real trick is to make it so that when somebody explains it to
you, you say ah, I got it, and you never have to have it explained again.
So a good design means you explain it only once.’ Norman’s point of
view is perfectly reasonable in the context of an operating system or
an application, given that there is ‘somebody’ to explain it to you — and
that you use it regularly. But even icons that you have had explained
can become obscure if you don’t use those features every day, as my
Eudora experience shows. When the same insouciance is applied to
the design of a website — which for the majority of ‘visitors’ is a one-o‹,
unmediated experience — the sense of frustration and disempower-
ment can be an order of magnitude greater.

One of the most commonly heard arguments in favour of icons is that


they allow for a truly cross-cultural visual language. Just as pictograms
have become part of the way we communicate without words, so icons
help the user navigate the computer interface regardless of her native
language. Or so the theory goes. Of course, pictograms have become a
very useful way of communicating certain kinds of information — al-
though it is salutary to realize quite how many learned associations
we have to make to be able to understand them. And some kinds of
messages do lend themselves to literal presentation: the car falling

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o‹ the road into the water will be understood by most drivers as a


vivid demonstration of a potential hazard. But others, such as the red
warning circle, are entirely arbitrary conventions. Much of the rich-
ness of language comes from its vocabulary of abstractions — things
that by definition don’t lend themselves to depiction. With pictograms
we are forced to adopt a way of representing abstract concepts which
loses all the advantages of immediate recognition, and requires pro-
spective users to learn new graphic languages — in addition to their
spoken and written languages. Nor are these languages particularly
‘intuitive’ — ask any driving instructor how many candidates fail their
driving test because of faulty recognition of road signs.

Another argument that is advanced in favour of icons is our greater


facility for memorizing images. This was, of course, the gist of the clas-
sical art of memory — and the basis for the scintillating stage perform-
ances of ‘memory men’. The use of images as mnemonics is indeed
very clever, but it requires considerable e‹ort — to say nothing of skill
and patience — on the part of the practitioner. And it is hard to see how
this connects with the ostensible purpose of icons, since one of the
avowed intentions of the user interface is to give us immediate feed-
back and not to require us to remember anything.

Issues of meaning and ambiguity are at the heart of the problem with
icons. Our instincts naturally draw us towards the figurative potential
of the image. But there is little scope for encouraging multiple read-
ings in presenting what is, in e‹ect, a control whose narrow meaning
has been fixed not in design but in the rigid logic of programming. And
it’s this definite denotation that makes me wonder about the argu-
ments about the ‘visual’ user. If there really are such people whose
dominant mode of perception is the direct, imaginal mentation that
the rest of us use only occasionally, do they really benefit from the pic-
ture as single noun? Or would they insist, like William Blake (verbal
or visual person?) that meaning be ‘Twofold Always! May God us keep,
from single vision and Newton’s sleep’.

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aesthetic problems with icons

Someone once told me — I’m not sure on what authority — that one of
the reasons our computers require us to do so many ‘physical’ things
on screen (pushing buttons, twiddling knobs, pushing sliders) is that
North America never developed a tradition of building automata. Had
the personal computer come from the old world, the hardware would
have had the a‹ordances to allow us to do these things manually. I
don’t have much interest in the historical accuracy or veracity of this
observation, but it does explain what is for me one of the most excru-
ciating aesthetic deficiencies of the graphical user interface — the way
it relies on simulations of the tactile controls of other technologies.
Since icons are o·en — most o·en, in all probability — buttons, this reli-
ance manifests itself in awkward attempts at trompe l’oeil: bevelled
edges, drop shadows, ‘depress modes’, click sounds and the like.

The aesthetic problems don’t end with mechanical emulation, how-


ever. There is also the issue of consistency. Interface designers devote a
great deal of time to producing environments that have a visual coher-
ence — a distinct graphic personality. But increasingly their e‹orts are
undermined by the way that these environments are nested within
other environments — each with their own conventions and approach.
Inside the desktop, with its own distinctive iconography, may be a
browser with an entirely idiosyncratic visual treatment. And inside
this browser is a website, with a third type of graphic approach. Like a
Russian doll, the website may turn out to be not a single entity but a
frameset, containing yet further sites and styles. What each designer
intended as a congruous aesthetic experience for the user has become
a riot of jarring colours, images and treatments.

Rather than trying to resolve these tensions within itself, however, we


find the aesthetics of interface design bursting out into other media.
Prompted by what I’m tempted to call ‘icon envy’, there are now televis-
ual treatments that scream ‘click me!’ — even though there’s nothing
to click with. And in a bizarre reversal of the claim that screen design
is being held back by the conventions of older media, we also increas-

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ingly find this tendency in print — where rows of icons taunt the reader
with the promise of an interactivity they can’t actually deliver.

philosophical problems with icons

Conceptually, icons fall into a kind of no-man’s land between the reso-
lutely modernist positivism of Neurath’s Isotype and the post-modern
‘reader-centred’ semiotics that derive from Saussure and Pierce. Both
schools lay claim to them, no doubt attracted by their enthusiastic take
up in the new media. But in reality they are neither fish nor fowl, not
‘positive’, observation based characters nor multiply referential signs.

In Neurath’s scheme, pictorial representations can bypass the ambigu-


ities and imprecision of language, appealing to an entirely empirical,
logical but wordless capacity of the mind through the mediation of the
eye. Needless to say, it is di›cult to recognize our ‘visual’ person as a
Vienna Circle Positivist, as Neurath would have liked to have seen her/
him. This perspective has, however, been highly influential in inform-
ing the discipline of information design, which still asserts a defiantly
Positivist view of communication based on concepts of ‘clear’ com-
munication, ‘plain’ language and diagrammatic representation. And
information design is one of the most potent forces shaping the new
media, a comfortable bed-fellow with the enthusiastic scientism that
drives the ‘technological revolution’.

From the Saussurian perspective, signs have an arbitrary (or unmoti-


vated) connection to the things they signify. Icons, thus, are tokens
or pointers, which take up their role within an intricately interwoven
system of ‘di‹erences’, and whose connotations depend upon cultural
and other readings. This is a beguiling theory that has been eagerly
taken up by the more expressive tendency in graphic design.
I have a hard time, though, imagining the genesis of language as a
Positivist — or even a Saussurian — naming exercise. (One caveper-
son to another: ‘Here is another thing. Let us call it “tree”.’) Far more
likely, language evolved first in what Martin Heidegger described as
its ‘disclosive’ aspect — that is, as our remote ancestors became ever

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more self-conscious, their awareness of the world became populated


with linguistic concepts and, vice versa, as they developed language,
they became more aware of the ‘thingness’ of their environment. In
The Way to Language, Heidegger points out that the disclosive aspect of
language is both prior to, and considerably more important, than its
representational aspect.

Added to this, there is the metaphorical nature of language. The nine-


teenth century view (epitomized by such figures as Müller, Humboldt
and Saussure) was that language was originally descriptive and only
later (as in the Homeric period) figurative. But, as Owen Barfield points
out, all the evidence is precisely to the contrary — the earliest records
of language, and the most ‘primitive’ languages, are profoundly meta-
phorical. It is only comparatively recently that words begin to be used
in a purely descriptive, representational sense (with the irony that
their etymology o·en preserves their original metaphorical status).

When it comes to the way we relate to our computers, the idea that
our world is disclosed to us through the medium of language — and
that language is itself inherently metaphorical — becomes highly sig-
nificant. We understand computing through the mediation of persua-
sive models which supplant any conception of what we are actually
doing with a profoundly anthropomorphic construction, where logi-
cal entities composed of bits become embodied in the images of things
familiar to us from the world of atoms. Under the influence of this
model, we can convince ourselves that we are ‘dragging’ a ‘document’
to the ‘trash’, even though the operations that are actually happening
in our computer’s memory or cpu bear no resemblance to these
mundane analogies. Similarly, we are induced to believe we are ‘surf-
ing’ through ‘cyberspace’ whilst we sit dispassionately, twitching our
mouse and staring hypnotically into a two-dimensional screen. It is an
intimation of the hyper-real world Jean Baudrillard describes, where
signs are no longer used to point to, or even conceal, reality — but to
conceal the absence of anything we could recognize as reality.

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In the beginning was the word

These reflections lead me to wonder whatever happened to


‘hypertext’ — the idea that words could ‘do’ as well as ‘say’, whilst
remaining located contextually within a narrative. Replacing images
with words does away with most of the problems with icons, returning
the computing environment from the make-believe world of manipu-
lating tokens to something that can be more closely correlated with
what actually goes on under the hood. Since the bulk of teh informa-
tion we access with our computers is still predominantly verbal, it
seems surprising that this has not been more widely explored. The
book became an extraordinary cognitive and aesthetic artefact despite
its predominantly verbal content — why not the web page?

Words seem to be disparaged in the new media — perhaps because the


people who are involved in shaping it have so little sympathy for them.
This is particularly ironic, since words can o·en have the resonances,
ambiguities and figurative dimensions that icons — in the few pixels
allotted to them — are incapable of. It’s also sobering to reflect that
while the Internet was limited to 7-bit ascii text, it gave rise to all sorts
of experimental forms — including the idea of the virtual community.
Since it has been able to accommodate images, however, it has simply
mutated into a giant marketing billboard.

But I do agree that a liberal sprinkling of icons can make computer


applications look pretty.

This piece was written for the Summer 1998 issue of Eye Magazine. Re-reading it
three years later, the arguments seem of mixed quality. We hear less of ‘visual vs
verbal’ these days — perhaps as a result of a generally better understanding of
cognition. Less hopeful, though, is the continuing insistence on describing inter-
faces as ‘metaphors’. If we can’t distinguish between ‘simulations’ (or, as I’ve
seen them called elsewhere, ‘simulacra’) and metaphors, we’re in trouble.

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Brand or Identity?

In the last few years, it has become increasingly common to hear the
terms ‘brand’ and ‘identity’ used interchangeably. One even hears
people talking about ‘brand identity’ as if the two terms naturally com-
plemented one another. And following the lead of organizations like
British Airways, the public face of an organization is now as likely to be
called a ‘masterbrand’ as it is a ‘corporate identity’. But are these two
things the same? Do the two terms just signify the same process, or do
we signal a lack of precision — borne of a lack of understanding — when
we talk about them in this way?

It has certainly suited many people to confuse the two terms: identity,
the designer’s term, has traditionally been the poor relation to brand,
the ad-man’s term, and speaking the language of brand has helped to
talk up design fees in lean times. Expeditious though this might be,
however, it ignores fundamental di‹erences in the circumstances that
gave rise to these terms and — crucially — misses the added dimensions
that distinguish identity from brand.

Different circumstances, different solutions

Branding came into existence as a result of an extraordinary set of cir-


cumstances that had arisen in mid nineteenth century America.

The development of techniques of mass production, the opening up


of transport networks and new thinking about management (which
originally came from the West Point Military Academy in Virginia)
were giving birth to the modern corporation. But these sophisticated

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manufacturing processes, distribution channels and organizational


structures brought with them a new problem: how to make sure that
prospective customers — who might now be geographically distant,
and thus not know of you or your reputation — bought your product
rather than your competitors’.
A problem that was solved with great ingenuity by the invention of
brand.

From the beginning, the development of brand was inexorably linked


to the new discipline of advertising. Brand imbued a product with an
arbitrary set of values. These gave a product, which was e‹ectively no
di‹erent from anyone else’s, a degree of uniqueness — making an emo-
tional appeal far beyond anything a mere commodity was capable of.
And advertising was the way in which brand could not only be brought
to the attention of a mass market, but also given a ‘spin’ from the com-
plementary skills of copywriters, lettering artists and illustrators col-
lected together under the agency roof.

Identity came out of a very di‹erent context. By the late 1970s, the
‘great corporations’ — in their traditional roles — were in decline. An
emerging global market was weakening the manufacturing base of
the industrialized nations at the same time as far reaching social
changes were radically reshaping their institutions. The convention-
ally hierarchical and centralized approach to management was being
challenged by the far more flexible and e›cient approach of the
Japanese — who favoured flatter organizational structures, a more con-
sensual approach to making decisions, and greater decentralization.
The German Mittelstand, with their tightly woven social and economic
context, were also beginning to emerge as exemplars — smaller compa-
nies whose close working relationships with investors, suppliers and
sta‹ allowed them to think in terms of middle- and long-term futures
and focus on continual improvement of quality. Among the world’s
think tanks, management consultancies and business schools, ideas
were beginning to germinate that would later flower as the ‘stake-
holder principle’.

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One of the problems that faced the companies who were emerging
reorganized and reorientated out of this period of adjustment was
that of communicating a sense of coherence and belonging across
increasingly dispersed operations. In a pioneering study, two McKinsey
consultants, Richard Pascale and Anthony Athos, identified character-
istics of organizations that had successfully emulated the Japanese
model — characteristics that included such intangibles as style, ethos
and what they called superordinate goals (the ‘significant meanings’
that motivated corporate life). Were there ways in which these could
be interpreted so that they could be made visible to key audiences?
Graphic design, just coming into its own as a business discipline,
seemed to o‹er some of the solutions: a facility with imagery and sym-
bolism combined with a culture that was more open to subtlety and
ambiguity than the overtly commercial creativity of advertising. So,
from the marriage of progressive management thinking and graphic
design was born the discipline of corporate identity consultancy.

This dichotomy between brand and identity is not a new development.


While the terms themselves may be of relatively fresh minting, the con-
cepts behind them were known in antiquity. To the Romans, ‘identity’
and ‘personality’, anima and persona, were seen as a duality. Anima
was the soul, from a root that meant breath, inspiration and the sign of
life — derived from the Greek psukhe (from which we get psyche). Persona
was the Greek prosopon, a mask, extended to mean the secondary, exter-
nal aspects of the self — those perceived by others — as well as a charac-
ter, or role, in a play. From a civilization that flourished long before the
modern corporation, the concept of Anima precociously anticipates the
nature of corporate identity, poetically conveying its role in both enliven-
ing and animating organizational life as well as representing its most
deeply held values. And if brand is by contrast inherently theatrical,
transient, opportunistic — this could hardly be better described than by
the original meanings of persona/prosopon.

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One dimension: many dimensions

Lord Leverhulme’s famous gibe, that half his advertising budget was
wasted — only he didn’t know which half — underlies one of the great-
est weaknesses of advertising. By its very nature media is expensive,
transient and of relatively short duration. The brand builder has to
concentrate on projecting a succinct, cost e‹ective — and hopefully
memorable — message, competing against thousands of others pitched
at the same groups of consumers every day. But of course there are
many other ways in which organizations are experienced — ways that
are seen to be far more reliable indications of the nature of the organ-
ization. Above all they are encountered through their products and
services, their premises and their communications (which latter cate-
gory includes the whole range of interactions from face to face contact
to formal missives). And these much more ubiquitous, permanent and
persistent expressions are the media through which identity is articu-
lated.
By dressing up a product or service in theatrical garb, a brand addresses
itself to an audience of prospective purchasers — but in the process can
make itself dishearteningly out of sync with everyone else. Identity,
on the other hand, is concerned with the whole gamut of stakeholders.
Rather than addressing just one audience, it provides a means of unit-
ing all the disparate groups of investors, employees, suppliers, custom-
ers and local communities — bringing them together in the purposes
and aspirations of an organization. Conceptually, the di‹erence is
huge — between showmanship and emotional resonance. But in terms
of visual execution, it is no less significant —between the obvious,
skin-deep and cosmetic depiction of brand and the rich, resonant and
archetypal imagery of identity.
The distinction between brand and identity, as di‹erent ways of inter-
preting a visual theme, was given a psychological twist by Carl Jung. In
Man and his Symbols, Jung di‹erentiates between images that acquire
their meaning through common usage or deliberate intent — as brands
do — and images that have a symbolic dimension, pointing to fundamen-

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tal truths that exist partly outside the reach of human consciousness.
Symbols — images that imply something more than their obvious and
immediate meaning, and which have a wider ‘unconscious’ aspect that
is never defined or fully explained, as Jung defines them — have always
had a central role in identity. From the emblems of the great religions
through the colourful pageant of heraldry to the trade marks of artisans
and cra·smen, symbols have traditionally been used to proclaim beliefs,
rally flagging hopes and to indicate pride of workmanship. But what-
ever their overt use, they have also served to signal a depth and reality
to the institutions they represent that goes beyond an obvious message,
and connects with their audiences at a fundamental level.

Consistency and congruity

Any set of values can be used to create a brand — the more colourful
and far-fetched the better. The only constraint is that it must flatter the
pretensions of its targets. Like an actor on the stage, there is absolutely
no requirement that anything of the real organization be reflected in
the brand (except insofar as it adds value) — all that matters is that the
presentation of the brand is always consistent and in character. In fact
consistency is o·en valued above any other characteristic, to the extent
that the execution of many historic brand insignia has deviated little
from their origins in the commercial art of a bygone era. One only has
to look at some of the ‘great’ marques — Rover, Heinz, Hoover — to real-
ize how stultified, and how frumpy, they now appear. They have become
visual cliches, arguably ever more valuable in financial terms — but
ever less meaningful in human terms — the longer they go on.

By contrast, identity seeks to bring out the essential qualities of the


organization, and give them form. Identity should be a lively expres-
sion of the things that make an organization unique, and special, and
important to those who are involved with it. It shouldn’t be frozen in
time, but live and grow as the organization lives and grows — reflect-
ing that which is organic and human and dynamic about it, not that
which is mechanical, impersonal and fixed.

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This can only be achieved if there is some substance there to start


with — a living soul and a beating heart, as it were — and it can extend
only so far as credibility will allow. Indeed, identity is constrained at
every step by the limits of plausibility. If the dissonance between how
an organization sees itself and how others see it is too great, its identity
will become something ludicrous — the focus for cynicism, disa‹ection
and disillusion. Consequently, the development of a corporate identity
is not an easy process of gra·ing on something extraneous — as is the
development of a brand — but o·en involves deep, sometimes pain-
ful, soul searching. And it may be that identity programmes require
substantial changes to be seen to be made before the task of visual
identification can begin. So it is easy to see why the idea of branding
an organization, which dispenses with any need for introspection or
change, has been so persuasive.

In a warning to anyone who would approach an identity project ignor-


ing the discrepancy between aspirations and reality, the Australian
communications expert Professor David Sless tells the cautionary tale
of a company called ‘City Mutual Life’. This was known by some of
its employees, somewhat disingenuously, as ‘Shitty Mutual Life’. In a
bid to improve perceptions — but, allegedly, without altering the sub-
stance behind them — the company changed its name to ‘Capita’. Within
moments of the announcement being made, the same employees had
christened it ‘Crapita’.

Into the future

What does the future hold for branding and identity? On one level,
it is clear that the circumstances that originally prompted the devel-
opment of branding have changed — in most cases product or service
o‹erings are now much more than just packaged commodities, and
are already distinguished by di‹erences in design, preparation or price
point. And increasing consumer awareness — occasionally to the extent
of what Faith Popcorn has termed ‘consumer vigilantism’ — is redress-
ing the balance of power between vendor and purchaser. People want

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to know where the things they buy come from, what goes into them
and what they can realistically expect from them. More than anything,
however, they want to know where the buck stops — if anything goes
wrong, who is going to sort out the problem for them. Organizations
that have, in the past, operated behind numerous brands are finding
that customers — and not just customers, but interested parties of all
kinds — are coming back to the parent company with their concerns.
Ironically, endorsing a brand with a corporate identity is being seen as
adding value to it — leading to the speculation that some kind of ‘prod-
uct identity’ may ultimately supersede the brand as we know it.

The innate human desire for authenticity, attested by thinkers from


Handy to Heidegger, should not be underestimated — and is exploited
at one’s peril. If the weakness of the branded approach is that an organ-
ization’s audiences are uncomfortable with the discrepancy between
the mask and the person wearing it, the strength of identity is pre-
cisely that it does assert that there is something real behind the prod-
uct or service o‹ering. And as new media arise that further remove
stakeholders from face-to-face contact with an organization (including
employees who may find themselves working from home, on site in cli-
ent’s premises or ‘hot desking’ in a club like environment) the asser-
tion of authenticity may become the biggest single issue facing the
corporation of the twenty-first century.

However, it is as a catalyst for change that identity o‹ers its most com-
pelling business rationale to the millennial organization. Management
guru Rosabeth Moss Kanter says: ‘The ultimate skill for change mastery
works on… (the) larger context surrounding the innovation process. It
consists of the ability to conceive, construct, and convert into behaviour
a new view of organizational reality. […] Innovation and change, I am
suggesting, are bound up with the meanings attached to events and the
action possibilities that flow from those meanings. But that very recog-
nition — of the symbolic, conceptual, cultural side of change — makes
it more di›cult to see change as a mechanical process and extract the
“formula” for producing it.’ The symbolic, conceptual, cultural side of

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change is exactly what identity seeks to communicate — and precisely


what distinguishes it from branding, whether corporate or otherwise.

This piece was written in 1997 as a marketing ‘think piece’ for Precedent
Communications. Since then I find myself increasingly agreeing with brand crit-
ics such as Naomi Klein, Thomas Frank and Douglas Rushko‹. I’m also less sure
that the idea of identity holds — much of the business thinking that impressed me
at the time (epitomized in Charles Handy’s ‘Empty Raincoat’ and Arie de Geus’
‘Living Company’) now seems to reflect the values of a previous era. Perhaps the
real distinction now is between an approach based on hype and an approach
that tries to represent some kind of reality. But there needs to be a real sense of
‘identity’ to represent, and at a time when organizations are busily divesting
themselves of their pasts and growing through mergers and acquisitons it can
sometimes be hard to know where to find it!

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Imagined histories

What’s wrong with the way we teach history to designers?

To an academic community embattled with funding and sta›ng cuts,


it must seem churlish to question the precious little cultural or contex-
tual education that it is possible to provide to design students. Perhaps
if one frames this question in di‹erent terms — for instance, why we
use the ‘great men’ theory of history, instead of a Marxist, Deleuzian
or some other theoretical approach, one might get a warmer response.
But the question I want to pose has a di‹erent slant on it than this. It
is why, when we claim to prize the iconoclasm and creative energy of
our new designers, we teach them to engage with the past not with
the power of their imagination but by adopting critical and analytical
methods that are largely alien to their principal ways of working?

I’m not asking this question in anticipation of an answer — there are


probably many, ranging from ‘well, this is the way we’ve always done
it’ to the perceived need of art schools, newly integrated into the uni-
versity system, to demonstrate some sort of academic respectability.
I am asking it, however, because I’m interested in what designers do
with their historical knowledge — and because I’m interested in what
it might mean to engage imaginatively with the past. For I am firmly
convinced that the way we currently teach history to designers, which
really only di‹ers in degree from the way it is taught to historians, fails
to draw on the strengths of design students, and o·en presses hard on
their weaknesses.

At this point, I’d like to interpose an objection which one o·en hears

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which goes something like this: ‘by teaching designers to develop


skills in critical analysis, research and synthesis, we’re helping them
to master an intellectual skillset that will complement their creative
skills’. In a sense, this is an accompaniment to the familiar tune of ‘pre-
paring designers for the real world’ — wherever, or however, that might
be. Before going on, I’d like to answer this objection lest it seem to
undermine my case. And my answer is that in at least one version of
the real world, the world of commerce in which some of us work, there
is actually no shortage of people with a superb command of analytical
thinking. But in the consensual, team-led approach with which many
organizations now approach design projects, there is a real need for
people who can think in other ways.

I’d like, for a moment, to look at some of the weaknesses of the ways
that we teach, learn or use history — from the designer’s perspective.
The first observation is that we tend to objectify history, to set ourselves
apart, as observers and critics, from past generations of designers and
the themes, processes and preoccupations in which they were caught
up. That is, the ‘mind’ we bring to history sets up a subject-object dual-
ism which is largely alien to the mind we bring to design (a mind that
is participated in its representations, to use Owen Barfield’s very useful
term). The second observation is that the fundamental, and irreconcil-
able, di‹erences between these approaches creates a tension in our
relationship with the past and with the tradition of which we are a
part. On the one hand, the view of history as a linear progression or
evolution (sometimes referred to as the ‘Whig model’) highlights our
predecessors’ shortcomings and shows their strengths to be merely
relative. On the other hand, we are drawn — as practitioners — to a
sense of respectful fellowship with them in a way that stands outside
of time. One voice encourages us to become tomb robbers and slander-
ers, appropriating what we will of history’s ultimate clip art collection
whilst slagging o‹ its authors, knowing that they aren’t able to pro-
tect their work against our mocking references and shallow criticisms.
Another voice condemns this as a kind of sacrilege — or to use a more
comtemporary term, piracy — knowing instinctively that the rights we

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accord to the living are due equally to the dead. In the context of teach-
ing design history, it is the former voice: harsh, judgmental, o·en
shrill, that we teach our students to listen to.

And what do we do with our historical knowledge — apart from using it


as a way of signalling to our peers how educated we are, spicing up our
work with knowing little references? This seems to me to be trivial, and
trivializing, in the extreme. Clearly, though, there are a small minor-
ity of designers who take a kind of antiquarian delight in researching
recondite aspects of design: shedding new light on the authorship of
an artefact, or investigating the impact of long disused technologies
on long dead societies. I don’t want to disparage their enthusiasm and
scholarship — on the contrary, I lament that it is not more common. It
is hard, though, to see how this kind of hobbyist interest can impact
significantly on the practice of design, or help to resolve the tensions
I’ve mentioned. However, following the promptings of the imagination
may help us to use our relationship to the past as an inspiration, rather
than an impediment, to our own authentic creativity.

Now this raises a question of what we actually mean by the imagina-


tion. That there is such a thing — the ability of our brains to sponta-
neously fire up visual, auditory and other systems without sensory
stimulation — is one of the more surprising discoveries of modern neu-
roscience. But despite these findings, imagination is still little more
than a colourful metaphor — and certainly as far as the education and
practice of designers is concerned, it is not treated as a faculty to be
developed and exercised.

The reasons for this seem to be largely historic. Since the decline of
the Romantic movement in the middle of the nineteenth century, the
idea of an active and productive imagination has been marginalized.
Its role in revealing and comprehending meaning has been usurped
by a narrow and quantitative empiricism — so much so that few people
now have a concept of what imagination is, and what it is capable of. At
best, it is a kind of childish whimsy. To get a sense of what it could be,
we have to go bakc to the great thinkers of the Romantic period.

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This is Blake:

He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments and


in stronger and better light than his perishing and mortal eye
can see, does not imagine at all.
And this is Coleridge:

The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and


prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the
finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite i am.

And Goethe:

Imagination is first re-creative, repeating only the objects.


Furthermore, it is productive by animating, developing, extend-
ing, transforming the objects. In addition, we can postulate a
perceptive imagination which apprehends identities and sim-
ilarities… Here it becomes evident how desirable analogy is
which carries the mind to many related points, so that its activ-
ity can unite again the homogenous and the homologous.

It is in Goethe’s conception of the imagination that we find perhaps


the most sophisticated model of a complementary mind — with strik-
ing analogies to the design process, not as theorized, but as actually
practised.

In a recent assessment of Goethe’s imaginative ‘way of science’ — to


which he devoted a much greater portion of his time than to his liter-
ary work — physicist and philosopher of science Henri Borto· says:

For Goethe, on the other hand, there is another kind of seeing,


which sees connections instead of separations. This is the seeing
of imagination. Now this is certainly not the same as having an
abstract idea, as in analytical thinking, but neither is it the same
kind of seeing as that which sees physical objects. Imagination
sees connections directly, so there is wholeness where for sen-
sory seeing there is separateness. Wittgenstein emphasized that
what is seen in the seeing of connections must not be thought of

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as if it were an object — because that belongs to sensory seeing.


Because the connection overcomes the separateness, the con-
nection itself cannot have the quality of separateness — which
means that it cannot be like a physical object. Hence the seeing
of connections cannot be like the seeing of physical objects. So
when the connection is seen, nothing new is added in the sense
of a new object which can be seen by the senses. In this respect,
everything stays the same. What is di‹erent is the mode of
togetherness, not the addition of an extra object called a ‘con-
nection’. The way of seeing changes, and with it the mode of
togetherness of the elements which are seen.

Despite the fact that what Borto· and Goethe are talking about here is
doing science, and what we’re talking about is doing history, there are
some arresting analogies. For it is precisely the seeing of connections
that designers bring to their work in the studio, and if we can take
that (largely untutored) skill and apply it to seeing historical connec-
tions, we can simultaneously strengthen the use of the imagination
and encourage a more profound engagement with history.

What exactly might this involve? One practical exercise that could
easily be set to students would be to ‘rehearse’ a designer to whom
they are particularly drawn. The first stage of this would be to immerse
themselves in his or her work, and to find out as much as possible about
his or her life. Although this might sound no di‹erent to the research
a student would do for a critical essay or dissertation, the emphasis
would be more like an actor getting into role — developing a feel for
the person behind the work. At the point at which they felt that they
had really got ‘under the designer’s skin’, the project could move into
its performance stage. This would involve tackling a design project as
that person. So, supposing the student had chosen Jan Tschichold, he or
she would tackle the brief in character. Again, this might sound like a
typical college project of the ‘design a poster in the style of…’. But fol-
lowing the very important distinction Borto· makes (and the whole
value of this exercise rests on an understanding of that distinction)

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this would not be designing in the style of Tschichold but designing as


Tschichold. Like the novelist, or perhaps the biographer — but unlike
the historian — the student would be establishing, exploring, deepen-
ing a sense of connectedness with their subject, and a sense being situ-
ated in a continuous process.
But to return to Goethe. Goethe developed a disciplined and rigorous
practice of imagination which he called exacte sinnliche phantasie (exact
sensorial imagination). Goethe’s exercises involved investing all his
attention into observation of his object and then precisely recreating it
in imagination — a process he would repeat over and over again. Borto·
says of this that ‘it has the e‹ect of giving thinking more the quality
of perception and sensory perception more the quality of thinking’.
It was an imagination delineated in ‘stronger and better lineaments’,
as Blake had it. However, unlike Blake, whose eidetic gi·s were inborn
and never lost their childhood fidelity, Goethe had to work persistently
at cultivating his imagination. ‘Not through an extraordinary spirit-
ual gi·, not through momentary inspiration, unexpected and unique,
but through consistent work did I eventually achieve such satisfactory
results’. But, perhaps as a result of the empirical, positivist trends that
shaped the Modern movement — and recently exacerbated by increas-
ing use of computers — the processes of visualization in design have
become increasingly externalized. It is now unusual to find a designer
capable of seeing a design concept in her or his imagination: it is more
and more common to see the visualization caried out on the layout
pad, or the screen. What is lost here isn’t just a kind of mental ‘virtual
reality’ but the power to comprehend connectedness.

Owen Barfield, whose researches in language and meaning owed a


great deal to his grasp of Goethean Science, grasped how this might
apply to our approach to history. He says: ‘We study, or we ought to
study, history not simply for the purpose of producing more and more-
books, or dissertations, but because the only possible way of grasping
in any depth both what as individuals we are, and where we are, is
by grasping with imagination, where we came from and how we got

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here’. Imagined history, then, is history grasped through the imagina-


tion. It is not history as a series of subject-object interactions, swept
along by unseen processes towards an ultimate consummation, with
a detached observer perched conveniently on the cusp of the future.
Instead, it is a history brought into the imagination as a living entity in
which connections, both between the protagonists and with the ‘his-
torian’, are linked by a kind of organic necessity. It is a history where
we co-exist with the long dead, as colleagues and fellow investigators
rather than as adversaries. And it is history in which the facts ‘speak
for themselves’, in much the same way as one designer’s work speaks
to another. As such, it follows the Romantic notion of Bildung (culture:
self-development), which Borto· defines as a ‘specially human way of
coming into one’s own by finding oneself in what is experienced, at
first, as other than oneself. In seeking to understand something which
is alien to us, we become more fully ourselves.’ I intend to be no more
explicit about it, but to leave it with you to be explored imaginatively.

I want to conclude with a quote from Peter Ackroyd’s English Music,


which I think is an example of the best kind of imagined history. At
the end of the book the narrator is reflecting on his life and his very
personal engagement with history.

Yes, I have inherited the past because I have acknowledged it at


last. It belongs with my father, and with his books, but it also
belongs with me. And now that I understand it, I no longer need
to look back. Edward was wrong when he described the recur-
ring cycles of history: they disappear as soon as you recognize
them for what they are. Perhaps that is why I have written all
this down, in a final act of recognition. I do not know what is le·
for me now, but I feel able to rise to my feet in expectation and
walk steadily forward without any burden.

And that, I think, beautifully summarizes why we — and here I mean


designers especially — need to engage imaginatively with history. That
we might ultimately be free from its claims.

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‘Imagined histories’ was originally a paper that I gave at the 1996 Design History
Conference in London. It was not well received — few of the academics who assem-
bled to hear it seemed to understand what I was trying to say, and of those who
did none were happy about it. This e‹ectively marked the end of my brief flirta-
tion with academia, and concluded my part-time career as a design educator. In
retrospect, I’m glad that the Design History Conference turned out to be such a
watershed — from that point on I reverted to being a practitioner, realizing that
that was where my passion lay.

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Philosophy and graphic design


26 August 1997

leif:

Philosophers o‹er a number of views of truth, some of which may even be


relevant to graphic design.

You mention several philosophers, but they come from the more
‘mechanistic’ (positivist: empiricist) pole of philosophy (e.g. Russell,
Popper, Neurath and early Wittgenstein).

I’ve found philosophy extremely helpful in unravelling some of the


dilemmas of graphic design in my own work, but personally I’m more
inclined towards — how to describe it? — the ‘organic’ pole. Bergson,
Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty etc. Hans-Georg Gadamer’s ‘Retrieving the
Question of Artistic Truth’ in Truth and Method sheds interesting light
on this question.

Now getting to graphic design… Jorge Frascara once wrote an article


in which he advocated objectively measurable goals as a part of the
planning process. In this way, the success of a design can be evaluated
against its original intentions.

Again, I discern a somewhat ‘mechanistic’ tendency. If you see people


as ‘users’, and design as an activity that can be measured against the
intention to ‘influence’ them in some way, then this approach is valid.
But I have a real problem identifying myself as a ‘communications
user’ — and in my own work, in subjecting people to an experiment in
engineering compliance.

For me, a more humane view of what I do as a designer is that I initi-


ate a conversation. For in a conversation it is not so much what you
say that is important — indeed, much conversation consists of things
we already know and believe — but what the other person feels about
themselves and, of course, about you. Indeed it strikes me that in con-

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versation the content/container relationship is actually inverted — the


ostensible ‘message’ is in fact a carrier, an excuse, for the framing and
reframing that goes on around it. So that the sound of one’s voice, the
pattern of the words, the rhythms of speaking and listening are what
makes the principal impression.
If one talks in terms of ‘conversations’, I believe one has a better expla-
nation of what is happening in graphic design — which seems to be
moving rapidly away from a crude, mechanical model based on 40’s
‘Communication Theory’ towards something far more interesting.

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Thinking and the brain


27 August 1997

leif:

Research indicates that we do not think in words, but in some kind of


internal code. Informal evidence for this is dysphasia. Before he died, my
father had this due to a stroke. While his thinking was intact, he would
o·en use the wrong word. We both knew what he meant.

The research I’ve come across points towards much of our ‘thinking’
being done before we become conscious of it — to that extent, I’m
sure you’re right that it is pre-verbal. But to suggest that we don’t
think — here, meaning consciously deliberate — in words goes against
most of our experience. Your father’s dysphasia o‹ers a fascinating
insight into the way the brain works, but it doesn’t contradict the
assertion that much of our conscious experience is verbal.

Imaging and language use di‹erent parts of the brain. As I understand


it language is localized on one side of the brain.

Indeed, but I’m not sure how much emphasis one should place on
di‹erent activities being located in di‹erent parts of the brain. For a
start, the human brain is a relatively small organ (about the size of a
grapefruit), and it is criss-crossed by neural connections. Furthermore,
Roger Sperry and Joseph Bogen were at great pains to emphasise that
their research into people with ‘split brains’ — whilst it illuminated the
lateral specialization of the brain — was research into an abnormality.
For the rest of us, the two halves of our brains are connected by a mas-
sive bandwidth link, the corpus callosum, which routinely carries a
huge amount of tra›c between them.

The ‘split brain’ model was interesting, because it gave us an opportu-


nity to see that there was more to human cerebration than ‘rational’
‘intellectual’ thinking — characterised as a ‘le· brain’ activity. This was
very important to those of us who had always believed that what we

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did — and the way we thought — couldn’t be explained with reference


to an analytical model.

Since then (the split brain concept was enthusiastically promoted in


Ornstein’s 1973 The Psychology of Consciousness) our understanding of
the brain — prompted by research in neurophysiology and the cogni-
tive sciences — has become a lot more sophisticated. We now know,
for instance, that whilst tasks involving language involve concen-
trated activity in a localized part of the le· hemisphere, they also
seem to involve activity in discrete parts of the right hemisphere as
well. We also know that linguistic activities that engage the ‘imagina-
tion’ — such as listening to poetry or reading stories — can cause the
visual processing areas at the back of the brain to fire up. And so on.

Over the last few years, I’ve noticed dyslexic students producing some
of the most consistently interesting graphic design. Since my eledest
son is dyslexic, I’ve spent a great deal of time talking to them about
their educational experiences and the way they approach their work.
One of the things that many have asserted is that they found them-
selves approaching ‘visible language’ as form — largely because they
struggled with its role as carrier of meaning (something the rest of
us o·en take for granted) — and as a result developed a completely
di‹erent relationship with it. And it may be that this relationship
gi·s them with such an extraordinary facility in seeing letterforms as
images. I don’t know — but it is an interesting thought.

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More philosophy
27 August 1997

Steve:

Could you please discuss the specific works of Heidegger you feel relate
to the design process? I am very interested in the relation between design
and philosophy and would like to know what parallels you draw from
Heidegger’s works.

Before I launch into this one, here’s a quote from Heidegger (speaking
in 1955 at a commemoration of composer Conradin Kreutzer):

‘Man finds himself in a perilous position... A far greater danger


threatens [than the outbreak of a third world war]: the approach-
ing tide of technological revolution in the atomic age could
so captivate, bewitch, dazzle and beguile man that calculative
thinking may someday come to be accepted and practised as
the only way of thinking. What great danger then might move
upon us? Then there might go hand in hand with the greatest
ingenuity in calculative planning and inventing, indi‹erence
toward ‘meditative’ thinking, total thoughtlessness. And then?
Then man would have denied and throw away his own special
nature — that he is a meditative being. Therefore the issue is the
saving of man’s essential nature. Therefore the issue is keeping
meditative thinking alive.’

Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, New York: Harper and


Row, 1966.

That — in words far more eloquent than I could have framed — expresses,
for me, exactly what I think I am trying to do as a designer. On the one
hand, a concern about the trend that is trying to roll design into ‘calcu-
lative thinking’, on the other, a growing desire to foster in myself — and
provoke in the audiences who receive my work — a state of ‘meditative’
thinking (in Heidegger’s, rather than the New Age, sense).

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Much of the appeal of Heidegger for me lies in his concepts of authen-


ticity and inauthenticity — the state of purposive, responsible, signif-
icant living contrasted with the depersonalized, dehumanized state
stripped of meaning and dignity. Whether we like it or not, we (graphic
designers) are caught up in the stuggle between authenticity and inau-
thenticity — and, as a mouthpiece for the values and priorities of our
societies, we have a small but crucial role to play.

I’d also identify Heidegger’s interpretation of Dasein (‘existence’,


‘being’) as a key concept pertaining to graphic design in the 90’s. I’d
suggest that there are primarily two aspects to this — the first concern-
ing Heidegger’s insistence that being is characterised by a‹ective rela-
tionships with people and things. Since our work is primarily a‹ective,
what Heidegger has to say about being in this respect has an interest-
ing bearing on graphic design. The second is the way in which he sees
being as a unity behind the (inauthentic) duality of mind and body — or
translated into our own sphere — meaning and form.

In terms of Leif’s reference to the analytic tradition of Russell,


Wittgenstein, and others, the ‘organic thinkers’ you mention primarily
situate themselves in the phenomenological tradition or its a·ermath. I
o·en wonder why classical works of philosophy have not cropped up in
conversation.

I recall that Plato did crop up in our discussions last year. But you raise
an interesting question — which I’ve touched upon before — which is
why design criticism has chosen to adopt the cloudy precepts of post-
modernism when the phenomenological and hermeneutic traditions
provide so many insights with direct relevance to our preoccupations.

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Blake, Goethe and cognition


27 August 1997

nancy:

A couple I’ve known for many years are involved with basic research in
cognitive psychology. He asked me one night how I get memories. I, natu-
rally, said ‘In full color pictures’. He asked if I get sounds, words, sche-
matics, or anything else. I don’t. That, he said, makes mine an eidetic
mind (this does not mean I have a ‘photographic memory’ in the popular
sense, just that I think in realistic pictures). He questioned me for a long
time, eagerly, as he gets so few subjects of this type; eidetics comprise 5%
of the population. That 5% would be us. The other 95% is our audience.

Cognitive Science does like to put things in neat pigeon-holes, though.

When I think of an eidetic mind, I think immediately of William Blake.


Through some quirk of genetics or destiny, he had an extraordinarily
developed eidetic ability. No doubt some of you know Varley’s story
about the ‘ghost of a flea’ — how Blake could envisage this monster
before him so precisely that when he started to draw it ‘he began on
another part of the paper, to make a separate drawing of the mouth of
the Flea, which the spirit having opened, he was prevented from pro-
ceeding with the first sketch, till he had closed it’.

Yet, as a natural and complete eidetic, Blake also had extraordinary


facility with words. His Tyger is the most widely known poem here in
the UK — and consistently ranks either at the top or among the first
three in popularity.

By contrast Goethe was not a natural eidetic — but, through sheer per-
sistence and patience, he developed the extraordinary eidetic capaci-
ties which form the basis of his unique form of scientific enquiry (to
which he devoted more time than his writing). What is remarkable in
his case is that it is almost a complete inversion of Blake’s — Goethe
was first the man of letters, later an eidetic — whilst Blake was a natu-

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ral eidetic who became an autodidact and taught himself Latin, Greek,
Hebrew and later Italian (to read Dante) in his forties.

Personally, I consider it a tragedy that we don’t encourage the develop-


ment of eidetic capacities — and that as a society we have allowed them
to atrophy. But it may be that if we acquire greater fluency and literacy
with images, as a result of ‘new media’ (from cinema to the Web), we
will switch from being predominantly verbal to predominantly visual.
I don’t know.

I don’t see though that this means it is a ‘them’ and ‘us’ situation as
far as the projection of these abilities through design. That, I think,
is one of the mistakes of information design — which believes that the
designer has to meet the ‘user’ on the latter’s terms. The result, inevi-
tably, is prosaic in the extreme — ‘plain’ language that both Blake and
Goethe would have flinched at, layout that looks like an experiment
in syllogistic logic, typography where the demands of maximum leg-
ibility destroy any mystery or magic — form following function down
the road to perdition. Yet information design is the logical extension of
the insights of cognitive science — with its unquestioned assumptions
about ‘usability’ — into graphic design.

In truth, I wonder whether the goal of usability is actually


achievable — or whether it is a kind of Xanadu for those with an instinc-
tive desire to impose order onto design and channel it towards ‘rational’
ends, underpinned by their distincly verbal/intellectual respect for
research and analysis. An alternative is to suggest that what the
designer does is to o‹er her/his work as a mirror, in which the
looker sees himself/herself reflected — each according to their own abi-
lilites, proclivities and aspirations. And here again I’d point towards
Blake — who remained uncompromisingly true to his convictions and
insights (even to the point of refusing a way out of the grinding poverty
that characterised his life). Yet vast numbers of people find something
important for them in his work (verbal and visual) — whilst remaining
untouched and unmoved by the latest ‘cognitive artefact’ to emerge
from Siegel & Gale’s ‘Simplification Unit’.

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Can one learn to be eidetic?


27 August 1997

Pat:

So James, is this eidetic ability teachable? I never realized that I think


in words, but that is surely the case. I remember being able, as a child,
to visualize in my mind. But for years now, when I close my eyes I only
see darkness. And I would very much like to be able to see the faces of
loved ones instead. You can understand how frustrating it is to do art as
I do, and be limited to life rendering exclusively. One of the only attempts
at portraiture from memory resulted in a strange looking character
indeed. I studied this drawing intently as it was very lifelike but resem-
bled no one that I knew, and wondered to myself if this person’s image
came from somewhere deep within. I suspect that I simply developed the
portrait as I went, and that the features were a compilation of people
that I had done previously. An interesting thread..this.

I can only speak for myself… and to say that it appears to be learnable.
That isn’t, of course, the same thing as teachable — but it may be an
answer to your question.

Like you, I recall having strong eidetic abilities as a child. Don’t most
children? But I wonder what e‹ect our educational methods — which
o·en encourage abstract intellection at the expense of sensorial imagi-
nation — have on us. By the time I was ten or eleven these eidetic abili-
ties had e‹ectively gone.

For some years, without great diligence, I have been consciously trying
to cultivate my imagination. I wanted to t to develop the ability to con-
ceive of a design concept as a fully fledged image. However, I’ve found
this particularly di›cult — and elusive. (Sometimes it seemed to be pos-
sible in that narrow territory between waking and sleep). Then, a few
months ago, I was describing a concept to a colleague and I realised I
was visualising it, as a more-or-less finished item, as we spoke.

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Since then, this has become a fairly common occurrence. But fine
detail still remains di›cult — it requires more attention that I am cur-
rently capable of giving to resolve much beyond the general outlines.
And, like in a dream, text appears to be impossible to grab hold of (pity,
since that would crack the copy problem!). Since this is a relatively
novel thing for me, previously very much a verbal person, there’s not
much more I can say about it. Except that it appears to be both a boon
and something of a curse. A boon, because it is much easier to enthuse
a client with a project if you can, e‹ectively, see the/an end result there
before you. And a curse because getting anywhere near enough to the
thing I see is beyond my modest cra· skills — any serendipity in putting
a job together (which I used to see as a blessing) has become a distrac-
tion away from the object I see in my mind. Still, I wouldn’t now have it
any other way.

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Reading and writing


29 August 1997

kc:

I o·en read (especially but not always fiction) in full concept mode. It can
be disconcerting when the ‘real world’ intrudes. Very similar to being
awakened unexpectedly from a vivid dream. Actually, the same thing
happens to me when I get ‘into’ a design problem/solution. I really am
‘inside’ the design.

I’d always assumed that everybody similarly got carried away by some
good descriptive prose, but now I’m wondering if this assumption
needs to be questioned. That feeling of no longer being aware of the
words — or even particularly of reading — is to me one of the great pleas-
ures of literature. But books are not universally popular or appreciated
in our societies, so it is perhaps a pleasure that has passed many people
by? And does literary criticism — which shi·s the emphasis from expe-
riencing a book to analysing its structure and style — cause people to
stop seeing the wood for the trees?

This is, perhaps, tied into another strand from this thread — which
is, should we be creating for people who are like us, or people who
are unlike us? Clearly there are ‘academic’ novelists, who place more
importance on cleverly cra·ing prose than on the experience — but
my suspicion is that for many novelists the experiences of writing
and reading are intimately connected. Certainly this is the case with
designers — we tend to seek out and ‘consume’ good design and also,
as Gunnar suggested some time back, take it apart to see how it works.
But should we actually be saying ‘most people don’t do this, therefore
let us design something that they can understand on their own terms
(whatever those are)’. I feel strongly that we should be inviting our
audiences to meet us on our terms — or at least meeting us halfway. But
maybe a sizable number of people can’t do that?

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Coercion
29 August 1997

leif:

In our culture, the term ‘behavior modification’ has very negative con-
notations, but in the pure sense, that’s what we’re about. A reality of
graphic design is that it intends to influence people. At times, you do
want to elicit one specific behavior. With a campaign to get kids to wear
bicycle helmets, the bottom line is that you want them to do it. More
ideally, I view design as decision support. You want to o‹er audience a
range of choices that they did not have before.

Something that I’ve wondered about a great deal is: if one reads Vance
Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders, one comes away with the impression
that the advertising industry knew (most of this book refers to the 50s)
a great deal about human motivation — and that they had a sophisti-
cated ‘technology’ for leveraging this knowledge. Significantly, this is
the same period that media attention was focussed on the ‘brain wash-
ing’ scares emerging from the Korean War — and the belief that the
Chinese possessed extraordinary methods of engineering compliance.
‘Motivation Research’, if I remember correctly, is the phrase Packard
gave to this powerful knowledge.

But whatever happened to ‘Motivation Research’? Either it didn’t really


work, or the advertising industry couldn’t make it work, or they
decided (for whatever reason) they didn’t want to make it work. For one
only has to spend a few hours on the inside of a contemporary agency to
realize that the creatives who actually cra· the ads know surprisingly
little about human motivation, rarely actually use research (except as
a show to placate the ‘suits’) and rely in the most part on whim, hunch
and traditional formulae. British advertising (I don’t really know much
about the US kind) is amazingly sophisticated — but that sophistica-
tion comes out of an art-school, rather than a buisiness school or psy-

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chology department, background. It is notoriously self-referential — a


careful observer can discern all manner of subtle references to film,
popular music, literature etc. — but the perceptual engineering is com-
paratively crude.

By the late seventies, when Judith Williamson wrote her seminal


Decoding Advertisements, the argument had shi·ed significantly. Her
exposé — from the point of view of a strong Marxist position on ‘con-
sumer fetishism’ — looked at the use of semiotics by the ad-industry.
Well, the intellectual climate of the time was dominated by the French
Freudo-Marxists, so it is not surprising to see this coming through.
But again, here was a critic predicating enormous sophistication and
cleverness to an industry the vast majority of whom probably couldn’t
give an adequate definition of a denotation — let alone expound the
theories of Lacan or Althusser. (One only has to compare the subtlety
imputed by Williamson to the seat-of-the-pants techniques espoused
by David Ogilvy in the roughly contemporary ‘Ogilvy on Advertising’ to
get a sense of the gulf that separated them).

We’re in much the same position now — only the ‘big idea’ of today is
the cognitive sciences. No doubt some ambitious academic has a publi-
cation in proof, even as I write, that demonstrates that the advertising
industry has a powerful methodology based on a profound understand-
ing of the neurology of the human brain. And no doubt it will make
chilling bed-time reading for those of us who are too grown up to read
pulp thrillers. But, once again, I doubt there would actually be much
basis to it.

The conclusion that I draw from all this is that ‘behaviour modifica-
tion’ has been a very convenient myth — in whatever fashionable form
it has taken. Whilst advertisers always denied that they did it, they also
loved people to impute it of them — suggesting that they were far clev-
erer than they actually were. But actually, the basic techniques (beauti-
fully described, from a psychological perspective, in Robert Cialdini’s
book Influence) are simple things that most of us do instinctively much
of the time, without thinking about them. Whether you look at them

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in rhetorical, behaviourist, linguistic or neurophysiological terms they


are a fundamental part of the way human beings try to get one over
on each other. Since they can be described, and recognized, on an
anecdotal, everyday basis they don’t really deserve to be dignified with
complex conspiracy theories or subtle political analyses. Like most
tricks, they work well until the other person understands what is going
on — at which point the trickster ends up looking rather foolish.

So, I think the time has come for a thorough debunking of the whole
thing. I don’t think any serious designer really wants to involve herself/
himself in the visual equivalent of ‘find the lady’, which is what this
amounts to. Nor do I think that we really want to encourage our clients
to stoop to things that should, by rights, be well beneath their dignity.
But unfortunately, whilst advertising has allowed itself to dri· into a
state of somewhat lackadaisical self-indulgence, there is a vocal lobby
in graphic design that wants to push us back into the ghetto of ‘scien-
tific communication’. Which means, as far as I can discern, still trying
to make people think and feel things that they might not otherwise
want to.

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Assumptions about ‘legibility’


1 September 1997

kc:

I was involved in a play that had posters so attractive that people were
stealing and collecting them. We had empty seats every night and people
were still trying to get tickets three weeks a·er the play closed, because
the dates were so unobtrusive that no one noticed and/or remembered
them. It gave a very good artistic impression of the theater and contin-
ued to do so for several years because people kept and framed them. Is
that worth the fact that it failed as an advertising piece? The informa-
tion was there and not di›cult to read, it just didn’t look important.

But then look at the psychedelic posters that Vic Moscoso, Rick Gri›n
and Wes Wilson were creating circa 1967. Not only couldn’t one read
the date, but the venue and the artist were equally obscure. However, I
don’t believe that it was a problem filling the auditoria — Steve Miller,
Van Morrison and the Grateful Dead (minus, of course, Pig Pen and
Jerry Garcia) are with us still, rather than busking in Market Street on
busy Saturday a·ernoons.

Might I cautiously suggest (without wanting to step on anyone’s toes)


that your poster was actually more desirable than the play was appeal-
ing? It is not that unusual for a designed promo to be more interesting
than the product itself…

Which brings me on to Leif:

A few years ago, I saw Susan Colberg — now a professor at the University
of Alberta — propose an alphabet designed to teach dyslexic children to
read. The aphabet was designed to incorporate phoenetic cues into the
typography. Her initial results were very encouraging.

Which, as the parent of a dyslexic child, I find very interesting.


Dyslexics appear to find typefaces easier where there is a maximum

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of di‹erence between letterforms — especially the ambiguous b and d,


p and q — easier to read. These days, typographers tend to prefer these
typefaces, too. It’s only educators who insist on children’s reading
books being printed in homogenous ‘futura’ style types, or in adapting
classic faces so they end up having more ambiguous ‘single story’ a’s
or redrawing ‘looking glass’ g’s (so that they can be confused with the
single story ‘a’s). So sometimes our instincts can be undermined by our
client’s briefs.

I have also heard about a project in Australia to redesign signage on


the most accident prone motorway in the country. Not only did design
save lives, it paid for itself by saving the government something like
$2,000,000 in ambulance costs yearly.

Which is marvellous. But in fi·een years of graphic design (at least


seven of which were spent as an information designer) I’ve never been
called upon to do anything that had life saving implications. So this is
not exactly a typical brief. For every piece of graphic design that has
to ‘do’ something, there are at least ten that simply have to ‘say’ some-
thing (an I’d guess that this estimate errs on the conservative side).

But it is also interesting to observe how information design — which


sees itself as a ‘serious’ genre (in contrast to the rest of us, who are dis-
missed as ‘stylists’) — is unwittingly influenced by stylistic considera-
tions. Perhaps the most famous example is the way in which the British
Minsistry of Transport preferred Design Research Unit’s then fashiona-
ble lower case sans serif road signs (which use Jock Kinnear’s Akzidenz
derived ‘transport’ alphabet) over David Kindersley’s organic serif, all
caps version. Yet Kindersley’s prototypes were uniformly found to be
more legible, in all weather conditions, than DRU’s. But then the
unholy relationship between Infomation Design and sans serif typog-
raphy becomes comprehensible when one recognizes that the infode-
sign is a really an extension of the Modernist project by other means.
I’d be prepared to bet money that the Australian signage job used a
solution straight out of Muller Brockman.

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Blake
1 September 1997

Steve:

To bring this post back to the design arena, I will bring the poet William
Blake into the fold. In addition to Symbolist poets, Blake’s poetry involves
a great deal of the ‘sense-mixing’ of which Conni speaks: ‘How the chim-
ney-sweepers cry/Every blackning Church appals,/And the hapless sol-
dier’s sigh/Runs in blood down palace walls’ (from London). I o‹er this
line as an e‹ort to link the creative processes of writing and design
together (not as an example of pedantry). One only needs to look as far as
Blake’s own Songs of Innocence and Experience to see how his writ-
ing and design minds came together.

It’s gratifying to know that you’re not alone! For me, Blake is the
archetype of the graphic designer for the twenty-first century — auteur,
visionary, social critic, person of principle and integrity. Now I can add
‘synaesthete’ to that list!

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Language
1 September 1997

leif:

Linguists refer to the internal code we think of as ‘mentalese’, and believe


there are several interdependent processes involved in translating from
mentalese to spoken language. (Chomsky’s term ‘deep structure’ refers to
one of these.)

But (as you’d expect me to say!) only some linguists. Chomsky and
Pinker — especially Pinker, since he’s made the brilliant career move
of linking Chomsky with evolutionary biology — are in the ascendant
at the moment. (This coincides with a period of ascendancy of the
‘nature’ lobby in the sciences generally). Chomsky’s love of formal logic
also links him with those philosophers you mentioned before — and
especially with the rather tedious ‘linguistic analysis’ that grew out of
Logical Positivism.

However, there are other positions within linguistics. Benjamin Lee


Whorf — who’s now under fire from no less than four disciplines (which
makes him an especially interesting figure from my somewhat maver-
ick point of view) — asserted what I consider to be a fundamental truth
when he suggested that:

‘We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native lan-
guages. […] We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and
ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties
to an agreement to organize it in this way — an agreement that
holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the
patterns of our language.’

Pinker, who seems to consistently misunderstand Whorf, tries to nail


him in The Language Instinct. Unfortunately (and rather amusingly) he
gets himself in a complete twist — giving a ridiculous example of a sup-
posedly Apache sentence about a canoe. It says something about the

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quality of his scholarship (and his common sense) that the original is
actually Nootka (a native American language of a seafaring people of
the North West), the Apaches not just having no word for canoe, but
having no need (in their inland, desert environment) for canoes.

Whorf’s assertion — which is more or less in direct conflict with


Chomsky’s ‘deep structures’ — is that our native language profoundly
influences the way we see the world. My experiences as a graphic
designer incline me to concur with that — I see no evidence that there
is a ‘universal’ graphic language, and plenty that people’s responses to
graphic design are a‹ected by the kinds of constructs they have about
it. The Anthropologist Edward T. Hall extends Whorf’s thinking to
other expressions of what he calls ‘primary culture’ — particularly (in
The Hidden Dimension) the way di‹erent cultures relate to space and (in
The Dance of Life) the way di‹erent cultures relate to time and rhythm.
Both make absolutely fascinating reading from a design perspective.

Whorf’s insights are also developed in Deborah Tannen’s work — par-


ticularly in her suggestion that men and women are conditioned to
use language in profoundly di‹erent ways (o·en with alarming con-
sequences). The degree to which Tannen’s examples ‘ring true’ is one
of the biggest impediments, for me, to accepting the Chomsky/Pinker
thesis that the way we use language is in some way universal.

Philosophically, too, the Phenomenological tradition has taken a great


deal of interest in language — and come, by a di‹erent route, to a
similar (but more developed) position to Whorf’s. From Brentano to
Husserl, Heidegger and on to Gadamer a ‘philosophy of language’ has
taken shape. This moves the argument well beyond the cognitive into
the realms of meaning and being — again, of not inconsiderable inter-
est to us as graphic designers. Perhaps the central insight of this tra-
dition is best expressed in Gadamer’s ‘Being that can be understood
is language’. Incidentally, in making this pronouncement Gadamer
says:

‘In all the cases we analyzed — in the language of conversation,


of poetry, and also of interpretation — the speculative structure

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of language emerged, not as the reflection of something given


but as the coming into language of a totality of meaning. This
drew us toward the dialectic of the Greeks, because they did not
conceive understanding as a methodic activity of the subject,
but as something that the thing itself does and which thought
‘su‹ers’. This activity of the thing itself is the real speculative
movement that takes hold of the speaker.’

This position is about-face to the ‘representational theory’ of language,


which holds that words signify things — and that the thing is prior to
our developing a mental construct for it. Although this seems superfi-
cially logical, the philosophy of language shows that it is impossible
for us even to conceive of the thing without, first, having a linguistic
concept for it. It also points beyond the idea of language as communi-
cating the already disclosed (the level of information) toward the dis-
closure itself. Which leads on to what Heidegger calls the ‘experience
of language’:

‘Instead of explaining language in terms of one thing or another,


and thus running away from it, the way to language intends to
let language be experienced as language’.

and later goes on to say:

‘There is no such thing as a natural language, a language that


would be the language of a human nature at hand in itself and
without its own destiny. Every language is historical, also in
cases where human beings know nothing of the discipline of
history in the modern historical sense. Nor is language as infor-
mation *the sole* language in itself. Rather, it is historical in
the sense of, and written within the limits set by, the current
age. Our age begins nothing new, but only brings to utter cul-
mination something quite old, something already prescribed in
modernity.’

Finally, I’ll mention in passing Owen Barfield — whose concept of the


evolution of consciousness, witnessed by the changing meaning of

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words, links with the last quote. Barfield asserts that we have only com-
paratively recently emerged from a ‘participative’ state of conscious-
ness, where the distinction between our individual sense of identity
and that of the world around us was by no means so clear as it is now. In
this state, it was therefore possible for the ancients to concieve of what
we now think of as human faculties as being ‘outside’ the individual
(a good example is the idea of ‘genius’). It was also natural for words
to simultaneously have metaphorical and literal meanings — and for
these meanings to be conjoined (an example is the Latin ‘Spiritus’
which means both ‘spirit’ and ‘breath’ — as it does, in fact, in both the
Greek ‘pneuma’ and the Hebrew ‘Ruach’). Barfield shows — in contrast
to conventional wisdom — that the metaphorical meaning was the
prior one.

Consequently, Barfield not only challenges the Chomsky/Pinker hypoth-


esis — which is based on a utilitarian model of language — but also
points towards a ‘natural’ state of language that is ‘poetic’ rather than
‘prosaic’. Barfield’s work is interesting from a graphic design point
of view because he suggests that humankind has reached the limits
of the ‘unparticipated’, ‘modern’ consciousness, and needs to move
towards what he calls ‘conscious’ or ‘final’ participation. As a model for
understanding what it happening in our field, it makes a great deal of
sense — one can see graphic designers making the first, tentative steps
towards a more participated approach to their work. Perhaps, indeed,
this is what post-modernism is about…?

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Advertising and mothers


1 September 1997

bruce:

In the case of advertising I respectfully submit that your focus is on the


‘trees’ rather than the ‘forest’. Advertising has done an excellent job of
modifying consumer behavior, i.e. increasing consumption, through con-
stant reinforcement. In the case of individual products/services, they do
not have the resources (even McDonald’s sales have been down recently)
for the required barrage.

I was being sloppy when I said ‘The conclusion that I draw from all this
is that “behaviour modification” has been a very convenient myth’.
What I really should have said is that the idea of a sophisticated tech-
nology of behaviour modification has been a very convenient myth.
In fact, I totally agree with your points. Repetition is the ‘blunt’ end of
behaviour modification. It makes perfect sense to me — and I’m sure to
most people — that if you say something enough times, and in enough
places, it will have some e‹ect. But my point about how all these meth-
ods are quite comprehensible from everyday experience is definitely
true here — one only needs to look at how one’s mother (or ‘primary
caregiver’) nagged one as a child to see the archetype of all repetition
as behaviour modification.

I have no problem with repetition, which is — of course — the basis of all


advertising and brand awareness campaigns. It’s a basic human trait,
and it’s quite clear what’s going on. What I do have a problem with is
the deliberate use of, say, cognitive dissonance or social proof. These
exploit structural weaknesses in the way we think and see the world,
without it being at all clear to most people that this is what is going on.
If you’ve got a strong product (or in the case of your area, an important
message) — and a creative interpretation — you shouldn’t need to play
ju-jitsu with people’s minds.

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Gestalt
2 September 1997

tom:

What about ‘Gestalt’? Since I didn’t follow the thread completely, has
anybody mentioned the term ‘Gestalt’? That might connect even more
disciplines…

One of the most interesting (and, perhaps, important) things to come


out of the original Gestalt psychology was the way in which it under-
mined the ‘myth of the given’ — the notion that the world that we ‘see’
is the world that our senses experience. Those ‘reversing cubes’ — the
three dimensional diagrams that you can ‘see’ both ways (but not at
the same time), or the rabbit that could also be a duck (depending on
how you look at it) — come out of this period. They appear to demon-
strate that, although the visual process remains exactly the same when
one looks at these figures, what one ‘sees’ depends upon how one inter-
prets and ‘organizes’ the image.

Even though this stu‹ is now nearly a century old, it can still seem
pretty mindblowing. The deeper one digs, the more one realizes
that our world is built on meanings — not perceptions. We hear a
noise and we see an object moving across the sky, and we think ‘heli-
copter’ — although there is no obvious sensory connection between the
image and the sound. We walk into a room, and on the floor is the
side of a cable spool balanced on a crate. Immediately we recognize
it as a table — although it doesn’t fit any definition of what a ‘table’
might be. And yet for the same reason, the artificially-intelligent com-
puter fails to ‘see’ the tank moving across the centre of its field of
vision — even though it has been comprehensively programmed with
clues as to what tanks ‘look’ like.

This was an area that preoccupied Wittgenstein in some of his later


work. He became very interested in the kind of cognition that he

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described as ‘seeing connections’ — the kind of understanding that is


involved in seeing a gestalt: the ability to ‘get’ a joke, ‘hear’ music,
‘understand’ poetry. (Exactly the areas, incidentally, that defy ‘artifi-
cial intelligence’.) He approached this by focussing on what he called
‘aspect seeing’ — seeing something as something — and asked what it
would be like to be ‘aspect blind’ (the condition of the computer). What
was missing in this case? He concluded ‘it is not absurd to answer: the
power of imagination’. Personally, I happen to find the implications
of that statement extraordinary, that the imagination is the faculty of
perception that sees connections — and that, for imagination, seeing
and understanding are one. It seems to draw a direct line between
‘author’ and ‘reader’ that leaves those who believe communication is
about encoding-transmitting-decoding wondering what happened.

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Seeing and meaning


2 September 1997

me:

Although this seems superficially logical, the philosophy of language


shows that it is impossible for us even to conceive of the thing without,
first, having a linguistic concept for it.

leif:

Is it then impossible to visualize something before we have a linguistic


concept for it? Must imagination (in the eidetic sense) always follow lan-
guage?

That’s an interesting question.

Oliver Sacks, in An Anthropologist on Mars, gives an account of a man


he calls Virgil who was blind from birth — but who, at the age of 50,
had his sight restored. It’s a fascinating — if tragic — story. The miracle
of Virgil’s newly acquired sight quickly becomes a nightmare for him,
as he discovers that he doesn’t understand what he is looking at — he
can’t fathom space or perspective, and he can’t corroborate what is
before his eyes with his previous, tactile experience of the world. Sacks
describes Virgil’s behaviour as ‘certainly not that of a sighted man, but
it was not that of a blind man, either. It was, rather, the behaviour of
one mentally blind, or agnosic — able to see but not to decipher what he
was seeing.’ Nor does the situation improve. Ultimately, when Virgil’s
blindness returns, he accepts it as a relief.

In a sense, this condition is close to what vision without language


would be like. William James described it as ‘a buzzing, blooming con-
fusion’ — although this only goes to show that we can’t even conceive of
a language-less condition without using words to describe it. Virgil has
words, but his visual experience isn’t organized linguistically — and
although he sees what we see, he can’t comprehend it.

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But of course much depends on what you understand by language. My


dog recognizes me, and many of the other features of his environment,
without having words for them. Presumably these things are them-
selves their own meaning — and are linked, like the verbal meanings
that are familiar to us, with other associations: good, bad, edible, etc.
But in a philosophical — phenomenological — sense, they are linguistic.
The dog’s visual world is organized in a way that Virgil’s is not. It is
endowed with meaning.

So, in answer to the question, I think it is a pre-requisite for imagina-


tion (in the eidetic sense) that the imaginer’s visual world is organ-
ized — and that this organization is linguistic in the broadest and
deepest sense of that word.

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Psychedelia
3 September 1997

leif:

Key to the psychedelic posters is that the audience defined themselves in


opposition to mainstream culture.

john:

Paralleling the ‘opposition’ of figure and ground…

I have to admit to a huge amount of fondness (to say nothing of nostal-


gia) for the psychedelic genre. However, I was really too young to have
been part of Leif’s ‘audience who defined themselves in opposition to
mainstream culture’. I was just a kid with an older brother who used to
‘cook up’ posters, light shows, three-dimensional concoctions of vari-
ous kinds — all of which held unending fascination for a seven year old
at a loose end on the long summer holidays.

My brother was no sort of graphic designer — nor would he have had


much in common with the commercial graphics (still heavily modern-
ist) of the time. But he used to spend a great deal of time in creating
weird and beautiful things for strange purposes: posters for obscure
bands, elaborate epsitles to friends, transparent structures that used to
catch the light from an ancient projector just so. Things that incorpo-
rated an unbelievably eclectic iconography — early Disney, Victoriana,
Art Nouveau, Tantric Mandalas, Op Art. He also introduced me to
magical entities like rapidographs, fluorescent papers, metallic inks…
things that seemed straight out of Aladdin’s cave to a kid who was used
to dip-pens and Parker’s washable Quink.

My brother used to hang out with a group of strange people in and


around London’s Notting Hill and Portobello Road. He would describe
them to me, and I used to think he was making it up. There was this
one guy who had converted an old wardrobe into a meditation cham-

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ber, lined with old egg-boxes painted black. But how could anyone have
a stupid name like Barney Bubbles? What little did I know…

Well, fate takes a funny turn. The older brother is now a systems
manager for a government department. The kid brother still loves
rapidographs, fluorescent papers, metallic inks (well, maybe not rapi-
dographs!). And the man with the crazy name and the weird wardrobe,
who died tragically young, is at last beginning to get the recognition
he deserves as one of the greatest innovators of British graphic design.

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If you weren’t there…


3 September 1997

rita:

I don’t understand what ‘Psychedelia’ is.

I wish I could explain. But I think you had to live through the sixties!

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Language and vision


4 September 1997

nancy:

My point? I believe (correct me at will) that we create understanding


through language; and that we also create understanding through
vision. They are separate, though ideally communicating, skills. Witness
how hard it can be to describe a visual idea in words, and how hard it
can be to represent a verbal idea in pictures.

I don’t disagree, except perhaps to suggest that if one adopts a wider


definition of what ‘language’ is, then one can describe both kinds of
understanding as linguistic.

The person who ‘sees’ the reversing cube in three dimensions (top for-
ward, bottom forward or even both at the same time) clearly does not
just see what is there on the paper. And even though the person who
doesn’t ‘get it’ will complain that they ‘only see a series of lines’, this
is still di‹erent to the person who was blind and now can see — who
doesn’t even recognize what is in front of him/her as ‘a series of lines’.
Meaning is nested that deep in vision, that it is almost impossible for
us to conceive of an image that doesn’t ‘mean’ anything — even if the
meaning we adduce from it is ‘it’s just a kind of blob’.

So what we see is almost all meaning — meaning that is not inherent


in the things itself. Pure sensory experience would be that of the for-
merly blind person — meaningless. This realm of meaning that is com-
municated by things, but is not inherent in them, is analagous to the
meaning that is communicated by words but which is not inherent
in them. Which is language. So if we have to define the relationship
between seeing and understanding, it seems reasonable to describe it
as linguistic too.

Heidegger (we’re back to him again, I’m afraid!) makes this distinction
between ‘language as disclosure’ and ‘language as representation’.

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Language as disclosure is (as I understand it) the meanings that organ-


ize our world coherently — that ‘disclose’ it. Language as represen-
tation is the sign system that we use to represent those meanings.
Heidegger is quite emphatic that ‘Language as representation’ derives
from ‘Language as disclosure’, and is secondary to it.
The paradigm case of this is the young Helen Keller, who became blind
and deaf as a result of having measles shortly a·er birth. She describes
beautifully describes the transforming experience of the ‘disclosive’
aspect of language, which she experienced much later in life than most
of us, and was thus able to recall much more clearly.

We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fra-


grance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Someone
was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the
spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled
into the other the word ‘water’, first slowly, then rapidly. I
stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motion of her
fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something
forgotten — a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mys-
tery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that ‘w-a-t-e-r’
meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my
hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, joy, set
it free! ... I le· the well-house eager to learn. Everything had
a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. As we
returned to the house each object that I touched seemed to
quiver with life. That was because I saw everything with the
strange new light that had come to me.’

Helen Keller, The Story of My Life, London: Hodder and Stoughton,


1959. p.23.
By the time we reach adulthood, the role of language as disclosure has
become invisible to us. We’re like the fishes in the fable who ask what
water is. As a result, when we talk about language we usually mean
language as representation. But this is one reason why I think those
positions that treat language purely as a sign system — for example,

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Saussurian Semiotics — are flawed. To believe that language (whether


visual or verbal) is simply a kind of game of codes, with one thing
standing in for another, is to lose sight of its real power. Which is to
reveal our world to us.

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Celebrating imperfection
10 September 1997

leif:

People are conditioned to think they are stupid if they cannot fathom a
design. In reality, the fault lies (usually) in the design.

All sound Donald Norman principles, exorcising the belief that we’re
inept in the face of design. But actually all we’re doing here is moving
from ‘the design is perfect, we’re stupid’ to ‘the design isn’t perfect,
we’re not stupid’. There’s still the implication that underlies much
of this cognitive factors stu‹ that ‘the design should be perfect’. But
designs are (still) human artefacts, and humans aren’t perfect. So why
should the design be? Can’t we have a situation where ‘it’s not perfect,
I’m not perfect, but what does it matter?’ Some of my favourite things
are precious to me because they don’t work as expected — or at all.
But that’s precisely — and perversely (pace Donald Norman) — why I like
them.

A·er all this emphasis on rigour, sometimes it’s a positive joy to come
across something that is totally, irredeemably and delightfully incom-
prehensible. It’s like rushing to get a train for an important presenta-
tion, only to see it pull out of the station as you arrive pu›ng and
wheezing on the platform — and then experiencing that extraordinary
lightness of being that leaves one standing in the pouring rain think-
ing ‘I’m alive! Who cares about the stupid Pot Noodle account’.

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In perspective
10 September 1997

don:

In cultures without a tradition of perspective drawing (in Europe it


developed fairly late), the sorts of depth cues that we’re accustomed to
interpretting (e.g., a smallerobject is farther away) are not recognized.
See J. B. Deregowski’s ‘Pictorial Perception and Culture’ in the November
1972 Scientific American. These cues can, of course, be learned.

Barfield, in Saving the Appearances, develops a fascinating hypothesis


that the advent of perspective drawing was directly related to the evo-
lution of a western, scientific consciousness. In a statement which has
a connection to the gestalt/blind-and-now-can-see thread, he says:

If, and with the help of some time-machine working in reverse,


a man of the Middle Ages could be suddenly transported into
the skin of a man of the twentieth century, seeing through our
eyes and with our ‘figuration’ the objects we see, I think he
would feel like a child who looks for the first time at a photo-
graph through the ingenious magic of a stereoscope. ‘Oh!’ he
would say, ‘look how they stand out!’. We must not forget that
in his time perspective had not yet been discovered, nor under-
rate the significance of this. True, it is no more than a device
for pictorially representing depth, and separateness, in space.
But how comes it that the device had never been discovered
before — or, if discovered, never adopted? There were plenty of
skilled artists, and they would certainly have hit upon it soon
enough if depth in space had characterised the collective rep-
resentations they wish to reproduce, as it characterises ours.
They did not need it. Before the scientific revolution the world
was more like a garment men wore about them than a stage
on which they moved. In such a world the convention of per-

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spective was unnecessary. To such a world other conventions of


visual reproduction, such as the nimbus and the halo, were as
appropriate as to ours they are not. It was as if the observers
were themselves in the picture. Compared with us, they felt
themselves and the objects around them and the words that
expressed those objects, immersed together in something like a
clear lake of — what shall we say? — of ‘meaning’ if you choose. It
seems the most adequate word.

Certainly, walking around the U›zi last year — with Barfield’s words
ringing around my head — was an extraordinary experience. It was
as if one could actually trace the stirrings of this new consciousness
from the still mediaeval representations of Cimabue through the first
attempts at perspective (still within a mediaeval frame) of Giotto to the
extraordinary breakthroughs of Piero and later Renaissance artists.
And it is worth bearing in mind that perspective-less pictorial repre-
sentations still remained the norm in the Islamic world (as in Persian
and Mughal miniatures) — a world still locked within the mediaeval
paradigm — for centuries a·er western artists had adopted perspective
as a norm.

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What it’s worth


2 October 1997

julie:

I am still not sure how much I will be able to charge for a logo but I
will follow the thread in the hopes that I can avoid becoming (horrors!) a
dunderhead. You guys may already be saving my reputation.

What should you charge for a logo? I don’t know.

It does remind me of a story, though. In which, in return for a favour, a


king asks a pauper what he would like as a reward.

‘A million gold pieces’, replies the pauper.

‘That’s rather a lot!’ says the king. ‘Is there anything else you would
accept?’
‘All right, a single gold piece.’

‘Certainly. But how come there’s so much di‹erence?’

‘Well’ says the pauper ‘the million gold pieces is what you are worth.
But the single gold piece — that’s what I am worth.’.

Perhaps there’s an answer there, somewhere…

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Sound advice
4 October 1997

cheryl:

Yes …I think about these things too...(does it not come down to some
degree at least, operating always as one personally sees fit, whatever the
size of the client…? Am I dreaming perhaps…? I would rather work by
my own standards than be a pawn in this kind of game and be taken for
a ride. I rather not get the job as I’ve said. Why bother…? Life’s too short.

Perhaps the best piece of advice I’ve ever been given as a designer came
from the director of industrial design of a major British multi-national.
As we returned from a lunch at which he and my then boss had con-
sumed more alcohol than I thought was humanly possible, he turned
to me and said (in that uncannily wise way that people can sometimes
get in their cups) ‘the most important thing for a designer is to under-
stand the corporate mind’. I don’t remember being that impressed
with it at the time (in fact, I seem to recall having to excuse myself
during lunch, plunging my face into a basin of cold water in a desper-
ate attempt to restore some semblance of sobriety). But it has been an
infallibly useful guide in the intervening years.

Not all designers who do identity work have corporate clients, but non-
corporate identity must be a pretty niche market. And corporates are
among the most political, games-playing institutions on this earth.
Designers are o·en pawns in someone’s empire building, and automat-
ically inherit all the opponents and enemies of their sponsor. Indeed,
we’re o·en so·-targets too — wet behind the ears when it comes to the
dangers of institutional politics, and without the status that could pro-
tect us from being thwarted.

So I’d suggest that corporate identity work appeals only to a certain


kind of designer. Someone who is possessed of natural diplomacy and
cunning, who can see the big picture (not just their own horizons) and

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knows a winning horse. Someone who is not frightened of a few pain-


ful knocks, and has a skin as thick as a crocodile. And, above all, some-
one who keeps their ears and eyes open — and their head down. Not
your average idealistic art school graduate.

Which is why, I suspect, you’re getting such di‹erent answers to your


original question. In this respect, designers fall into two categories:
‘precious flowers’ and ‘resilient creepers’. Those of us who fall into the
latter category (and I think you’ll find most of the big identity consul-
tancies — the Landors and the Siegel & Gales — are of this kind) have
learnt that one can’t go crying back to mummy when the big kids start
getting rough.

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The thin blue line


4 October 1997

gary:

I live in the UK. My colleague and I are both Police O›cers who have
been asked by our Forces to design and construct a Website for our force.
It’s a big project with a big budget. We have been asked to source and
take courses on HTML authoring and graphic design. We have found the
HTML course without any di›culty, but the design side is more di›cult.
Basically, we are both OK on the so·ware (Photoshop, Illustrator, mainly)
but need a course which will tell us what looks good, what catches the
eye, things to avoid, that sort of thing. I would appreciate any ideas or,
particularly from UK residents, names of companies.

I don’t know how to say this without sounding high-handed. But I’m
going to have a try anyway.

The police are forever telling us to ‘leave it to the professionals’ — and


rightly so. Supposing I say to you, ‘well, there’s a murder (‘homicide’ for
our US friends) that I want to investigate. I’m pretty good on science,
so I’m sure most of the forensic stu‹ won’t be too much trouble — but I
really need a short course to brush up on the basic principles of detec-
tion’. You would be horrified, and with good reason. No, I’m not taking
the piss or trying to score points — but trying to make a valid analogy.
Your Force are obviously lucky to have such multi-talented o›cers as
yourselves, but when it comes to a project like this… leave it to the pro-
fessionals!

I’ve spent the better part of twenty years exploring questions like ‘what
looks good, what catches the eye, things to avoid, that sort of thing’.
Some days I wonder whether I’m any closer to an answer than when
I first started — and I’m sure you’ll find others here who feel likewise.
There are no easy solutions — least of all that could be summarized
in a few simple lessons. And whilst there are principles, design of all

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kinds exemplifies the observation that ‘circumstances alter cases’. Like


every discipline, graphic design has its gi·ed amateurs — its Hercule
Poirots and Sherlock Holmes — and there’s no reason why you and your
colleague shouldn’t join their number. But I don’t think you’ll find
anyone who can tell you how it’s done.

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Encouraging amateurs
9 October 1997

alec:

I find no pain in letting a few amateurs into a few secrets.

Why be parsimonious? Why not share with them the great secret of
graphic design. Which is that it is a journey, and not a destination?

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Colours receding
14 October 1997

ed:

I used to be very interested in this, Hans Ho‹mann’s push pull theories


were based on warm colors coming out from the plane, and cool colors
receding, making a space illusion, creating tension. But at the same time
I was reading Joseph Albers, color expert at Yale, also a painter, and he
didn’t believe in this at all. Itten, Munsell, and Goethe didn’t mention it,
and I couldn’t get it to work in my own experiments, so I abandoned the
idea.

It is implicit in Goethe’s colour theory, although I’ve just flicked


through my copy of Eastlake’s translation of the Farbenlehre (MIT
Press, 1987) and can’t find an explicit reference.
Goethe believed that the ‘warm’ colours — red and yellow — were pro-
duced by the displacement of darkness over light, and that the ‘cool’
colours — cyan and violet — were produced by the displacement of light
over darkness. There’s the famous story of how Goethe borrowed a
prism from the Duke of Weimar to repeat Newton’s experiments,
but never got around to it. When the Duke’s agent came to recover
the prism, Goethe quickly held it up to his eyes and looked at the
window — leading him to his dramatic revelation about the nature of
colour (that spectral phenomena only occured at the boundaries of
light and dark), and to his now notorious declaration that ‘Newton was
wrong!’. Be that as it may, he realised that red and yellow appeared
(according to how one held the prism) at one boundary shi·ed over
into the light area — and that violet and cyan appear at the other,
shi·ed into the dark area. Thus giving a — in Goethe’s words — ‘deli-
cately empirical’ basis to the idea of warm colours coming forward
and cool receding. Goethe also found that Green only appeared where
the two boundaries come close enough to each other, as they do in

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Newton’s ‘Experimentum crucis’, where some of the yellow from one


boundary overlaps some of the cyan from the other.

Because of Goethe’s denouncement of Newton, it has since been con-


ventional to disparage his theories (despite Goethe having derived
them from years of patient observation, while Newton derived his the-
ories from alchemical and cabbalistic studies). However, it is a fasci-
nating — and thought proking — experience to repeat his experiments
with the prism. Particularly interesting for us graphic designers is his
experiment with the ‘anti spectrum’. This is produced by doing pre-
cisely the opposite of what Newton did — instead of narrowing the shut-
ter to let a thin beam of light through the prism, have a narrow opaque
body stand in a wide beam of light. The result is an extraordinary spec-
trum, but instead of the familiar band of Red-Orange-Yellow-Green-
Blue-Indigo-Violet there is a sequence of pure Yellow-Magenta-Cyan.
Everyone should try it. It is guaranteed to set you scratching your head
about what you learned in high school.

Since those days I’ve noticed color space illusions both in print and on my
computer screen which were working fine, but did not seem to go with
the warm/cool idea. In other words, I noticed blue floating up from a red
field, and sometimes the opposite. These e‹ects may be very subjective,
and the result of environmental conditions and mental states, stress,
a·erimage, all kinds of things.

At the end of last year, I attended a lecture where the speaker (a


designer taking about a product she had developed) showed a series of
slides with a predominant cyan-ish/cool blue hue. On one, there was a
word picked out in a strong, warm red. As I moved my head from le·
to right, this word seemed to move vis-a-vis its neighbours — li·ing o‹
the baseline and (I think) to the le·. I was so fascinated and entranced
by this phenomenon that I quite lost track what she was talking about.
I’ve never before experienced anything like it — and am at pains to
explain it.

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Learning from the workplace


22 November 1997

kc:

As someone pointed out to me a long time ago. There ARE perfect jobs
and ideal companies out there. Unfortunately, no one in their right mind
quits a perfect job, so they don’t have very many openings.

In employment Xanadu, perhaps. But I suspect that right underneath


free lunch on the list of ‘no such things’ comes perfect job, perfect boss
and perfect employee (and probably for much the same reasons).

I’ve seen this from both sides. And the conclusion I’d draw is that
to look towards perfection in employer/employee relationships is to
miss the point. Which is that work involves necessarily abrasive rela-
tionships — abrasion that conduces both to maturity and to bitterness,
o·en simultaneously. In Jungian terms, work is where many people get
to meet their ‘shadow’ — and the resulting ‘projection’ can be a trial for
everyone, as well as a spur for growth.

I think it is important to remember that a job (at least, a ‘cra·’ job,


like design) is not a commodity but a journey — literally, in fact, in
the old cra· usage of ‘travail’ as ‘work’ and ‘travel’. Sadly the pro-
fessions — which were originally occupations for the surplus sons of
the aristocracy — preserve none of the beautiful resonances of the arti-
san cra· guilds. Journeys are usually uncomfortable, only intermit-
tently exciting (between long stretches of tedium) and o·en bring
out the worst in people (as well as occasionally displaying unexpected
strengths). And their true significance — as well as their glamour — is
only appreciated in hindsight. So I’m not sure we should expect a job to
be any more than this — but, of course, if we’re missing this dimension
of personal growth we’re not getting as much as we could out of the
opportunities on o‹er.

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As an employer I’m pretty mean (finances are always tight) and I expect
a lot from my employees. It’s certainly not uncommon for them to
work late into the night, for no extra remuneration. I’m also pretty
infuriating — I o·en (but not invariably) insist on things being done
‘my way’, change my mind at the last minute and fail to practise what
I preach. Still, several people have said that they learned more here
than they learned at College — and at least they’ve not been charged
for this opportunity to improve themselves (and their prospects) at my
expense! And I’m continually surprised and gratified by a level of loy-
alty beyond and above what I have reason to expect (although I also
have a fair idea of what they say about me a·er work at the pub…).

In justification of this position, I would say that it has cost me a great


deal to get to this stage — of which the financial cost is only a token
compared to the personal cost. I’m also still very much in the ‘journey-
man’ stage of my career — so, if others want to travel with me, they have
to put up with the fact that my own travail takes priority. However,
(judged by the number of applications we get) this doesn’t appear to be
quite as o‹-putting as it sounds!

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Styling versus usability


29 November 1997

jennifer:

1 What percentage of your job as a graphic designer is to make some-


thing ‘cool’, and what percentage is to make something clear and
usable? (mention whether you do brochure, newsletters, webpage, multi-
media — whatever you have in mind when answering the question).

2 If you feel that part of your task is to make something readable, what
percentage of your clients hire you for you ability to make their product
‘cool’ and what percentage hire you for your ability to make the product
‘understandable’. In other words, are clients aware of your ability to do
this or do they care about it?
I’d like to be helpful and respond, but I don’t think the dichotomy
between styling and usability is right. It’s a bit like asking ‘how
much of your job involves using colour and how much involves using
type?’ — the two are really di‹erent dimensions, neither polarities nor
ends of a continuum.

Every graphic expression is a statement — even the understated, reces-


sive ‘information design’ approach (which actually makes a powerful
statement, but that’s another matter). Every graphic expression is also
a communication — something that involves some degree, or variety,
of ‘usability’. There is no obvious correlation (at least to me) between
these two aspects.

I’m sure clients have lots of reasons for hiring us (the chemistry is
right, the things we say strike a chord with them, we have the right
kind of experience, etc.) but without a doubt the overriding considera-
tion is that they believe we will help them further their objectives.

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Jack of all trades


3 December 1997

kc:

I also see a disturbing trend of ‘combining’. People want designers to also


be: copywriters; programmers; computer maintenance; receptionists;
secretaries; sales; public relations. Because why? …design can’t possibly
be a full time job? And since (as we all know) anybody can do design,
they invariably end up with a programmer/coppywriter/secretary/etc.
who does their own layout.

I’m not sure I agree — although when you put it like this, it sounds per-
suasive!

Not having seen the article (or being likely to), I can’t comment on it.
But I do think designers who work with type will increasingly have to
become far more literate, to the extent that they can write and edit
well. I also think you’ll find many more writers who want to use the
full expressive power of typography.

Creating a visual communication concept involves the dovetailing


of semantic, typographic and pictorial aspects. The ad-agency ‘Pin
Factory’ approach depended on the collaboration of a witty and elo-
quent copywriter with a visually inspired (but usually incoherent and
illiterate!) art director, with the fruits of their collaboration being
passed down to a disgruntled ‘just do it!’ typographer. Apart from being
very much out of kilter with the spirit of the times, this kind of divi-
sion of labour reinforces ridiculous stereotypes. Writers can design,
you don’t need to have flunked math and English to direct a photo-
shoot, there’s no reason why the typo can’t be creative director — and
so on. Not only does the technology make this possible, but an inte-
grated product seems to demand it. If you want to have copy that looks
a certain way, you probably have to write it yourself — if you want copy
that reads a certain way, you probably have to style it yourself.

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It’s also worth adding that those of us in business for ourselves, or


working in small businesses — which is certainly the majority of design-
ers here in the UK — have to be good at everything. Or, at least, we
can’t a‹ord to be bad at anything — accounting, secretarial skills, mar-
keting, selling, managing, purchasing, organizing, systems adminis-
tration, hardware maintenance, public relations, human resources,
training — you name it, we probably have to do it. Versatility is certainly
high on my list of priorities as an employer. Being just a designer is a
luxury, not a right.

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Virtuosity
4 December 1997

cheryl:

Absolutely. It’s respect for the individual specialities which is what makes
this work and work well. I would guess that one calling themselves a
‘jack of all trades’ is really a jack of nothing… and merely indication of
yet another on the bandwagon in the same vein as a desktop publisher
calling themselves a designer. We had a great thread on a interactive
media listserv here locally; where someone was posting a position for a
receptionist, that is one that knew HTML, graphics, writing, phone work,
C++, java, co‹ee making… the works. Needless to say, it sparked a whole
slew of responses.

I think it is unduly pessimistic, though, to assume that a person can


be master of one trade or another — but not both. I take a slightly
di‹erent view and think that although our lives are not usually that
long, there’s plenty of opportunity for continual growth and develop-
ment. Nobody would expect a 23 year old, fresh from College, to be a
brilliant art director, typographer, copywriter and web engineer. But
what about a 33 year old? Or a 43 year old? Or a 53 year old? No shortage
of opportunity there to acquire new skills and abilities.

Those who really understand their own field o·en have an intimation
that other forms of knowledge are in some way or another related.
Designers have historically been extremely good at switching mid-
stream to other design disciplines (virtually all the older generation of
Italian industrial designers trained as architects, for instance — Sotsass,
Mendini, Bellini etc.). Di‹erent design disciplines may have radically
di‹erent processes, materials, markets and cultures, but once you
understand what design per se is about, these di‹erences are easily
overcome. Writing is designing with words, Art Direction designing
with images, Typography designing with letterforms — is there any

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great impediment to moving freely across that range? I’ve met people
who have successfully switched from fashion to product design, or
from graphics to music, or from literature to programming. So I don’t
think claiming to know ‘HTML, graphics, writing, phone work, C++,
java, co‹ee making’ necessarily means that one is either a paragon or
a charlatan.

As a (largely) self-taught designer maybe I see this from a di‹erent


perspective. I don’t have a College degree that I can use to say to
dtpers ‘I’m di‹erent from you, I’m a professionally qualified graphic
designer’ — and I also know that it is quite possible for others to do
what I did myself. It predisposes me to a much more pragmatic way
of judging what people can do — you’re a designer if you can design, a
writer if you can cra· prose, etc. (notwithstanding any piece of paper
that claims you are an alumnus of the University of Blah). In a world
where change is a constant and the boundaries are shi·ing all the
time, it can even be an advantage not to define yourself too rigidly on
the basis of something you did several years before…

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But does it sell?


5 December 1997

scott:

Another angle: don’t think you’re at the top of the food chain. The heavy-
duty marketing and advertising people say ‘Yeah, he/she is great with
a tablet, and has tremendous talent, but doens’t know jack about what
sells’. Don’t take o‹ense to this. I’ve been on both ends of this one. I do not
want to o‹end, just educate. I’m not a know-it-all, I’m just passing on
what I’ve seen.

There was a piece on this morning’s radio news about the EU decision
to ban tobacco advertising. A spokesperson for the tobacco industry
was interviewed, and came out with the priceless ‘it won’t have any
e‹ect on consumption’. If it doesn’t have any e‹ect on consumption,
why bother to advertise! (Do they take us for complete idiots?)

But I o·en wonder whether many marketing people actually know


that much ‘about what sells’ either. The ‘principles of marketing’ are a
perfect example of late c20 scientism — talked up, exaggerated, decon-
textualized social psychology. And that famous quote (attributed to
Lord Leverhulme) that ‘half my advertising budget is wasted, only I
don’t know which half’ still appears to be as true as ever.

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Typesetting
8 December 1997

dick:

Unfortunately my experience has been that most designers are not good
typographers -- at least, not in the sense of the cra·smanship that existed
in the better ad shops before the advent of dtp. Or, maybe it’s just that I
have been around this industry too long and am prone to making unfa-
vorable comparison between a lot of what goes on today and what we
used to strive for.

In the quantitative sense implied by ‘most’, that’s undoubtedly true.


But, unqualified, that gives the wrong twist to the development of
Typography over the last fi·een years — which has undoubtedly been
driven by designers who were passionate about type (and o·en had a
profound grasp of its historical context).

When I started working as a (typographic) designer in London in the


early eighties, there was a thriving typesetting industry. However, the
direction that it was moving felt very much out of step with what I
wanted from it. I’d ask for non-lining (‘old style’) figures and true small
caps, and the type house reps would look at me as if I was from another
planet. ‘Look at this great Les Usherwood face’, they’d reply. ‘We’re the
only people in London who have got it’. I’d look at it and think ‘ugh!’
Instead, I’d ask for obscure faces like Gill’s Joanna. ‘Yeah, I remember
that’ some of the older guys would say, launching into reminiscences
of what it was like to mump fonts of foundry type, or something of
the kind. ‘We’ve just got this great Berthold Bodoni’ they’d say. ‘But it
doesn’t look anything like Bodoni!’ I’d say. And get some more of those
askance looks.

But I clearly wasn’t on another planet. Because almost from the start
of PostScript, independent type designers were producing fonts with
small caps and old style figures, authentic revivals of old favourites,

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and new and exciting types that were in keeping with the spirit of the
times. Indeed one of the first things that many of us did when we got
our hands on the first versions of Fontographer was to try and fill some
of these gaps between what we wanted and what was available. Then
we met each other at type conferences and realized we were not alone.
Soon the big type foundries (initially Monotype and Adobe) grasped
that their designer customers were driving the market for PostScript
type, and that our preferences were distinctly di‹erent to the received
wisdom of the type industry. The first sixty five or so releases in
the Adobe Library reflected stultified type house choices — Optima,
Souvenir, ITC Garamond etc. Then, quite suddenly, there was a marked
switch to designer choices, capitalizing on the distaste for sanitised
versions of historical types.

But these are only easily illustrated examples of what was a much wider,
and more serious, di‹erence between what designers wanted — and
what the type industry was prepared to give us. We increasingly wanted
type with more authenticity, more ruggedness, more ‘spite’ to it — what
the type houses wanted to give us was more slickness, more homogene-
ity, more polish. And what made it really irksome was — right up until
the end — they thought they knew best. They stuck with their techno-
phobe customers who still liked the sickly-sweet ITC reworkings of the
eighties, and smirked at those of us who were using Macs.

I’m sorry if some of these guys have ended up as janitors. But if they
had listened, and not been so supercilious and dismissive, there might
still have been a place for them.

Note: old style figures (e.g. 0123456789) include some characters that descend
below the baseline and some that ascend above the ‘x’ height. In this respect they
di‹er from the more common ‘lining’ figures (e.g. 0123456789) which range
with the capitals. Because of this, old style figures harmonise better with lower
case. To ‘mump’ a font is to borrow a case of type from another typesetter.

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Graduates
8 December 1997

bob:

This is the problem we have with finding good interns and entry-level
designers. It seems that most of the schools are turning out design stu-
dents with such big egos that they aren’t interested in ‘producing paying
work’ by starting at ground level and working their way up. They come
out of school with the idea that they are ready to jump right into project
management and art direction. We’ve had second-year students inter-
viewing with us for an internship ask how much involvement they would
have in meetings with clients, and said they weren’t interested if the
internship would only involve ‘production’ work.

There is a problem with managing expectations in the college envi-


ronment, and between the college environment and work. Partly, I
suspect, this comes about because graphic design courses don’t really
know whether they are supposed to be humanities/liberal arts or voca-
tional. But, in any case, much of the problem comes about because it is
only possible to give students productive learning briefs by asking them
to imagine themselves art directors or senior designers. In moving
from student to employee, however, it is necessary to appreciate that
one has been used to undertaking tasks far in advance of what one’s
new employers are likely to want, or even allow, one to carry out. In
college, everyone gets a chance — freshness, innovation, adventure are
rewarded. In work — especially in a small company — there’s already an
established pecking order of who gets to do what creative tasks. And
experience counts for more than enthusiasm.

I think this is one of those things that doesn’t have an answer. If


we expect institutions of higher education to do our training for us,
e‹ectively for free, we don’t really have any right to tell them how they
should do it. But if we are going to do it ourselves, do we have the time

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or the skills to take raw recruits through the monumental syllabus


required by contemporary commercial graphics?

To try and turn lose lose into win win, we have to realize that the entry
route into graphic design requires an alternation of learning, unlearn-
ing and relearning — and that employers should work with the colleges
to help manage the ‘human resources’ issues (i.e. bewildered and dis-
appointed graduates) that result.

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Playing by the rules


8 December 1997

irisa:

In my opinion education can sometimes kill what makes art and artists,
art and artists! It has taken me almost ten years to shed the damage to
my creativity that was done when I got my formal education in Graphic
Design. I guess I just didn’t have the ‘balls of steel’ to come out of the
schooling with my creativity still in tact, like some people seemed to be
able to do. What I came out of the schooling with was a group of instruc-
tors, forever sitting on my shoulder, and whispering ‘rules’ in my ear as
I sat in front of a white sheet of paper, hungry to let go and create. Raw
artistic emotion cannot be put to paper, or maybe into a musical form,
if the artist is worried about what is ‘proper’ or ‘in style’. The rules of
layout, composition and color, to create certain moods and get the audi-
ences eye to move as the artist desires, may come in handy occasionally,
when the artist stares at a work in progress and can’t figure out what
just isn’t working… but I think for the most part, these rules and school-
ing do far more damage than good.

It’s not the rules that do the damage, but the blow to self-esteem when
one is made to feel ignorant. Knowledge is power: you can choose to
follow the rules, or to reject them. But being made to feel as if one’s
work is of no consequence, because one doesn’t understand how to
play the game, is one of the biggest blocks to creativity. This is a draw-
back of applying a mediaeval model of academic education — firmly
based on a feudal hierarchy of ‘knowers’ — to a creative field.

Interestingly, rules appear to govern the otherwise apparently anar-


chic world of ‘BritArt’ — the trendy phenomenon of ‘fuck it!’ expres-
sionism that has supposedly made London one of the most ‘happening’
cities on the globe. This week the Turner prize — our most prestigious
award for the contemporary arts — was awarded to Gillian Wearing for

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a video of 26 policemen struggling to remain silent for an hour (it turns


out that they weren’t real policemen, causing one critic to utter a truly
postmodern cri de coeur). Now, regardless of the merits or demerits of
the work, it is only possible to be acclaimed in the way Wearing is if you
both understand and play by the rules. It is an unspoken requirement
that one has passed through the art school system, that one enjoys the
approbation of peers and critics, and that one is able to cultivate (albeit
perhaps by sticking two fashionable fingers up to) the media. Anyone
may be able create a prosaic piece like 60 Minutes Silence (The Cauldron).
But only selected people — the ones who know how to successfully com-
pete in the apparently uncompetitive milieu of the contemporary arts
scene — get to be publicly rewarded for it.

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Knowledge and power


10 December 1997

cheryl:

You said: ‘It’s not the rules that do the damage, but the blow to self-
esteem when one is made to feel ignorant. Knowledge is power: you can
choose to follow the rules, or to reject them. But being made to feel as if
one’s work is of no consequence, because one doesn’t understand how to
play the game, is one of the biggest blocks to creativity.’ Do you care to
expand on this very interesting sentence, James? I’d be delighted…

Sorry, it was late and I was less than coherent — it’s not as if I was trying
to make an obscure, profound point!

Education, and higher education in particular, involves a relationship


between knowledge and power. The teacher’s status comes from knowl-
edge, but from knowledge that is recognised as such by the long and
elaborate rites of passage that make up academia. As a colleague once
said to me ‘nobody below postgraduate level should express original
opinions’ (you might argue about whether this is quite true in graphic
design, but she was talking about ‘respectable’ academic disciplines).
Although many academics would be eager to brush this o‹, my own
experience as an outsider in higher education tends to confirm it. The
higher echelons of study are not about ‘learning’ per se, but about
learning to play a game with highly complex, unspoken rules. The proc-
esses involved are more important symbolically than literally. (Steven
Rose, writing in The Making of Memory, says of even the doctoral thesis
‘...the real value of the thesis is quite di‹erent from all this grand theo-
rizing; it is simply a certificate of completion of apprenticeship; it says
this person can do independent research and is now fit to be launched
on the world, to sink or swim.’

In my opinion all human a‹airs are invariably circumscribed with


such unspoken rules — whether within universities, corporations, or

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other social groups — this is one of the great revelations of life. But
it does depend on the slow germination of the ‘Aha!’ factor, which
means that it’s not as common a perspective as it should be. Many
perplexing setbacks and disappointments — such as when your College
tutor doesn’t recognize your dissertation as the most exciting thing
ever to be written about graphic design — take on a di‹erent, and far
less personal, complexion if you grasp these rules (or even just have an
intimation of their existence). If you understand that someone is criti-
cal of your work because they are operating within a certain frame-
work (which they may be unaware of), you can choose to a›rm or deny
their words. If you can’t, it’s likely you’ll interpret them as a personal
blow to your self esteem.

I’ve seen how devastating it can be to students — particularly to the


first years you North Americans call ‘freshmen’ — to have their work
trashed when they’ve put their heart and soul into it. We have a tradi-
tion in British Art Schools — perhaps a bloodsport is a better descrip-
tion — called the ‘blistering crit’. It involves tutors having a good liquid
lunch, and then seeing how many students they can reduce to blubber-
ing wrecks in the course of an a·ernoon. From the educators’ point of
view (even the enlightened ones, who use encouragement rather than
rebuke) the students are not expected to be able to do sound work — by
definition, they haven’t paid their dues/learned the form/earned a
place in the pecking order. And since one’s early twenties tends to be
a time of great vulnerability and self-absorption, few undergraduates
get to figure this out.

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Art as brand
11 December 1997

gunnar:

James, The problem is that most people see ‘Art’ as a collection of objects
that have inherent value. The Art world sees ‘Art’ as a dialog of sorts.
Under the second view there is no problem with doing something that
‘anyone could have done’ any more than it would be a problem to utter
a short (brilliant, pithy) statement in a conversation that ‘anyone could
have said’. The phrase ‘fuck it’ could have an entirely di‹erent meaning
in another context. The same sentence might be a conceptual break-
through in reply to one statement and a bit of idiocy in another conver-
sation. To that extent anyone else’s sixty minutes of silent cops video
would not have been more than vaguely similar.
I wasn’t really intending to make a value judgment on Ms Wearing’s
piece — well, not principally, anyway. What I do feel about the Turner
Prize episode, though, is that it beautifully shows how ‘Art’ has fully
become a social construction — a clever and di›cult game, with inscru-
table rules, open only to the eligible. Of course, we’ve lived with this for
years now — with ‘installations’ consisting of piles of bricks or heaps of
old crockery being the butt of many a tabloid joke. But even so there
was always a suggestion that it was ‘Art’ because an ‘Artist’ had graced
it (my previous reference to Duchamp and the fire extinguisher, for
example) — a lingering feeling that there must be some quality in the
artefact that made it Art, Noun. Wearing’s piece is di‹erent though (in
common with many of her peers, like Tracey Emin or Mona Hatoum).
The thing itself has no inherent virtues (it must be unwatchable, unless
one is a complete masochist or in a state of deep catatonia, and my
guess is that nobody will seriously ever watch it). It is the concept that
is Art, Verb — an idea that probably doesn’t even need to exist to be
the subject of critical discussion. The doing of an Artist has therefore
become the art — the artefact is simply an irrelevant by-product.

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And that’s what I find fascinating. Because literally anyone could


have made Wearing’s video — there are no cra· skills here that anyone
is concerned with, only a modicum of organization, a little rudi-
mentary equipment and some (presumably grant) funding. But to
be Wearing — to be accepted in the heart of the throbbing, bustling
London Art Scene — that is a di‹erent matter. And actually, if one looks
at this — which is where the real artistry is — one sees a picture (forgive
the pun) little di‹erent from the age of Michelangelo. It’s a picture of
conformity, and of constrained rebellion within conformity. It’s a pic-
ture of a group of people whose world is arranged according to certain
assumptions and norms that are, in all probability, invisible to them.
And it is a picture of the enduring Machiavellian politics of acceptance
and status.

As for the ‘statement’ that the piece makes, I’m sure I could improvise
some suitably adulatory twaddle about it deconstructing the role of
law enforcement in mass culture and entertainment, etc. One could
also say that the prize, the hype, the reactions of the critics and the
public is itself some kind of installation/performance with a multitude
of unfixed, reader-centred interpretations. But, in truth, one could say
these sorts of things about almost anything — and I’m not sure what
anyone would gain from it.

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Emotion
17 December 1997

ron:

I think it’s more di›cult for artists to talk about art. What it is, what it
ought to have, etc. There is this tension between technique and emotion.
A good design will move me as much as a good drawing or photograph.
Then I have this desire to find out why it moved me. What exactly did the
artist do?

In this century (and perhaps the last) the arts have come very close
to the danger of believing that emotion is ‘spirituality’ — that there is
something special, sublime about it. Ironically, at the same time the sci-
ences have come pretty close to understanding that emotion is a func-
tion of some of the lowest, most primitive parts of the brain — common
to all mammals, even rats and mice.

Emotion is extraordinarily easy to manipulate — in a sense it is just tech-


nique. Madison Avenue understands this, as does Hollywood. Anyone
who doubts this should curl up for an a·ernoon in front of the corni-
est, tritest ‘weepie’ — I strongly recommend the ‘Lassie’ series — and see
if they are immune to the masterful engineering of their emotions. If
that fails, try Billy Graham… But artists are usually a few steps behind
‘common knowledge’ (another danger of artists who don’t develop
their intellectual lives). Amongst the catalogue of the ‘sad but true’
is that the ‘profound’ experiences some people have when entering,
say, the Rothko room at London’s Tate Gallery, can be easily replicated
without the ‘great art’ (which is not to deprecate Rothko, only some of
his admirers). And such liberation of emotion can be far from good for
people. There is a marvellous story of a Canadian researcher who took
two groups of people, one of which had to listen to a tape of Christmas
carols. He then described a crime to both groups, and asked what sen-
tence they thought it deserved. Those who hadn’t heard the carols

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said ‘five years’. The others, who had been moved by the singing about
peace and goodwill to all men, came up with an average sentence of
‘eleven years’. (Moral: don’t get brought up in front of the magistrates
at Yuletide!)

Having said this, I should distinguish between the almost visceral feel-
ing of being overcome by something — that sensation of emotion ‘well-
ing up’ — which is a dangerous pleasure (nobody has ever manipulated
it better than Hitler, whom we shouldn’t forget was an artist by inclina-
tion and training) and what, for want of a better term, I’ll call aesthetic
awe. This latter is what we experience when we witness something
that is so superb in execution and/or conception that we appreciate the
distance between ourselves and its author. Doubtless there is an emo-
tional component to this feeling — a thrill that raises our hackles — but
primarily it is not an emotional experience. More, I would say, it is
an experience akin to the ‘Aha!’ type of realization — but, of course,
di‹erent. It is at once both humbling and empowering. And, unlike
the feeling of being moved by something, it is extremely hard to engi-
neer — the only thing that can provoke it is the exercise of genius on
someone else’s part (and it requires that we understand something of
that genius from having striven in the same direction ourselves).

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Creative demagogues
18 December 1997

michael:

C’mon, James. The Hitler-the-artist fillip was unnecessary.

I should have been more careful. Not long ago I was speculating on
why all Internet discussions (no matter what the subject) always come
around to talking about Hitler. And here I am bringing him up again!

But behind the fillip was an observation I find inescapable — which is


that artists make truly disastrous political leaders (Nero being another
prominent example, and of course Napoleon was a failed writer). Why
is this? Perhaps because somewhere close to creativity is an intoler-
ance of things that don’t conform to one’s vision, a (necessarily, given
the world in which we live) inflated estimation of one’s own abilities
and a desire to change the world. All laudable qualities in the artist or
designer, but catastrophic qualities in a politician. Artists and design-
ers also seem to be addicted to rhetoric — is this because we are so
used to admiring stirring form without worrying about meaning?
Fortunately for everyone, though, the extent of our megalomania will
mostly be confined to such relatively harmless expressions as, say, help-
ing a client impose a rigorously ‘pure’ corporate identity scheme.

At some point I would like to try and collect some of the declamatory
utterances of the early c20 modernists — the ones that sound like
Robespierre or Trotsky, only with a designer’s vocabulary. One that
comes to mind is El Lizzitsky’s ‘War has been declared on the aesthetic
of chaos. An order that has entered fully into consciousness is called
for’. Thank God he never got to govern anybody…

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Teaching people to see


5 January 1998

david:

I was told in design class that graphic design is about seeing in certain
ways, and that the designers themselves have a large responsibility in
teaching the public how to see

That’s usual here, too — very much an Art School view of the world. I’m
not sure it’s right, though. People have always struck me as being able
to see perfectly well — our brains have evolved the magnificent capac-
ity to limit the amount of information processing they have to do, and
whether you’re a bank teller or a bartender it’s not always that adap-
tive to be able to see like Kandinsky.

The public has an appetite for our work (as and when it does) because
we play with their visual world — not because we’re socially respon-
sible pedagogues. Just as most of us love to hear musicians who can
do things that are novel, clever or beautifully fitting with words and
chords, so too do we love the same sorts of things with visual language,
imagery and symbolism. As designers, we don’t really have to educate
this appetite — just cater to it.

So this seems to provide the critic with a useful role to fill. He should
attempt to answer the question: what assumptions does a particular
designer make about the way people see things, what changes might a
particular school of design induce in the way people see things?

Though if you compare the design critic to, say, the music critic, this
would place a largely undeserved burden on her/him. Does anyone ask
what assumptions the Red Hot Chilli Peppers or the Chemical Brothers
make about the way people hear things? Does any critic even ask this
about Mozart or Schumann? That’s not to say that it isn’t an interest-
ing question — only that music criticism goes on without needing to
engage with the big, existential topics. Imagine a design review along-

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side one for a restaurant — the first all angst and anxiety about context,
meaning and interpretation, the second a mouth-wateringly evocative
description of aroma, colour, texture, taste: sheer artistry with the
bain marie and the pastry knife. Why should we designers have to draw
the short straw?

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Ice skating
7 January 1998

ian:

I would read, with great interest, any literature about where or how
Shakespear, Rodin, (or contemporaries like Burroughs or Brody), got the
inspiration to do what they did. And not vague notions of ‘the world,
man’. Perhaps that would give us the didactic tools to deconstruct the
real meaning behind their work. Perhaps if we became more e‹ective
in communicating the reasons for our designs, others would have the
tools to criticise our design. I know of few professions that remain so
aloof and insular in the creation of initial processes.

A couple of things…

Firstly, I’m not sure knowing the ‘where’ or ‘how’ is really the clue
you’re looking for. Many stories of ‘inspiration’ show it to be triggered
by the most mundane things. Without getting too theoretical, I think
one has to factor in some of the ways the mind works — in this case, the
way that ideas can be ‘incubated’ below the level of consciousness. In
my experience, being ‘inspired’ by something o·en has little to do with
that thing itself, except in so much as it catalyses the coming together
of an assortment of pre-conscious ideas. As in chemistry — where the
catalyst only serves to initiate a process — so, I think, in ‘art’.

Also, it’s worth bearing in mind that ‘genius’ isn’t simply the product
of what the brain is ‘programmed with’ (to use an awful mecanomor-
phic analogy). Shakespeare and Rodin shared a similar educational
and cultural background with many of their peers, but it’s what they
did with it that counts. As Wilde so aptly said: ‘two men looked our
through prison bars…’ Cultivating inspiration is a skill, not a content-
driven thing. Describe to me how to ice-skate, and I’ll tell you how I
design! Which is to say that like most skills, being able to do it and
being able to articulate it verbally are quite di‹erent things — and that

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even when it’s possible to do the latter, the results are about as useful
as trying to teach yourself to balance on the rink by learning the phys-
ics of equilibrium.

Which leads on to my second point. Somehow we’ve got into a situa-


tion where, in order for something to be credible, it has to be possible
to ‘explain’ it. So ubiquitous is this point of view that everybody seems
to expect us to communicate what we do in terms they can under-
stand. What this demand fails to recognize, however, is the fact — now
supported by a mountain of evidence from the brain sciences — that
the verbal/analytical capacity is an extremely limited one. And, per-
haps more than anywhere else, it shows its limitations when it comes
to ‘talking’ about certain kinds of ‘doing’. Just because something is
believed, and demanded, doesn’t make it either possible or plausible.
Try humming the smell of cheese…

Which is not to say that there’s anything necessarily complicated or


esoteric about what goes on in our heads when design ideas start to
come together — just as those who can skate tell me ‘it’s simple — you
just step onto the ice and o‹ you go!’. What I find very interesting about
this, though, is that there is now a body of research which shows that
teaching a beginner ‘theory’ about a skill like ice-skating can make it
significantly more di›cult for them to learn it. It’s not just that find-
ing a way to explain it is di›cult, but that taking the explanation and
trying to use it actually impedes the activity itself.

So I’m not sure I agree with your conclusion that if we could better
communicate what we do others would have the tools to criticise it. The
tools a critic uses are generally not those the practitioner uses — which
is why we have a tradition of ‘lay’ criticism. I can watch Torville and
Dean and admire their e‹ortless grace on the ice, without being able
to put one foot in front of the other on the rink. And it’s precisely
because it is possible for people to appreciate — and make judgments
about — a whole range of activities (including Design) without the ben-
efit of a comprehensive explanation of how they’re done, that any of us
have jobs in the first place.

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Deference
9 January 1998

michael:

We may be able to work our way laboriously backwards from the aes-
thetic properties of their style to their makers’ purpose, but I doubt that
we would ever reach the point of fully understanding the tattoo, or the
masks, etc. based on aesthetics alone.

Whilst on one level I agree with you, I do wonder why — of all cultures
and epochs — we have been saddled with having to mix our aesthetics
with anthropology and political correctness. The Victorians could col-
lect Japanese prints or African masks without ever having to ask them-
selves what their makers’ purpose was — and we can see how this
eclecticism revitalised their art. And almost every other culture has
unselfconsiously appropriated artefacts from outside itself and applied
its own systems of judgment to them. We, on the other hand, have to be
excruciatingly deferential and circumspect in what we say about cul-
tures other than our own — showing that we understand and respect
their world-view. So deferential and respectful, indeed, that when
anyone takes them up as influences — and the paradigm case must be
Paul Simon with Graceland — everyone shouts ‘exploitation!’

I think one can be overly precious about all this anthropology. Whilst
the Maori tattoo undoubtedly had significances within that society,
so one could argue Mickey Mouse or Ronald McDonald does in ours
(look at the e‹ort that is spent preserving the integrity of those icons!).
Would we want our remote descendents to put them on a pedestal — to
mutter in hushed tones ‘you really have to understand the seminal role
of popular culture in twentieth century American life before you can
comment on the aesthetics of Duck Tales or the Big Mac’? Personally,
I’d rather that they just take the bits that appeal to them, and put the
rest in the recycler…

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We don’t need to know


12 January 1998

marc:

While I don’t just throw elements around on my layouts, I cannot hon-


estly say that I know why everything is where it is. I know when some-
thing is in the wrong place, or when the wrong font is used. What I need
is a way to verbalize my decisions.

I think it’s perfectly reasonable to know that something feels right but
not to know how one knows that. Paul McCartney woke up one morn-
ing a·er a dream where he’d been hearing this sequence of chords.
He didn’t know where they came from, but they nagged their way
into his waking consciousness. He started to play around with them
on the guitar and found he had a song. ‘Yesterday’ became his — and
the Beatles — biggest selling hit. Thank God George Martin didn’t say
to him ‘Well, actually Paul, I’m not going to accept this until you can
describe to me the rationale behind this song — what exactly were the
influences, how did you put it together, and why this is relevant to our
identified target market segments?’

This isn’t a justification for touchy-feely-trust-your-feelings wooly think-


ing — but a recognition (supported by cognitive science) that the brain
is o·en cleverer out of consciousness than it is withing it. And that
the verbal-analytical function, while important, doesn’t run the show.
I seem to remember Alan Watts (in The Way of Zen? — I don’t remember,
it’s a long time since I read it) talking about the extraordinary aes-
thetic sensitivity of a Japanese Teamaster. His acuity concerning where
exactly to place an object (was it a scroll?) was extraordinarily highly
developed. Watts had the good manners — and the good sense — not to
ask him to explain how he did it.

Having said all this, I am personally a great believer in the (now very
outmoded and unfashionable) notion that there are harmonic rela-

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tionships on the page as mathematically precise as the relationships of


musical tones. I’ve o·en found that when I’ve checked something I’ve
done that does feel ‘just right’ there is an underlying pattern of ratios
and proportions. But then, in a sense, these only correspond to the
chords in the McCartney example — the fourths, fi·hs, minor thirds
etc. As in music, it’s what one does with them that is important — and
which is, except in the silliest sense of post-rationalisation, dependent
on processes that are impossible to verbalize.

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Grids
12 January 1998

rodolfo:

And do this: use a grid. Make your ‘spiritually’ positioned elements


‘snap’ to it and you’ll feel safer about their location. Keep a gridded
print of your layout to produce when your clients are that fussy. It
will impress them as showing your ‘locational’ decisions have been con-
sciously thought up. (And this may partially compensate for a certain
lack of oral fluency many designers su‹er from.) And more, not only use
the grid, but establish the main alignment lines of the design (these need
not always coincide with the grid, but must be based on some regular
division of it).

I used to be a big fan of grids, but recently I find that I’m working more
and more without them. Obviously there are certain elements of con-
sistency that I still use — the measures of text columns, for instance
(although I’ll sometimes cheat even these for aesthetic reasons), or the
locations of standard hanging lines. But I’m no longer convinced that
the underlying structure is that apparent (or important), especially
when one uses complex grids with a number of di‹erent alignment
points. And I find where there is fluidity in a document (and my docu-
ments seem to be becoming more and more fluid!), the grid constrains
me to putting something somewhere where I don’t really want it to be,
or sizing something to a size that doesn’t feel right.

Many years ago I read Russell Page’s wonderful Education of a Gardener


(Page was one of our leading garden designers, but had started out as a
painter). In it, he describes the ideal garden as a series of rooms, each
giving rise to new and unexpected vistas. Over the years, I suppose I’ve
come around to thinking that a document (and perhaps especially
a web site) should also be like this. Most printed documents unfold
as a series of spreads, and what gives them pace and interest is the

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interplay between consistency and di‹erence. However, consistency


needn’t mean always having the same thing at the same size in the
same place (gridded consistency, as it were) but can be a playful reinter-
pretation — a kind of visual fugue, where the boundaries of sameness
and di‹erence are explored. This isn’t the anarchy of ‘deconstruction’,
but a way in which otherwise static elements can be intelligently artic-
ulated. The concept of the grid seems to suggest that the underlying
structure has more inherent merit than what sits on top of it (more
than a hint of modernist dogma here). I’ll spare you all a dissertation
on the di‹erence between the modernist approach of ‘unity in multi-
plicity’ versus the romantic ‘multiplicity in unity’, but point out that
there is a connection between the view that sees the page as something
that has its own logic and necessity and the romantic view of ‘mor-
phology’, where the parts are organically related to the whole.

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One’s own style


13 January 1998

john:

Should a graphic designer have a style? I subscribe to Bob Gill’s state-


ment that if any two of your pieces look like the same person did them,
then you’re doing it wrong. Even though I don’t measure up to the chal-
lenge, myself, I still think it’s the right philosophy…

The history of design suggests to me that one has to give the designer
her/his due. Paul Rand’s work was inescapably Paul Rand, but did IBM
or Westinghouse su‹er because of it? Likewise Alan Fletcher, Milton
Glaser, Derek Birdsall and a host of others — pretty much every ‘name’
designer one can think of. No doubt most tried to follow a similar
approach to Gill’s — but in retrospect, who were they kidding? A third
year student could probably sort their work into the respective piles…

Really we’re back to this thorny issue of the ‘professionalism’ of graphic


design. What does it mean to give your clients value — is it a case of
subduing one’s own personal style in favour of some putative personal-
ity of the client? But if it is, what exactly do they gain from it? ‘This is
more you, because it is less me…’? Or is it more a case of — as I would
suggest — ‘I’m good for you: you’re good for me’? A·er all, it’s accepted
that chief executives can stamp their personalities on organizations.
Why not designers?

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The reason why


13 January 1998

gunnar:

One could then postulate a designer who does not think except ‘with
her hands’ and creates designed solutions to problems. She then has to
switch gears to ask herself whether the solutions do, indeed, solve the
problems or whether something else might have done it better. If there
is any negative answer to the former or positive answer to the latter
she could then return to subconscious problem solving and continue
this cycle until she thought she had it nailed. At that point her analysis
becomes an important part of explaining the design to others. Thus the
question is not ‘Why did I do this?’ but rather ‘Why is this this way?’

Not all the things we do are the result of mysterious processes at the
back of consciousness — but a great many of them are equally futile to
talk about. ‘Why have you put this text in three columns instead of
two?’ ‘Why are the folios half way up the page instead of at the bottom’
‘Why are the headings all picked out in green’ ‘Why have you made
the pictures so small?’ If one gets a client who has never emerged from
the three-year old’s ‘why this, why that?’ stage — and they do exist — one
usually ends up with either a sore tongue (from too much biting) or,
God forbid, a suitably chastened client (probably an ex- one, to boot).

Being a designer involves making decisions. Like Michelangelo faced


with a block of Carrara marble, something has to go. It can’t be both
two columns and three, folios at the foot and the side, headings simul-
taneously in green, black, blue, pics duplicated big and small. Relatively
few of these decisions — at least, as far as I’m concerned — have any par-
ticular rationale. Just as the answer to the small child who demands
‘why is the moon?’ usually turns out to be ‘because it is!’, so the answer
to the client who wants to know why you’ve made particular design
decisions can either be a brazen lie (‘because we’ve found that text in

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three columns results in 25% more customers responding to the call-


to-action at the bottom of the page’) or the more truthful ‘because
that’s how I’ve decided to interpret it’. Mostly these things are based
on a subjective decision about what works best, in turn based on an
overall vision of how one thinks the thing needs to look. Do we have
to be afraid of this? Do we have to pretend there’s more to it, so that
clients can feel satisfied and academics can write PhD theses? I don’t
see why. Is it really the client who is unsatisfied with all this (it seems
to me that most accept the principle that ‘if I had a better idea, I’d do
it myself’ — and seem happy to defer to someone whose judgment they
trust)? Or is it just a little bit of vanity on our part, a little bit of ‘the
grass is greener’ in the consultant’s patch, where there are all sorts of
clever and complicated sounding reasons why decisions get made?

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Identity and iconography


16 January 1998

david:

This leads me to a logo question I’d like to pose to the list: what are the
strengths/weaknesses in a logo where there is a close connection between
the images in the logo and the group/thing/whatever the logo repre-
sents, but this connection will not be recognized by most people? Now the
image of the patronness of music looking upward in musical rapture at
the initials of a choral group is full of significance, but most people will
not realise this.

Where to start?

There is a huge strength in a logo ‘where there is a close connection


between the images in the logo and the group/thing/whatever the logo
represents’. Identity is rooted in the most fundamental, ancient desire
to identify and to belong — and is at its best when it recognizes that.
When it really works, it provides an outward, visual focus for those
desires.

The big question, however, is who is included and who is excluded


from that identification. With many organizations, inclusion is an
important issue — an identity should bring in all the stakeholders
(investors, employees, customers, suppliers and partners, local com-
munities etc.). And this is one of the key distinctions between identity
and brand — brand making its appeal to customers and prospective cus-
tomers without any dimension of ‘belonging’.

Obviously an issue with identity is that the wider you throw the net,
the more chance there is that some groups won’t ‘get’ the message — so
usually what happens is that the more people it has to reach, the more
dilute and anodyne the imagery is. Needless to say, such an approach
really works for nobody — there’s not enough substance there for the
real ‘insiders’, and still perhaps too much for the real ‘outsiders’.

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With a group such as the choral music group, I would guess that the
key stakeholders are much more cohesive than with a commercial
organization. Even people like backers, management and others will
likely be enthusiasts for the subject — if not cognoscienti. I would also
guess that audiences for this kind of music don’t just dri· in o‹ the
street, either, so that at the ‘customer’ end of the equation people
will actually appreciate an approach that treats them as being more
‘insider’ than perhaps they really are.

So, what I’m saying probably amounts to a green light for the Saint
Cecilia route — and a suggestion that you don’t worry about those who
won’t ‘get’ it (it was probably never intended for them anyway). One
final pointer, however — and that is that I would consider a treatment
that brings out the symbolic, archetypal ‘richness’ of the subject in
the treatment, rather than a straightforward depiction. Unless the
group you’re working with have a particular religious focus, the image
will not have the pulling power that it might for those brought up in
Catholicism. Therefore, it needs to appeal at a more universal level.
One thing that one frequently finds with the representation of saints
is that many of them have specific attributes or accoutrements that
are a legacy — or a continuation — of an older, pagan symbology. A good
example here is the pecten shell, which is an emblem of Saint James of
Compostella — but which is the traditional accoutrement of Aphrodite/
Venus (witness Botticelli’s and Titian’s depictions). Wol‹ Olins played
on this dimension (with greater or lesser degrees of success, accord-
ing to your point of view) in their famous ‘Prudential’ logo — with the
figure of Prudence (as a rather nondescript eighties ‘new woman’)
shown with her traditional mirror and earings made from live snakes
[unfortunately nobody ever gets this, unless they are told]. So, consider
the traditional iconography of Saint Cecilia and maybe see if there are
particular resonances that you can bring out for the group — things
that reach out from beyond the veil of sanctity into the secularity of
modern life.

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Typefaces
20 January 1998

Lindsay:

Stating the obvious, the choice for a detective novel may not be appropri-
ate for a math textbook, or suit a newspaper or magazine announce-
ment soliciting donations for a cancer hospice, or a report to the CEO
analysing the accounts of a subsidiary company, a technical engineer-
ing report to a municipal utility, or scripts for the performing arts.

But equally, it may. I reviewed the types I’d pro‹ered in response to


Michael’s question and I could see no reason why any of them couldn’t
be used for all of the above.

In fact, if you turn the statement around, you end up with a series of
fairly bewildering questions. What typeface is appropriate to a detec-
tive novel, but not to the magazine announcement or the report to
the CEO? Have I missed a Chandler Roman or a Gumshoe Sans lurking
about out there? What does a script for the performing arts need in the
way of legibility, e›ciency and character that couldn’t equally benefit
a technical engineering report to a municipal utility?

We like to think of type having certain attributes — witness the (abor-


tive) attempt at classification on this list a few months ago. But actu-
ally those attributes are fairly flimsy. And a good designer can overturn
them fairly easily — I’ve seen work of great delicacy and beauty set in
Helvetica, powerfully impactive communications in Centaur and very
contemporary stu‹ done in Bell (the neo-classical type: not the ‘gothic’
or ‘centennial’ versions!).

Ruari McLean states somewhere that when he started working as a


typographer, he only used Caslon — and found this experience invalu-
able for discovering what type could do. In a sense, this relates to Phil
Baines’ quote about ‘British designers doing novel things with ordi-
nary types and American designers doing ordinary things with novel

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types’. Ignoring the (good natured) jibe at our transatlantic cousins,


the point he is making is about the di‹erence between an approach
to design in which use and context are more important than the type-
face (characterised as ‘British’) and an approach where the choice
of type takes precedence (characterised as ‘American’). The latter
approach is the lazier, because it slipstreams the design behind asso-
ciations created by the type. It’s also inherently the more dangerous
approach — because di‹erent people may have di‹erent associations.
As the South African who commented on some work we’d done for
Royal Mail (set in their Stempel Garamond) said: ‘Man, I just hate that
type! It’s what the military used, and says call-up to me.’

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Hopkins
20 January 1998

michael:

Why do some folks think Sabon is better for a book and others Galliard?
Is it really a case of acquiescing to the ‘lazier’ way that things have
always been done? Or is there just a bit of the proper realization by
the designer that one face evokes responses regardless of how adroitly
you have use the face to go against the expectations? Would you set
the display type in an ad about child abuse services in Broadway or
Klingspor? I kinda doubt it, not because you probably couldn’t pull it o‹,
but because you couldn’t control all those ‘lazy’ responses that the read-
ing public would impose without regard for what you constructed.

[…]
It reminds me of why Hopkins’s sprung rhythm is something few poets
have been able to master — if they tried.

Lázinéss, is it beliéving
That fonts théy should be deceiving?
Typés, made to impress us, true
to their fair outlines always do
confórm. But is your layóut not bólder
Than the contents of systém fólder?
Does not this block of type belie
mere convéntions, that to this eye
a flóck of laziér thoughts imply?
Now no matter, spooled, the name:
Yésterday’s fonts are all the same!
Nor use made, no, nor shape distressed
but that a typographic sin’s confessed.
Is this the job these glyphs were drawn for?
Or is it intégríty I yearn for?

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Letter to the Editor, Design Week


23 January 1998

Dear Ms Relph-Knight

In his piece ‘A visit to the body shop’ (DW 23 January) Michael Evamy
writes: ‘But, who knows, in 20 or 30 years’ time the term “identity con-
sultant” might be taken over by someone who helps clients develop
their personal identity: designing not new logos but new faces.’ I real-
ize he’s being flippant, but it’s not his humour I have a problem with.
Rather, it’s the way he perpetuates the misapprehension that identity
consultancy is in some way a kind of ‘corporate facelift’.

Visual identity is a very simple proposition, so it is surprising that it is so


frequently misrepresented in this way. Baldly stated, it consists in find-
ing ways to represent emblematically the character — the ‘ethos’, in the
original sense of that word — of an organization. The result is a ‘signa-
ture’ that should both feel appropriate and — significantly — exercise a
beneficial influence over those it represents.

How is this similar to cosmetic surgery? The straightforward answer


is that it is not. Cosmetic surgeons may do wonders for their patients’
morale, but hardly help them to discover themselves. Visual identity,
on the other hand, can be literally healing — coming from a millennia
old tradition of using symbols to bring people together and make them
whole. If one has to make an analogy with one-on-one therapeutic
practice, it would have to be with the Jungian therapist helping her
client towards ‘individuation’ by grasping the significance of the arche-
types as they manifest in his life. Certainly, in my work, I have always
found that much more was achieved through listening to the client on
the couch than by putting them under the knife.

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Paul Rand
2 February 1998

nancy:

He deserves our praise for at least trying to make sense of what we do,
and for trying to link design to the chain of history, but I’m not sure he
fully succeeded. His logic, historicism, and prose were not quite up to the
task, and why should we expect them to have been? Consider not only a
designer’s typical education — noteworthy for its thinness in the liberal
arts and hard sciences — but also the visual, global-perceptual, intuitive
nature of design intelligence. I don’t think we will have a competent
or rigorous literature of design until someone who does have a verbal,
linear, logical intelligence decides to take on design as a liberal study. At
the moment, no one much cares but ourselves.
I agree that Rand’s books read better as poetic musings on the subject
of design than as ‘a competent or rigorous literature of design’. It
might have been much better had he recognized this — it would have
certainly spared him some of the harsher criticism of a younger gen-
eration of designers, impatient with his pontification. But I suppose it
is important for all of us to believe that we are not only in the middle of
the geographical universe but the conceptual universe as well.

I’ve wondered long and hard as to whether we really need a rigorous


literature of design. There’s certainly no shortage of people wanting
to do it for us — failed PoMo literary critics, obscure Marxist historians/
sociologists, ambitious journalists etc. But do their e‹orts tell us any-
thing about ourselves, or do they tell us about the kind of design they
would like us to practice?

If one takes a subject like design history, you can study it with all the
vogue academic tools — but does it reveal what it was really like to be
in William Morris’ or Alexey Brodovitch’s skin? A couple of years ago
I argued provocatively at the Design History Conference (taking a of

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flak in the process!) that designers need to be encouraged to make an


imaginative connection to history. Analysing the history of design
with that ‘verbal, linear’ logical’ intelligence might make great mate-
rial for a post grad liberal arts student, but does it help anyone to
be a better designer? On the other hand making a personal, intuitive
connection with the past can be a powerful stimulus to creativity. I
later discovered that Robert Graves used just such a technique of imag-
inative reconstruction — which he called analepsis — while writing his
famous novels. When Malcolm Muggeridge interviewed him on British
TV in the sixties, he asked how he knew about a certain event recorded
in I Claudius. Graves replied ‘because I was there!’

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Problem employee
3 February 1998

webmaster:

He will work fine for about 2–3 hours, producing work far exceeding
the expectations of the clients. His projects are on time, and he always
produces quality work. He has been told repeated times not to engage
in these games during working hours or on company machines and has
been wrote up at least twice involving this. Now what I find interesting
is the sort of divided nature of this situation. On one side he is a superior
employee who preforms far above the expected norm. But on the other
side, he has engaged repeated times in an activity that both goes against
company policy and his employer’s orders.

Creative pursuits can’t be organized on a production-line basis. Many


days I hang about, a cup of tea in hand, looking out onto the hill, listen-
ing to music. I take calls, chat to the others, pick up a magazine, fire o‹
a couple of letters, clean up my desktop, check my mail. Then at 9 p.m. I
may come back into the studio and do two or three hours of sustained,
productive work. Don’t think that nothing happens in the rest of that
time, though — for years I thought that, and felt guilty about it. Then I
discovered that the quality of the short bursts of work depended upon
the steady percolation of ideas that goes on in those ‘idle’ moments.

Your friend is trying to run a creative business along sound manage-


ment principles, which is both noble and totally misguided. He’s happy
with this guy, but he thinks he shouldn’t be because — although he
delivers great work, on time (and presumably to budget and brief) — he
doesn’t fit his model of how a business ought to be run. Tell him to
forget this — to create a culture that encourages excellence, but also
allows for the idiosyncracies that creative people have. We’re compli-
cated people — we’ve got mutant genes (an extraordinary number of
creatives have schizophrenics in their immediate family groups) or

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else we were damaged in childhood — which is how we get to see things


from a di‹erent perspective to the norm. So we need to be treated
carefully and di‹erently (but not necessarily as ‘precious flowers’ or
primadonnas!). So my recommendation is that your friend flush the
company rule book down the john, realize that circumstances alter
cases, and make sure he gets in a steady supply of great games to keep
his employee motivated.

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Mensch
3 February 1998

kc:

…the real problem I see is an employee who apparently ignores direct


instructions from his superiors. Whatever the reason, that makes for a
di›cult working relationship. If it is a personality characteristic rather
than his necessary work style, then giving him latitude here will only
cause him to challenge you somewhere else, because what he could really
want is to be at odds with authority. An employee who gets his work done
and plays video games doesn’t bother me. An employee who needs to be
in trouble wouldn’t be worth it no matter how talented they are. But I
like a peaceful life.

If his attitude is really a problem, then it is a problem — and a royal


pain in the butt (but I didn’t get this from ‘Webmaster’s’ post). Still,
foibles are part of the package that all human beings bring to the work-
place. So it’s more of a question of how much the good work makes up
for the bad attitude. We’d all like to employ perfect sta‹, but they prob-
ably wouldn’t want to work for flawed employers.

There’s also the question of whether the boss wants to help this
employee get over the problem, or whether he just wants it to go away.
I’m reminded of A.S. Neill — the radical headmaster of the revolution-
ary school Summerhill — who was faced with a young boy who kept
smashing windows. One day, he took the boy outside and proceeded to
take him around the school smashing the windows himself. The boy
never did it again… But that kind of solution requires a boss who is, in
that lovely Yiddish term, a ‘Mensch’.

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Rhyme
4 February 1998

gunnar:

One of the appeals of rhyme is that it makes connections that are not
obvious and mundane. The real magic happens when those connections
are combined with other kinds of connections and a synergy of meaning
and feeling results. One of the reasons bad rhyme is so irritating is that it
makes a promise of new meaning and fails to deliver on it. (Lenny Bruce
delicately called the phenomenon ‘Getting it up without getting it o‹’.)

Beautifully put!

There’s also an aspect of rhyme that is sheer playfulness, which one


shouldn’t discount either. Doggerel can be enjoyable, if not particu-
larly meaningful — and it harps back to the pleasure children take in
babbling word-play. There’s a great deal of graphic design (junk mail,
for instance) that will never be poetry. Wouldn’t it be better if this stu‹
just allowed itself to be good natured visual banter, instead of harbour-
ing higher pretensions? Why does it always have to be so dispiritingly
earnest in a down-market kind of way — like the neighbour who has
converted to Amway?

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Curriculum vitæ
4 February 1998

barbara:

I was wondering if a few of you could give me your 2 cents worth for a
question I have? I did a resume for my son who lives in the eastern states
(I’m in the central) he is just out of college not too long and works in thea-
tre design. Everyone he works with likes his resume and wants to know
how much I would charge to do their resume. In May I hope to have my
BFA in Graphic Design. I don’t have a clue as to prices for this and I want
charge the usual and customary charges. Do you charge a one time fee or
do you charge a fee with changes extra, do you set a limit on changes and
corrections (spelling, additions, changing a line to another place etc.)
What is the going rate?
Most people who want a CV are usually looking for a new job. Very o·en,
they also have an idea of how much they think they are worth — what
kind of salary they are looking for. Simply, the value of the CV should
be commensurate with that salary expectation.

CVs are key personal marketing tools — they probably do far more for
an individual than a corporate brochure does for an organization (pro-
portionately, that is). If you are looking to be the next CEO of Boeing,
or GEC or Apple, this document could clinch you a job worth literally
millions (plus share options, golden handshakes/parachutes and all
the other trappings of corporate life). Is it then reasonable to expect
it to cost less than that flashy Rolex Oyster you flout ostentatiously
at the interview? But if you’re looking to be the next washer-up at
Joe’s Diner — and want to parade your unhappy succession of previous
McJobs — $5 might seem on the steep side.

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Education
5 February 1998

brian:

Art schools everywhere have someone who utters this warning or dis-
claimer and reassures everyone they have not entered a trade school.
That’s the problem. If you go into engineering, medicine,or law the
schools don’t say you’re making a big mistake. I know a kid who majored
in European History, got a job trading German stocks and within 4 years
makes over 200K a year. Some people grow up and cure cancer, send
rockets to the moon, create Disneyworld or become Bill Gates. Maybe art
schools should be more aggressive about defining the fundamentals that
will let students grow into a life long career other than the few ‘artists’
who will become famous.
Don’t forget, though, that there are other people who go to College
and then go on to do something equally fulfilling, but not necessarily
remunerative, like raising a family. Education isn’t there to make
people financial success stories — that’s an incidental by-product. It’s
there to make them bigger people — with wider intellectual horizons,
more appreciation of the world around them, better understanding of
their own capabilities, and possessed of a conceptual framework that
can give meaning and coherence to their future professional activities.
To some, that’s extremely valuable — to others it may prove invaluable.

It is lamentable that some noble disciplines are now seen in a narrow


return-on-investment way: medicine, for instance, or the law. To be
brutally honest, it has done nothing for them — except give us aber-
rations like defensive medicine (protecting the physician’s revenue
stream) and ambulance chasing (marketing for overpopulated law-
yers). The aspect of ‘Humanity’ is fast receding. One of the strengths
of design is that one still does have to be dedicated and truly love the
subject — almost any other calling will earn you more money.

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Comrades
10 February 1998

gunnar:

The reason that academia is not, despite the closing and illiberal books’
claims to the contrary, a monolith is that smart people poke holes in
each others’ work with the intent of discovering what works and what
doesn’t. Strangely, I’m in a discussion on another list where I’m argu-
ing against language that demonizes capitalism unfairly. I also object
to demonizing marxism unfairly. I’m suspicious of any argument that
essentially says ‘This is all commie crap; ignore it’.

I’m all in favour of a diversity of views and voices. Sadly, the ideologues
who had a stranglehold on British cultural studies departments in the
late seventies and eighties didn’t share this view. But they did believe
that people would make judgments about ‘commie crap’ if it was not
presented by stealth — a couple of friends went through three terms
of such indoctrination before they realized they were actually being
taught good, old-fashioned ‘dialectical materialism’.

Maybe it’s hard from a North American perspective to realize quite how
pervasive — and, indeed, how stifling — the influence of the le· was in
European intellectual life. Long a·er 1957 — the Hungarian uprising,
when many people le· the ‘o›cial’ (Stalinist) Communist Party, the
Marxist mafia dominated much of British academia — in some places
and disciplines more than others. Even knowing this, I was shocked
reading the second volume of Doris Lessing’s autobiography, where she
charts her years in the le·-wing London intelligensia. Again and again,
one is hauled short by striking revelations — ‘My God, so-and-so was a
party member — I had no idea!’ One missing piece in the design his-
tory jigsaw puzzle is the extent to which post-war British Modernism
was constructed by people owing their allegiances — not always hap-
pily — to King Street (headquarters of the British Communist Party).

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Success
10 February 1998

gunnar:

James, I’m quite mystified by your recent posts that seem to indicate that
all graphic design can best be judged by profit and loss statements. If
this were true the ethical thing for you to do would be to write Nancy
apologizing for trying to take Critique’s money and suggesting that
they hire an accounting firm to supply all of their future articles.

It’s not quite as mystifying as it seems. The principle I adhere to — and


which still seems valid to me — is that when an activity has an eco-
nomic aspect, that aspect must be taken into account (along with the
others) in judging its success or failure. And probably also weighted
against the other factors, too, according to how important an aspect of
that activity it is. There’s no implication that the balance sheet should
be the sole criterion of success — a view I hold to be barbarous — but nor
should it be ignored.

Like many others here, I do graphic design for a living. No matter how
much I love the subject, this is still my primary motivation — if I can’t
pay my mortgage, feed and clothe the kids or keep coal in the grate, I’ll
have to do something else. And my clients — some of whom are urbane,
civilized people who certainly don’t believe that all there is to graphic
design is ‘bang for buck’ — buy my services because they are looking
for business advantage for their organizations. They might like to com-
mission work just for the sheer pleasure of it, but their primary moti-
vation is to carry out the requirements of the jobs they were appointed
to. So in my life graphic design is closely related — in the most basic
and fundamental way imaginable — to my own and my clients finan-
cial success or failure, and their consequences.

But why do I feel like I’m apologising for this? Graphic design is one
hell of a way to make a livelihood — it’s hard to imagine a more chal-

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lenging, satisfying, stimulating, and fascinating occupation. There’s a


real buzz to producing a great piece of work. Likewise winning a great
piece of business. One continuum, two ends.

So if we’re going to talk about success, we must be talking about some-


thing that takes into account all the various aspects that make up
graphic design. Work that pushes the envelope of the discipline — if
that’s what is called for. Work that delivers a better-than-could-be-
expected result for those who commissioned it. Work that has its read-
ers — whoever they are — thinking ‘Wow! that’s really great’. But work
that also has your accountant saying ‘you must be doing something
right!’. All of that.

Now let’s transpose these criteria to Kenneth’s assertion that David


Carson is ‘the biggest success of the decade’. It seems to me that the
most successful graphic designer of the decade must be a person who
has made a significant contribution to graphic design, who has ecstatic
clients, has reached a sizable proportion of the population, and is
making substantial amounts of money. Someone whose achievements
are clearly greater than the next nearest contestor. Now I don’t know
why anyone would want to discover who this is — nor how exactly they
would quantify some of these things (except, of course, the balance
sheet). But what I do know is that, by these measures, that person is
unlikely to be David Carson.

Which is not to disparage his achievements, such as they are.

I also believe that if we put together a list of the best paid graphic design-
ers and/or most profitable design firms we’d spend a lot of time asking
‘Who the hell are these people?’
Don’t you think you’re being a little unfair? We live in a world where
there is graphic communication wherever we turn our heads — from
street signs to posters to letters and bills to packaging to books to tel-
evision to computer interfaces. What would you say to someone who
walked obliviously past all of these things, until he spotted the latest
Emigre on the news stand and declared ‘Graphic Design at last!’

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Style
27 February 1998

colin’s quote from emigre:

What once upset the staus quo have become run-of-the-mill solutions.
One bankruptcy replaces the next. The number of books beign published
on ‘cutting edge design’ is evidence of the complete exhaustion of what
initially looked like an honest-to-goodness savior of graphic design.

My initial reaction to the writer of this piece is ‘well, what did you
expect?’ Perhaps this is where a modicum of design history comes
in useful — knowing how the status quo always eventually integrates
styles that initially existed in opposition to it. Why fight it? Looked at
in another way, this is just another example of the marvellous evolu-
tionary ‘adaptability’ of human societies.
I do wonder, though, whether ‘style’ is ever really radical. Ideas can be
radical — certainly — as Oscar Wilde recognized when he said that ‘an
idea that isn’t dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all’. But
style? How can the adoption of distressed or vernacular type as a gener-
alized kind of statement be considered an ‘idea’ — or, for that matter,
pose any real danger to anyone or anything? My own impression of this
nineties movement in design is that it has been ‘intellect on idle’ — and
I’d really have to be convinced otherwise.

This, I think, goes to the heart of my objections to post-modernism.


Take the politics — the ‘struggle of the oppressed proletariat against
the hegemony of bourgeois culture’ — out of Barthes et al. and what
have you got? Some ideas about ‘deconstructing the power relations in
the narrative’ without any real reason for doing it. No wonder commer-
cial culture — advertising and marketing — has latched on to this stu‹
so readily. It is the ‘chic’ part of ‘radical chic’, without having anything
le· in it that is in any way radical.

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Arrogance
27 February 1998

greg:

This is probably the most exciting and important time to be a designer


in the 20th century. Has Emigre forgotten about the Internet and other
interactive technologies? The Internet is changing the was people com-
municate. I really don’t think people that read this list can disagree.

I suppose that depends on what really turns you on about design. Sure,
there are technological challenges aplenty — and the new dimensions
(time, sound, interaction) are, in their own way, exciting.

I’m not sure that any of this is changing the way people communi-
cate, though. Once one understands how people — biological entities
with this magical gi· of language — do communicate, one sees that
they communicate in largely similar ways whatever the medium. The
thing that gets me going, however, is what they communicate. Is this
an ‘exciting and important time’ in terms of the messages and ideas
they are communicating? For me, that’s the real question.

There is also a sense in which the designer is becoming a kind of vil-


lain, too — which worries me greatly. This is abetted by statements like
Katherine McCoy’s ‘Graphic designers have become dissatisfied with
the obedient delivery of the client’s message.’ and Bridget Wilkins’
(infamous) ‘Legible is easy to read. If it is easy to read it bypasses the
visual potential of the message. People prefer the comfort of legibil-
ity’. This idea that the ‘designer knows best’ is fomenting considerable
resentment — especially when it is patently obvious that many design-
ers have neither the culture or erudition to really act as ‘interpreter’
for the texts they work with — and sooner or later it will no doubt result
in a backlash. I’ve actually heard ‘webmasters’ saying publicly ‘we don’t
want to let this medium fall into the hands of designers’ — an opinion I
found sobering, to say the least.

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Pectens
6 March 1998

John:

What do you consider to be the best books, etc. on principles and philoso-
phies of logo design?

In my opinion there’s only key book: Carl Jung’s compilation Man and
his Symbols. I was put onto Jung by my former boss, Wally Olins, and I
have to say that I don’t believe anyone should be designing logos with-
out having read him (or at least being familiar with his distinction
between symbols and signs).

Per Mollerup’s book Marks of Excellence is an example of what happens


when one doesn’t take this (mythological: poetic: archetypal) perspec-
tive. Mollerup uses a bizarre taxonomy which looks to be based on
Pierce’s Semiology — and is to my mind the designer’s equivalent of
sticking pins through cyanide-extinguished butterflies.

As an example of the shallowness of his approach, Mollerup consider


the Shell ‘Pecten’ to be an example of a totally arbitrary — I can’t
remember his exact word, is it ‘accidental’? — mark.

I did a presentation to Shell recently, where I traced the roots of the


pecten from its traditional association with the goddess Aphrodite
(Venus, Eurynome) through to its use by Shell today — in an unbroken
chain. I think it makes an interesting case study about the persistent
power of symbols.

As a visual example of this continuity, I showed them Botticelli’s Birth


of Venus — with the goddess rising out of the sea on the pecten — a paint-
ing which Robert Graves describes in The White Goddess as ‘an exact icon
of her cult’ (a phrase I made damned sure I had word perfect before
I said it!). Pectens are an intriguing motif in Renaissance painting:
Raphael depicts his Galatea riding on one, pulled by porpoises, whilst

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Piero della Francesca incorporates one as part of the ceiling behind


the virgin in the Montefeltro Altarpiece (an enigmatic and important
association — as I was to discover). For those who don’t know the story,
Aphrodite was supposedly born as a result of Cronos castrating Uranus
and throwing his genitals into the sea — which then created a foam
(Aphrodite means ‘foam born’), out of which the goddess was formed
and delivered up in a pecten shell.

Apparently the worship of Aphrodite/Venus persisted into Christian


times, transferred onto a quasi-historical figure called ‘Mary Gypsy’ or
‘Mary the Egyptian’. This was repressed in Christian Eurpope but per-
sisted under the tolerance of Islam — profoundly influencing the cru-
saders when they came into contact with it in the Near East. This Mary
retained the traditional accoutrements of Venus: the palm, myrtle
and pecten/comb — her name also echoed Aphrodite/Venus’ association
with the sea.

The worship of ‘Mary Gypsy’ (which is, amongst other things, intri-
cately tied up with the Robin Hood legends) was brought to England
from the Levant, via Compostella in Spain, by pilgrims who became
known as Palmers (because they carried Aphrodite’s sacred palm,
as well as having pectens stitched to their hats — ‘cockle hats’, as
Ophelia calls them in Hamlet). The pecten thus became associated
with St James the great, through his supposed shrine at Santiago de
Compostella — and is still used as the visual indicator for the pilgrim-
age route.

In the mid nineteenth century, Marcus Samuel Jr ran a business in


the East End of London, importing exotic sea shells from the far
east — which became extremely popular due to the Victorian vogue for
shell decorated trinket boxes. He found that his business was further
enhanced by exporting kerosene oil to his contacts and agents — a busi-
ness that soon took o‹ a·er he visited Batum on the Black Sea in 1890,
and saw how the Russians were building a large-scale oil export busi-
ness. In 1897, he formed ‘The Shell Transport and Trading Company’.

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The pecten was adopted as a corporate symbol by Shell in 1904. It had


been suggested to Samuel by a Mr Graham, who was one of his ker-
osene importers in India, and who later became a Shell director.
Graham’s family had adopted the pecten as a coat of arms, a·er a
distant ancestor had made the pilgrimage to Santiago (and doubtless
adopted the Palmer creed). A·er Samuel’s ‘Shell Transport and Trading
Company’ formalized its relationship with Henri Deterding’s ‘Royal
Dutch Company for the Working of Petroleum Wells in the Dutch
Indies’ in 1907, the pecten became the symbol for the resulting ‘Royal
Dutch/Shell Group’.

Looked at in a mechanical, Mollerupian way, this story is simply a


jolly — but irrelevant — anecdote. Seen from a Jungian perspective, how-
ever, it takes on a quite di‹erent significance — and has powerful res-
onances for the company today (amongst other things, a modern
company, presided over by the emblem of a goddess). The lesson I draw
from it, however, is that symbols have a life of their own — and will reas-
sert their power whether we’re conscious of it or not (the pecten is as
ubiquitous and recognizable now as it was in classical times). That’s
the basis for all my corporate identity work, anyway.

Note: Since this message was written, I have acquired a lovely book called ‘The
Scallop’, published by Shell in 1957. It is a collection of essays on the subject of the
pecten, beginning with its biology and ending with ways to cook and serve it.
There is also an excellent investigation of the heraldic dimensions of the pecten,
a dissertation on its use in Pre-Colombian art, a piece on scallops in Renaissance
painting, and another on their role in early Christian iconography, as well as
a brilliant contribution by Sir Mortimer Wheeler about its symbolism in the
ancient world. Shell may have been an insu‹erably patronising and paternalis-
tic company in the ‘fi·ies but, compared to the narrow and reductive way it now
talks about its ‘brand’, it also had a much greater sense of respect and custodian-
ship for the symbol it had adopted.

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Manuals
6 March 1998

john:

Has anyone seen any good books on the creation of corporate i.d. stand-
ards manuals? I’ve seen quite a few books on logos, but none that discuss
a comprehensive usage strategy.

Without wanting to sound disrespectful, I think this is a bit like asking


for a good book on paste-up. I can’t remember the last time I worked on
a manual, but I think it must be at least six years ago — maybe more.

For all sorts of good reasons, multimedia is now the de facto medium
for communicating identity. For a while, it was Director (delivered on
cd), but intranet delivery is taking over — and here Flash seems to be
the way to go. We’ve handed over two Flash based identity communica-
tion systems in the last six months.

Identity Manuals were appropriate to a kind of organization that


is, increasingly, no longer with us. Hierarchical, centralized, prizing
conformity — an institution where the identity manager could wield
authority, and needed a big book to hit people over the head with. They
also assumed a climate in which a small group of (knowledgeable) com-
missioners worked with agencies and suppliers — before the ubiquitous
pc put professional publishing tools into every user’s hands, and made
identity implementation a universal agenda. Manuals seem quaint
now — all that Old Testament language (‘Thou shalt not…’) — belonging
to the ‘other country’ that is the past. There’s also a distinct whi‹ of
nostalgia about the idea that anyone ever believed it possible to final-
ize a corporate identity scheme, assuming that nothing significant
would change within its lifespan.

Identity in the nineties is about consensus and buy-in. Identity man-


agers have to work with empowered colleagues in increasingly decen-
tralized and autonomous business units, convincing them that the

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company-wide identity policy has both the flexibility to accommodate


their needs and the ability to deliver real business benefits. And it’s a
two-way thing now, too — requirements from the grass roots shaping
identity policy as much as anything decided in head o›ce.

This new kind of identity — for today’s organization — is communi-


cated in profoundly di‹erent ways. You can’t be prescriptive any more:
nobody buys it. And the chances are they will resent the attempt, too.
Nor can you expect that the big, expensive book does more than gather
dust — getting people to use identity means engaging their attention,
and trying to win their ‘hearts and minds’. That means leveraging
video, animation, voice over. It’s also necessary to anticipate constant
change — which is one of the attractions of using intranets (even the
telescoped 4–6 month publishing cycle for cd is too long to keep up
with the pace of change in some organizations). Such systems have
their own requirements — for modularity, for usability, for tone of
voice — which are radically di‹erent from the old manual.

If you find your good book, prize it. It’s a snapshot of a period in the
history of our business. But apply its precepts with the same wariness
you might bring to a sixteenth century book of medicine (most of them
will seem antiquated to modern managers, many will be wrong for the
contemporary organization — and some will even prove pernicious).

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Communicating identity
7 March 1998

john:

As quaint and antiquated as it may seem, my clients do want some


direction as to how they should use their logos, what colors are recom-
mended, how much space should exist around the logo, in which cases
they should use a certain version of their logo, what considerations
should be taken when applying the logo to signage (I could go on, but
you get the picture).

Still, the approach needs to be di‹erent if you are going to get people
to take notice. In the bad old days, it was enough to say ‘you must do
it this way!’ Must and should don’t go down too well these days — if you
want people to observe things like minimum areas, etc. you have to
explain why they are a good idea (and actually, you need to make sure
that they really are good ideas first). People need to come away from
the explanation feeling they have gained something — not having lost
some of their enthusiasm, autonomy or self-respect.

Sure, talk about ‘consensus’ and ‘buy-in.’ Does that mean that everyone
should do what’s right in their own eyes? True creativity is rarely fos-
tered in an environment with no boundaries. Real freedom exists when
we understand certain standards and are confident that anything we do
within a proscribed framework is acceptable.

It means that, in the contemporary corporation, people will do what’s


right in their own eyes. These people are charged with delivering
results — they also understand their markets, audiences and cultures.
If they think that the identity won’t work for them, they won’t use it.
period. We may not like it, but this is the reality of the climate in which
identity now has to work.

People can — and do — see the benefits of identitifying themselves with


something bigger, however. And there are ways in which company-

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wide identity schemes can be made to seem reasonable, even attrac-


tive propositions to users. Unfortunately, the monolithic identities of
the seventies and eighties stifled creativity — and there is a lot of work
to be done to overcome the feeling that identity is about head o›ce
‘knowing better’, reasserting its authority in an otherwise decentral-
ised and empowered organization.

In the end, management has largely twigged that there weren’t any
tangible benefits to be had from 100% visual homogeneity. Many com-
panies have flourished despite a range of visual interpretations of their
identity — whilst others (take IBM as an example) have floundered even
though they had the most anally retentive identity police.

My clients are smallish, I usually work directly with the ceo, and rarely
charge more than $5,000 for an identity program. Still, that’s a decent
chunk of change for most of my clients, and they want some advice about
using what they’ve paid for.

Some of the most challenging identity jobs are for smaller


companies — the issues that a‹ect multi-national corporations o·en
apply to sme’s in microcosm. I’ve worked for small professional firms
where some of the partners resisted attempts to implement an iden-
tity. Who is there to tell them that they must comply? Entrepreneurial
businesses where there is a boss whose word is scripture are a di‹erent
matter — but in a sense, parallel the older, centralized corporation. The
dilemma with identity always used to be that the chairman/ceo was
behind it, but middle managers could drag their heels and wield ‘nega-
tive power’ to thwart it. I’ve seen one small business of about 16 people
where the md was hugely excited about a new identity, and the o›ce
manager saw it as a burden too far on her existing workload. Who do
you think got the last word?

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Who to trust?
7 March 1998

gunnar:

Graphic designers are the last people you should trust to understand
and build on an identity program.

Ths is very true. Sadly, corporate identity programmes bring out the
worst in designers. Most su‹er from the ‘Not Invented Here’ mentality,
which means that they are less than inclined to try and understand
the spirit of an identity — or even play by its rules. And this destructive
competitiveness is o·en exacerbated by a strong streak of ‘visual fas-
cism’ inherent in the scheme itself — where the designers who created
the identity insist their (usually limited) conceptions be applied to
absolutely everything.
The people to trust ‘to understand and build on an identity program’
grasp the relationship between the organization — its businesses, strat-
egy, markets, culture, ethos — and the way it represents itself visually.
They are prepared to accept and work within an existing identity struc-
ture — but also to articulate it with flair, imagination and intelligence.
They need to be flexible enough in their thinking to drop ideas when
changes make them obsolete, as well as to think new thoughts when
tomorrow comes. And above all, they are able to communicate the
principles of the identity to people who don’t have any interest in aes-
thetics or the finer points of design, and just want to know what it will
do for them.

Does this sound like any graphic designers you know?

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Squeezing out creativity


9 March 1998

gunnar:

Some general suggestions for a manual -- Make sure it explains what the
system is and why. Make sure it shows that a range of great things can be
done within the system. Make sure that you’ve made it easier for people
to do what you want them to do rather than something else. In designing
an identity program it is very important to figure out how people are
actually going to use it -- make sure your manual shows that you under-
stand what they are going to do with the identity. Make sure that it’s
easy to get to a general understanding of the program; many people
are not going to read through a long, boring list of rules. Make sure
there are resources for people to go to for answers (even if the answers
are in the manual). Remember that di‹erent people get information
in di‹erent ways; a good manual combined with Q&A sessions will be
easier for people to understand than just a manual.

Identity is one of few areas where the designer is involved in creating


a metastructure within which other people will exercise their creativ-
ity. In theory, this is an exciting challenge — but in practice few of us
can resist the temptation to want to do both parts (i.e. to decide the
structure, and then to decide what the individual items should look
like). Maybe if we understood the requirements of the creative process
better, it would be easier create a system with the flexibility and scope
for interpretation that the ‘other fellow’ is going to need.

The danger of the manual was that it exaggerated this latter part — it
was too easy to show examples of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ ways to do things,
and to give other designers a clear message that the creative aspects
have been worked out in advance. Pointing them to the spirit of the
thing is much more di›cult, because it means accepting that there
is no ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ way — only a greater or lesser fit with the cor-

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porate personality. But this personality is an intangible — how do you


communiate it in print? With di›culty, I think…

In my experience manuals were either too prescriptive — which invari-


ably also meant convoluted and overly-complicated — or too simplistic.
An instruction that tells you only that the logo might appear in the
bottom right of a brochure cover, for example, tells you next to noth-
ing about that essential ‘who-ness’ that is the key to successful identity
implementation.

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Absorbing identity
9 March 1998

karel:

Personality (the system) is not completely intangible. There are ways to


identify an identity.

That is really interesting. However — and this is a big however — I’m not
sure that attempting to analyze a corporate personality is the right
approach. Words are o·en inadequate in describing what is — for many
people — a palpable, but non-verbal experience.

The second step remains very di›cult: to visualize an identity. Even


if there is an accurate description of an identity than it is possible to
develop a range of visualizations.

More di›cult, though, because what the designer is being asked to do


is to ‘visualize’ what someone else has already ‘analyzed’. (This goes for
most other kinds of design, too.)

Better, by far, to cut out the verbiage in the middle. Let the designer
spend time in the client organization, soaking up the culture and
ethos, the dreams and aspirations, the daily realities and the politics.
And then let her represent what she has experienced.

Certainly there won’t necessarily be only one solution — which, in


part, is why the problem-solution model of design is such a dubious
one. Ideally, a corporate identity should be a patchwork of representa-
tions — lots of interpretations pointing towards the same reality — held
together within a framework that provides coherence and continuity.
‘Fixing’ a symbol into a logotype: ‘the corporate mark must not be
recreated, redrawn or repositioned in any way’ (I wish I had a pound
for every time I’ve written those words!) can certainly constrain its
power — and may even kill it as a living emblem for the organization
it represents. Is it necessary? Once one begins to examine the assump-

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tions underlying our (thoroughly Modernist) obsession with consist-


ency and conformity, the question begs more and more insistently…

This is the late, great David Kindersley on this subject:

Designers abound who are content to produce ‘logos’ and


‘awards to industry’ not specifically intended for any one mate-
rial. Personally, I do not believe in this standardization, because
it does not allow for any imaginative interpretation by the qual-
ified inscription-maker. The whole idea of the designer treat-
ing the cra·sman who must execute the design as a ‘slave’ is
abhorrent. The dichotomy that has divided the designer and
the maker is very much to be regretted. We have all seen the
inevitable loss of life and imagination that has resulted from
the copying of heraldic designs. Copying is synonymous with
devolution. Re-creation, now miscalled recreation, carries with
it the chance to produce evolutionary designs. I do not forgive
designers easily for their unnecessary standards.

David Kindersley and Lida Lopes Cardozo, Letters Slate Cut,


london: Lund Humphries, 1981. p.16.

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Real symbols
9 March 1998

kc:

In fact any previous meaning can be totally erased orverwhelmed by


strong associations. In a city that is busy preserving and restoring its
historical elements a company has promised to spend a lot of money to
totally erase what is le· of the sign/advertisement from the original busi-
ness that was painted on the side of their building because it contained
a swastika. The building was originally built and painted in 1910–15.
Everyone agreed that it means nothing sinister, but the symbol itself has
been tainted to the point where previous associations of luck, cosmology,
unity or religion are unreachable.

I agree that it will still be a good few years before it’s possible to use
the swastika. But it will be back, I’m sure of that — it is such a potent
symbol that it will not remain derelict for ever. And in some cultures
(e.g. South Asia), it has never had that break in continuity.

It’s an extreme example, but meant to illustrate the fact that you must
tunderstand the context where you are applying your ‘meaning’. The
logo you choose may have all kinds of rich history and depth behind it,
but if it resembles the local gang symbol that’s painted on every flat sur-
face in town, that is the first, and sometimes the only, association people
will make.

Much depends on how you do this. A company like Landor might


research and develop numerous marks, and then ‘panel’ them in the
markets and cultures in which they are intended to operate. This proc-
ess should flush out any undesirable consequences — at least, one hopes
so. But there are always stories about someone’s big cock-up.

A ‘real’ symbol might — of course — come about in this way. But it’s
making it pretty hard for it. Another approach — one that I would
endorse, and believe is generally more fruitful — involves a di‹erent

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kind of research. This is to nose around an organization and its people


until one gets a ‘whi‹’ of something interesting, and to follow it back
to its source. Just as it is a truism of counselling that people wear their
pain on their sleeves — and will talk about it given half a chance — so
there is a symbol somewhere close to the surface of any human activ-
ity, for those with the eyes to see it.

Sometimes, though, the trail will throw up an extraordinary coinci-


dence — or a series of extraordinary coincidences — which will point the
designer to what she/he is looking for. This is how, incidentally, some
of the best known identities were developed — for instance, the Akzo
figure was found on an ancient Greek inscription in the Ashmolean
Museum in Oxford. It’s not the kind of methodology, however, that
stands up well in the flashy presentation of a global design consul-
tancy. (For that, one needs to pretend to be McKinseys — all ‘analysis’
and ‘process’.) But, for all that, it is surprising how much identity work
actually happens like this.

Real symbols always fit. That’s because they have been called into
being by the circumstances, and not retrofitted to them. It may even
be — and these are the most interesting cases — that the designers aren’t
aware of what they are bringing into being. (I’ve been collecting exam-
ples of these for some time.) Ironically, though, it’s more likely that the
local gang found their symbol in this way than the large corporation
whose walls they daub it on. But one of these days they’ll learn, too.

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Finding symbols
11 March 1998

stephen:

In the discussions about identity manuals and logos, James mentioned


something that has been bothering me (in that good way of being on the
verge of understanding something in a new way) ever since. You said
that many organizations have symbols that stick with them over the
course of their lifetime. A trained observer, you said, could spot them for
use as a starting point for an identity. A lovely idea that I have been
trying to apply to my own organization, with no success. (Obviously, I
probably have the worst possible perspective being the designer of the
current identity.) My design school training would want me to research
what the product or service is, where the company is and what its per-
sonality is, etc. but I don’t think that is what you are talking about. Can
you elaborate just a little on what kinds of things to be aware of when
you are thinking about an identity and looking for persistent symbols?

The first thing is to understand what the identity is for. It’s my belief
that identity comes out of a need to identify — to belong, and to repre-
sent the thing to which you belong. This is far from the usual viewthat
identity should be a marketing thing — making people take notice of
you, and perhaps expressing some aspect of what you can do for
them. I’m suspicious of the idea of associating a company with what
it does because companies are bigger than what they do. The world’s
oldest companies, Stora in Sweden (founded in 1288) or Sumitomo in
Japan (founded 1590), have changed focus many times in their life-
times whilst having retained a distinct sense of identity. Companies
are about a group of people who, by making common cause and pooling
capital, skills and experience, create an entity that takes on a life of its
own. So I think that identity should symbolize the vision, ethos and
values that binds them together — and not the thing that they happen
to be concentrating on at the time.

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Finding a symbol is a kind of twentieth century quest — I make no apol-


ogies for the deliberately romantic and quasi-mystical terminology.
In more conventional management-speak, creating or re-framing an
identity should involve a robust process of clarifying the things that
the company is about. But it goes beyond the grasp of anything an
McKinsey or Anderson consultant would understand. The mediæval
knight would have knelt in vigil through the long hours of darkness,
hoping for a divine ‘shewing’ — the Native American or Aboriginal
Australian might have headed o‹ into the wilderness on a ‘vision
quest’. And Dr. Jung would have nodded his head in approval. It’s a
bit more di›cult to explain this to a board of directors — but actually,
sometimes they can be more open-minded and progressive than their
design consultants.

To find symbols, one has to have some sympathy with them — not a
thing our age is known for, but not entirely forgotten for all that. A
symbol will appear through a dream, an insight or an unexpected ser-
endipity — but in all cases, there will be one or more significant coin-
cidences that identify it as being right for your purposes. Without
an easy familiarity with the worlds of dreams, mythology and poetic
expression, one might easily miss it. To say more on this subject is not
easy; some people will know what I’m talking about, whilst others will
think it idiocy — and there is not really any middle ground.

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Filling up
11 March 1998

gunnar:

James’ objection to the cleaned up Shell and Jim’s disgust at the Mobil
wordmark ignore a major emotional justification for the modern aes-
thetic applied to the gas station. In addition to the reasonable (and
largely successful) attempt at linking the products with a notion of tech-
nical progress, remember that before the mega chains most gas stations
were grimy places where people didn’t want to let people touch their
cars. Going to the bathroom was, by middle class standards, a horrible
experience. In this sense less - is - more.

In the village where my children go to school, there is a sweet little fill-


ing station that has been le· behind by the march of time. It reminds
me and the boys of Roald Dahl’s Danny the Champion of the World — which
is presumably why we like to fill up there (even though they don’t take
credit cards, and one has to wait interminably for the owner to get
around to serving you). There are bits of cars of uncertain age scattered
about the yard, sat in pools of motor oil and grease. There’s no branded
canopy or forecourt, no computerised tills or digitised pumps, simply
a rickety old shack, some very doubtful mathematics, and an ancient
pump that I’m sure doesn’t meet modern safety standards. And I sin-
cerely hope nobody has ever asked to ‘use the bathroom’!

I’m sorry that there isn’t more of this kind of individuality le· in the
(developed) world. I’m certainly glad for many of the a‹ordances of
modern filling stations. But does the price of progress have to be bland
brand homogeneity? Where the only human contact is a conversation-
less kid behind bullet-proof glass — and the standardised experience
leaves one feeling that, since everywhere is anywhere, one might as
well have stayed at home…

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Our ancestors did it better


12 March 1998

karel:

Are graphic designers currently working on the following four issues:

• develop approaches to identify a corporate personality


• investigate creative processes and relations between ideas
and visuals
• find out how corporate identities are interpreted
• find out how people could be motivated to co-operate in order
to strengthen a visual identity of an organisation.

I am afraid that the answer to all four areas is no: graphic designers
leave these questions to be answered by others…

In fairness to ‘graphic designers’, some of us are working on these


issues — admittedly in di‹erent ways. But, of course, it’s worth remem-
bering that the contemporary discipline of corporate identity grew out
of graphic design — not out of advertising, marketing, management or
other consultancy. And that, actually, it’s mostly still graphic design-
ers who are asking the interesting questions about it.

Corporate identity is nothing new — it has e‹ectively been with us for-


ever. And in very many respects, our ancestors — who were as unskilled
in the Landor approach as in the McKinsey — were much better at it
than we are.

The focus of most corporate identity today is the identification of com-


mercial organizations. By and large, these are actually — in evolution-
ary terms — not terribly successful. The average life expectancy of a
publicly listed company is about 40 years — one third of Fortune 500
companies from 1970 had disappeared by 1983 (the average life expect-
ancy of al companies is only 12.5 years). As Arie de Geus (former head of
planning at Shell) points out in his luminous book The Living Company,

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there is no biological entity with such a huge discrepancy between


its average and maximum lifespan. Yet despite their relatively puny
life expectancy, most of these organizations will — on average — have
changed their visual identity between three and four times in the
course of their short lives.
Other types of organization have been much more successful — and
have retained their identities far more tenaciously. Universities are
good examples — the earliest universities (Oxford, Bologna, Al-Azhar)
are still flourishing a·er 700+ years of existence, whilst relatively
few (I can’t think of any, but presumably there must be some) have
ceased to exist. Religious organizations are another example. Shell,
one of the world’s largest multinationals — now just over 100 years
old — employs about 117,000 people worldwide. Compare this with the
Roman Catholic Church — almost 2000 years old. Any guesses for how
many people work for it? Several million, I would imagine. Catholic
iconography — without ever having been focus or usability tested — has
taken root in every corner of the globe. Few of us will see, say, a
Madonna and Child, without recognizing it for what it is. Yet the
Vatican has not felt the compulsion to make sure that a minimum
clear space around Mary’s halo is properly observed, or that her robe
is always a corporate pantone 294 Marian Blue. (Does this ‘inconsistent
personality’ make the Church of Rome ripe for re-branding?)

All of these types of organizations are interesting because they have


very strong, successful identities that came about in very di‹erent
ways from contemporary practice — and to which people relate in a
much more direct, personal and emotional way. So, in a sense, if there
are questions le· ‘to be answered by others’ — with which I heartily
agree — it is our ancestors, and not the management consultants, to
whom I would turn for advice.

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Subsidiarity and consistency


12 March 1998

gunnar:

There are some general questions that should be considered when you
decide how restrictive a corporate identity should be:

Good points, but I still have a problem with this idea that an identity
should be seen as ‘restrictive’.

Identity should signal coherence — but this can be inclusive, rather


than exclusive. Wally Olins used to say that identity was about ‘Unity
in Multiplicitity’ — which invariable meant a reductive process, result-
ing in a monolithic approach. My opinion — having seen how dismal
and soul-destroying this can be — is that it should in fact be about
‘Mutiplicity in Unity’. This would mean celebrating the diversity that
exists within an organization, as well as the thing that makes it a
coherent whole.

It is interesting, in this context, that it was the Catholic Church which


first introduced the idea of subsidiarity — the notion that power and
responsibility should devolve to the lowest appropriate level (e.g. a
parish priest having autonomy in all decisions a‹ecting his flock).
Subsidiarity is now a great management buzz-word (will they really be
able to go through with it, though?) — but I think it is also one of the
keys to identity. Every group within an organization should be able to
decide for itself how much of the overall identity it wants to reflect,
and how much of its own. It would, of course, mean a very di‹erent
look to organizations — but who is averse to that? Does anally-retentive
top-down all-over consistency really belong in the twenty-first century,
or should we have le· it behind sometime around the beginning of the
last quartile of the twentieth?

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Ironically, this idea that ‘one dresses for others’ was one of the rea-
sons we were given at school for having to wear uncomfortable and
outmoded uniforms. I think we’re all pretty much agreed that it’s not
a bad idea to wear clothes that you feel comfortable in, and that do
something to project your own individuality and self-esteem — even if
you are conscious of your public-facing role. When ‘dress codes’ were
dropped by corporations, the expected sartorial disaster never hap-
pened (some of these same corporations even used — comparatively
recently — to reserve the right to approve an employee’s choice of
spouse!). It’s taking organizations a while to come to the same conclu-
sion about their identities, but I believe they are getting there.

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Standardization and homogeneity


14 March 1998

leif:

Having grown up in an era which had little standardization, how could


my parents have valued the kind of individuality your talking about?
Instead, they valued things like price or reliability, and personalities
didn’t matter much, especially idiosyncratic ones.

I’m not sure the issue is so much about standardization as homogene-


ity. Standards can be good things, but don’t necessarily imply same-
ness (too see this in practice, try visiting a championship cat show).
And sometimes ‘standards’ drop when they are implemented mechan-
ically, because they don’t spring from a real enthusiasm on the part
of those who have to apply them (anyone who has flown with British
Airways will know what I mean). Modern management is, at last, begin-
ning to realize that identification requires empowerment — that for
people to feel that they have a stake in something, they have to feel
they have some influence on it.

Also, the concept of ‘real’ is a generational. Is Williamsburg any more


‘real’ than Disneyland? Both are consciously planned. In Williamsburg,
the idea was to simulate history, but towns in the colonial period weren’t
anything like it. It may come to which kind of fantasy you prefer, with
many of the younger generation saying: ‘I know it’s fake and I love it.

‘Real’ doesn’t dwell at the level of styling, or bricks-and-mortar — but in


the quality of interaction that people have with one another. Disney,
as a large paternalistic corporation, believes that the unpredictable,
spontaneous nature of human interaction should be constrained to a
homogenous ‘Disney experience’. Fortunately, most of us don’t have to
live it — only bear it for a day or two for our kids’ benefit.

In a sense, the move to homogeneity was the correlative to the central


planning of the former Soviet Bloc. It was based on the idea that

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someone in the executive can write the script for other people to live
by. The enormous flaw with this is that the human spirit is irreppress-
ible — and, like a weed through concrete, wayward individuality breaks
through even the most monolithic systems. One sees this, of course,
in the multitudinous ways in which employees subvert and personal-
ize corporate identity schemes — the nightmare that makes ‘logocops’
busy people. The lessons of the ‘Velvet Revolution’ — and its equiv-
alents — pertain here, too. Monolithic systems can only exist where
people sustain them by fear and conformity. When everybody finally
begins to realize that they are bankrupt — which is what I contend is
happening in many corporations — they simply fall into dust.

If idiosyncrasy turns out to be an enduring value, expect it to be a


designed product.

Surely, though, idiosyncracy has driven ten millennia of designing and


making — if you want to see ‘idiosyncratic’, look at any iron age arte-
fact. It’s only in the last two centuries that we’ve taken personality out
of manufacture, and perhaps only in the last ten years that we have
begun to see the substitution of ‘market intelligence’ for the design-
er’s idiosyncratic vision.

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Is research possible?
16 March 1998

karel:

However, tacit knowledge can/should be used as the basis for research.


I rate professional knowledge on exactly the same level as ‘knowledge
based on scientific research’. Sometimes decisions are based on one, some-
times on the other, and many are not taken on either basis, but for exam-
ple for emotional or for diplomatic reasons. However, if motivations are
needed to discuss ‘what will/won’t work’ than it seems necessary to come
up with arguments. Personal experience is not su›cient and another
source needs to be consulted. Research can be used as such a source. That
is the reason that I am unfair to graphic designers: I want to know the
motivations for their decisions.
In corporate identity, though, it’s very hard — perhaps impossible — to
quantify what ‘works’ means. Does a company with a memorable iden-
tity sell more products? But if it does, is it because people recall (and
are influenced by) the identity, or because it sells good products (or just
markets them well)? Does an identity that resonates with employees
prevent labour disputes? But identity won’t make up for the absence of
a just and fair labour policy. Asking people if they ‘like’ or can ‘remem-
ber’ an identity is pretty meaningless, too — I really like the ‘Irish Life’
identity (more than other financial services providers), but have no
intention of moving my policies to them because of it. And I can’t get
the McDonalds identity out of my head, but would walk around the
block rather than go into one of their outlets. So what sort of metrics
could one use to determine ‘what will/won’t work’, if one can’t even
define what ‘work’ means?

This leads onto another point — which is that, actually, everything in


graphic design works. As the Meta Design slogan has it: ‘You can’t not-
communicate’. It just may not work in exactly the way you want it to.

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And the factors behind the way people respond to graphic design are
so hugely complicated that it can’t be anywhere near a predictive sci-
ence. For instance, human beings love novelty — sometimes any new
thing will work just because it is new. Market research methodologies
give misleading and conservative responses — which is why the ‘next-
big thing’ in graphic design never comes out of research that is sup-
posed to indicate what people will respond to.

I think it is a fallacy that, because quantitative research works for sci-


entists, it must necessarily be good for every other discipline. Science
is not a ‘creative’ pursuit (even if Kuhn and others have shown that
it depends on occasional creative insights) — the methods of doing sci-
ence preclude engaging imaginatively with the subject. That’s fine for
scientists. For designers, research produces prosaic and uninspiring
results. Why does nobody ever get excited about information design?
Because it places research above creativity, and is consequently thor-
oughly dull. What sells product is buzz. Here, graphic designers are for
once on exactly the same wavelength as their clients.

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Information design and identity


16 March 1998

karel:

There is a fundamental di‹erence between Information design and


Graphic design: It is ‘information design’ if readers are obliged to use
visual information — there is no alternative available, and the informa-
tion is immediately essential for the reader to achieve something. It is
‘graphic design’ if readers are not obliged — there are alternatives, or the
information is not (immediately) essential. It is possible to make a very
enjoyable living as a designer in both fields. However, it is not possible to
apply graphic design criteria (Buzz, novelty, excitement) to information
design. They are di‹erent.

From the perspective of corporate identity, however, these can be two


ends of a continuum — or di‹erent points on, say, a customer’s ‘jour-
ney’ (e.g. the ‘graphic’ end represented by promotional materials, the
‘information’ end by post-sale materials).

Much of the information we all have to use is dull. Good design won’t
make the information any less dull — which is where I think much
information design fails. Introducing little elements of delight is a
pleasant way of enlivening otherwise turgid materials — but, unfortu-
nately, one that is anathema to the puritan Modernist sensibilities
of many information designers. Consequently — and rather sadly — the
logo is sometimes the only element to have any emotional or aesthetic
resonance on some documents.

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Consensus
30 March 1998

nancy:

Just before he died, Paul Rand said that he doesn’t believe ‘great design’
can be done in the corporate world anymore, as one has to work with
committees. He said he was lucky to have been able work with single,
visionary, decision-makers.

If you can only convince one person that it’s ‘great design’, and not a
small group sat around a table, can it really be that great? Although
my ambitions are slightly more modest — I’d settle for ‘good design’ — I
work on the basis that I’m ultimately going to have to convince audi-
ences that vary from thousands to millions.

Ordinary people, who make decisions as part of a team, can become


visionaries — and it’s part of our job to help liberate their vision. Of
course there’s always politics involved in organizations. In part, that’s
what makes them human. So a designer’s cra· skills need to include
ways of outwitting the person on the committee who is exercising
negative power — and preventing everyone from moving on. I learned
today that these people are called popos (pissed o‹ and passed over).
Design doesn’t have to piss them o‹, or pass them over. It could be a
means of bringing some light and enthusiasm back into their working
lives. If there’s real passion, conviction and integrity in the work — and
the designer — it will touch all it comes in contact with.

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Competition
30 March 1998

david:

…competition is good. Especially in the creative fields.

Really? Why is it then that so many ‘creative’ people in the arts and the
sciences have cloistered themselves away from the clamour and com-
petition of the world? And does a client get a more creative solution by
asking three agencies to do a free pitch, or paying one to really think
about the problem?

Creativity depends upon the ability to play — as investigators from Carl


Rogers to Arthur Koestler have observed. Sometimes, as with childs-
play, this involves shutting out distractions. Some of us, preoccupied
with the demands of making a living in a competitive world, find that
it’s only at times when the phone stops ringing — or we can give our-
selves a complete break — that our minds can become fecund again.
And students, sequestered from the ‘real world’, remain one of the
most creative groups.

If one looks back over the fruits of human creativity, by far the
greatest examples — from the Lindisfarne Gospels through the Gothic
Cathedrals to the paintings of the Renaissance — have been motivated
by something quite other than competition. The greatest contribu-
tions of ‘Free Enterprise’ to visual culture, on the other hand, appear
to be packaging and advertising.

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Both sides of the brain


1 June 1998

randal:

I have a theory that there is a much closer link between music and pro-
gramming or the sciences than between visual art and these le·-brain
subjects. I’m not sure why, but I have studied the natural sciences and
also art and in my feeling they were very di‹erent experiences.

In terms of the how the brain works, it appears to go like this:

Casual listening to music is predominantly a right brain activity. For


professional musicians — or listeners who have developed a critical
appreciation of music — it becomes predominantly a le· brain activity.
And it doesn’t seem to matter what kind of music you’re listening to.

The reason seems to be quite straightforward. For the casual listener,


music is a ‘complete’ experience — you enjoy it as a whole, without
being able to identify or analyse the elements that comprise it. As your
understanding and awareness increases, you inevitably become more
analytic — observing that it is ‘clever the way she follows that minor
third with a diminished seventh’, ‘lovely the way he uses counterpoint’
or ‘incredible how they achieve such syncopation’ (or whatever).

The more recent work suggests that the ‘verbal/visual’ characteriza-


tion was a gross distortion of the actual complementarity of the brain’s
hemispheric specialization. Robert Ornstein, in his 1997 book The Right
Mind (which summarizes much of this research), suggests that ‘text/
context’ is a much more accurate way of representing how the two
parts of the brain work together. And ‘work together’ is the operative
phrase — Ornstein derides those who suggest that there are ‘right brain-
ers’ and ‘le· brainers’.

‘There’s a popular view that the right hemisphere is reserved for


special things like artistic creativity or amazing insights. The

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research since the 1970s shows, from the lowliest of molecules


to the rat to ordinary thinking, that this side of the brain con-
tributes to everything we do, and contributes an essential com-
ponent’.

Robert Ornstein, The Right Mind, New York: Harcourt Brace &
Company, 1997, p.97.

If you consider music, programming and graphic design in terms of


this ‘text/context’ dichotomy, you can see that, although the balance
may be di‹erent in each case, all involve both close focus on concrete,
stepwise processes and also awareness of a big picture, o·en conceived
figuratively or metaphorically. The programmer may cut code line
by line — but can’t do so without the ability to represent the under-
lying business processes with appropriate conceptual models. Is this
so di‹erent from the painter who solves numerous practical, local
problems of acheiving desired e‹ects on the canvas (through a com-
bination of learned principles, acquired cra·-skills and on-the-spot
experimentation) — whilst simultaneously keeping in mind the overall
shape, objective and meaning of the work?

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Design and programming


2 June 1998

randal:

I’m not so sure I would agree they are as similar as you make them
sound. I probably agree that they all use aspects of the same set of mental
skills, but they have very di‹erent emphases. For example, I love the sci-
ences, and seriously considered science as a career -- until I realized that
in order to be a really successful scientist you really have to have a mind
like an accountant (with a really active imagination). I have the imagi-
nation, but not the orientation to details. Similarly, a programmer has
to be obsessively concerned with not making mistakes, whereas for a
designer or artist creative ‘mistakes’ are part of what they do.

Back in the early 60s, Thomas Kuhn showed that what scientists think
they do, and what they actually do, are quite di‹erent things. The
idea of empiricism — that science is about making observations of
Nature and then forming deductions from those observations — didn’t
stand up to the investigations of the new history and philosophy of
science. Kuhn and others showed that most great ‘discoveries’ — like
Copernicus’ heliocentric universe or Newton’s optics, began with
an already formed idea (o·en from a completely di‹erent source).
Copernicus’ theory came from Neo-Platonism, and he never managed
to get it to yield calculations as accurate as the convoluted Ptolemaic
astronomy it set out to replace. But it is taking a while for this message
to get through to the scientists!

To my mind, graphic design and the sciences are surprisingly similar in


this respect. Designers too are supposed to make ‘objective’ judgments,
based on a rigorous analysis of the client’s brief — but in practice rarely
do. The brilliant ones shatter old paradigms, not because their obser-
vation or analysis is superior, but because they intuit a greater truth.
But even in design (especially commercial design) intution is hardly

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respectable. So, like Newton, clever designers are not above disingenu-
ously telling their clients that the ‘solution’ emerged from a respect-
able, ‘empirical’ problem solving exercise.

There are other similarities, too. At a practical level both graphic design
and the sciences are primarily concerned with politics. Graphic design
is concerned with the politics of getting projects through to comple-
tion, Science with getting them funded. But despite these di‹erences,
the skilled politician will always do well in both fields.

There’s an awful lot of grunt work in both, too. And it’s detailed grunt
work — I lose sleep over the thought that a job will go out with a literal,
or that that there will be an error on the separations. Is picking over
a job before sending it out much di‹erent from checking and double-
checking one’s findings before publishing a paper? Reputations rest on
the accuracy of both.

Then again, there’s another similarity — which is that just as scientists


can spend years barking up the wrong tree, so can we designers. And
the really original, paradigm breaking work will almost certainly be
done by someone else — a sobering thought for us and our lab-coated
equivalents.

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Applying for that first job


2 June 1998

nancy:

Other suggestions? Come on, you hiring types.

Most applications we receive are heroic, but stupid. Heroic because the
applicants put a lot of time and e‹ort into mailing hundreds of design
companies (usually up to six weeks a·er they leave College — a·er
which point they seem to give up), stupid because they are so obviously
inadequate and doomed to failure.

The things I look for are:

• the applicant gets my name right (if you can’t manage to tran-
scribe a seven letter name correctly, some other career than graphic
design is indicated);
amazing how many fail this first test

• the applicant has bothered to find out something about who we


are and what we do, and targeted her/his approach appropriately
(we’re not just another name in a mass mailing);

• the applicant has thought about whether her/his experience will


be relevant to us, and in what ways.

All it takes — as I never tire of telling students — is a ‘phone call before


putting something in the mail. ‘Hi, my name is… I’ve just le· College
and I’m writing to various design companies. Can you tell me some-
thing about what you do? If I wrote to you with some details about
myself, do you think you might be interested in seeing me? Could you
please tell me to whom I should address my letter? (Can I just check the
spelling: s-o-u-t-t-a-r)’.

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Daydreaming
8 June 1998

john:

During the time consumed by actually having to scribble out a logo, a


layout or whatever or laboriously put together a comp, the right brain
is still, unconsciously, looking for creative solutions. When the computer
delivers finished-looking solutions in seconds, the amount of exploratory
and playful-experimentation time is diminished.

I learned something the other day which I’m still chewing over, but
which seems to pertain here.

In 1909, a colleague of Freud’s called Silberer discovered that when


he tried to master a particularly demanding intellectual task, there
would come a point at which drowsiness would temporarily overcome
him. He would ‘come to’ a few moments later, realizing that he had
daydreamed a symbolic representation of the task — or its outcome. He
called this phenomenon the ‘autosymbolic e‹ect’.

Unfortunately, it seems that he spent his life in the shadow of the


‘maestro’, and consequently this discovery never became better known.
I heard it from an Irish psychologist called Joseph Gri›n, who came
across it when researching into the evolutionary purposes of meta-
phor and pattern. Joe Gri›n is also a hypnotherapist, and believes that
Silberer accidentally hit upon one of the keys to understanding the
relationship of trance and metaphor.

It seems to me that this sheds a fascinating insight into the creative


processes, which we’ve discussed here before. There seems to be a
point that most of us seem to reach, when our (overtaxed) conscious
minds reach an impasse and go into idle, whereupon a breakthrough
occurs. And o·en — and here my own experience corroborates the
theory — that breakthrough seems to initially appear in some figura-
tive way. The example Silberer uses is of trying to resolve a particularly

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di›cult passage in an essay, and dri·ing o‹ into a reverie about plan-


ing a piece of wood.

One factor that might definitely help all of us who, from time to time,
depend upon this kind of inspiration for our bread and butter, is an
understanding of the so called ‘ultradian’ rhythm. This is a natural
cycle of about 90 to 110 minutes, where our brains peak in conscious
alertness and then dip to reinvigorate themselves (it was first discov-
ered in studies of Air Tra›c Controllers, and is now built into their
schedules). During the dip phase, which lasts about 10 to 20 minutes,
we have a tendency to turn inwards (and to switch from the literal le·
hemisphere to the metaphorical right one) — which hypnotists have
learned to exploit, as it is apparently the easiest time to put someone
into a trance. (You can always tell that this is happening if you ask
someone the same question three times, and they respond ‘Uh, what
was that?’) According to this hypothesis, most of us hit one dip around
the time we get to work, and the next about 1.5 to 2 hours later. The
natural inclination is to take a break at these moments, and fix oneself
up with a he·y hit of ca‹eine. But if you’re looking for a good moment
to hand the screen over to A·er Dark, and swirl your pencil in mesmeric
circles, this could be it.

Note: I’m led to believe that this ‘ultradian’ cycle is the same as the cycle of Rapid
Eye Movements (REM) that occurs in sleep, and which is responsible for dream-
ing. The periods of REM sleep cycle get longer over the night (from less than
10 minutes to about half an hour), whilst the intervals between them reduce
from about once every 90 minutes at the beginning of sleep to about once every
20–30 minutes before waking. I have a gut feeling, based on my experience of
giving and listening to presentations, that the ultradian cycles of audiences
‘sync’. However, I raised this with one of Joe Gri›n’s colleagues who didn’t think
it could be the case. It would be an interesting subject to research.

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Presentation
9 June 1998

nancy:

Here’s another thought: we have been ranking on the FUSE people for
giving less-than-fabulous performances. While I also found some of what
went on in San Francisco tiresome or insular, I wonder that we are sur-
prised that a group of professional designers may not be experts at per-
formance-based presentations. It seems to me the two activities demand
di‹erent sets of skills.

Here I have to disagree. Whilst these days name designers can be


bores — talking interminably about their own portfolios or regurgitat-
ing ideological cant — there are, and always have been, others who are
personally and presentationally inspiring.
Graphic design is not only about doing the work, but about selling
it. I suggest that most successful designers know this, and practise it
already. From my own experience, giving a presentation is as impor-
tant — perhaps even more important — that creating the work you are
presenting. And I contend that they are not skills to which di‹erent
people are suited — non-designers rarely present designers’ work as well
as (inspiring) designers do. In fact, I’d argue that they are two sides of
the same coin — you have to create a communication that really speaks
to people — that is really convincing — and you then have to explain
it to your client — convince them that it is the right solution. Both
graphic design and presentation are all about communication, and I
find enormous synergies between them. And — at their best — both are
pure theater, too.

Part of what we see here, though, is the recent myth of the designer
as shambling, tongue-tied ‘right brainer’. I was talking about this to
someone the other day and I realized that most of the really great
designers — and, for that matter, painters too — have been simultane-

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ously competent as visualizers/form-givers and thinkers. They have also


tended to be (and this is certainly true of the designers) great com-
municators, explainers and evangelists for what they do. One only has
to think of the late Paul Rand, for example. The idea of the designer
as an inarticulate young man who goes through a presentation yawn-
ing, scratching his testicles and muttering monosyllabic obscenities
has only really emerged in the last few years — and FUSE probably has a
great deal to do with it.

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Gender and design


10 June 1998

nancy:

And here’s an observation that ought to arouse some debate: The lib-
eration movement has begun to allow that women can be as good as
men. At things like being soldiers and CEOs and bicyclists and pilots.
Nowadays, if a woman is so·, or vulnerable, or domestic, or uncomfort-
able with confrontation or competition, she’s derided. Rather than just
be able to do the things men do, I’m looking forward to the day when it’s
actually okay to be a woman.

The FUSE thing sure has brought this to a head — and rightly, too, since
it is downright perplexing that a supposedly ‘cutting edge’ ‘right-on’
graphic/typographic design project should end up such a den of misog-
yny. The first FUSE conference was criticised (very vocally, I recall) for
the lack of women speakers. And so has each and every FUSE confer-
ence since. But we’re not talking about the Model Railway Congress
here — women design students are a majority now, and the profession
has a demographically representative gender balance. So what’s going
on?

Well, I think it is important to recognize that there is a di‹erence


between predominantly male (status contesting) and female (relation-
ship negotiating) styles of meeting. Like most things on the matter of
gender styles, the linguist Deborah Tannen has been inspirational in
helping me understand this. Men seem to be attracted by the idea of
coming together in large numbers to witness largely adversarial con-
tests — to cheer or boo as the limelit contestants jostle for status. But
women don’t. So I believe Wozencro· and Brody when they say that
they have tried to get more women speakers at FUSE. But I also think
that they were misguided if they thought that many women would be
interested in what, fundamentally, is organized as a boys’ thing.

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The sad thing about FUSE is that it is already something of an anach-


ronism. As the gender balance has changed (for the better) in many
of our institutions, feminine styles are becoming the norm. The stu-
dents who flock to hear the words of the gospel fall from Wozencro·’s
lips are actually much more likely find themselves working as part of
small, networked teams than to find themselves in the kind of oppres-
sively hiearachical role culture that was the corporation of yesteryear.
And male designers are going to have to work much harder at the kinds
of interpersonal social skills that women — whether by nature or nur-
ture — are generally better equipped for.

Ms Tannen astutely points out that the ‘strong silent’ type of man is ‘a
lure as a lover but a lug as a husband’. To which I can only add that he’s
also a ‘liability as a colleague’.

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Play
10 June 1998

john:

The key seems to be relaxing. What amazes me is the amount of resist-


ance I get from my students to the idea of playing. Playing is fun! Who
cares how long you ‘work’ when it’s play?! Playing is relaxing, which,
given how busy we all are, must be a good thing.

Play seems to be important for so many di‹erent reasons. In evolu-


tionary terms, it is found only in the mammals (and some species of
birds, but that seems to be contentious). And it increases in impor-
tance as one moves along the evolutionary scale. One of the things that
gives homo sapiens such an adaptive advantage is our long childhood.
Which, were it not for the good intentions of the educators, would
probably be filled with play. The Neanderthals, who co-existed with
our Cro-Magnon ancestors for at least 50,000 years, had far shorter
childhoods — and I heard a convincing theory that it was their less well
developed sense of play that denied them the flexibility needed to sur-
vive.

But play is important philosophically as well. At a seminar last week


I boldly included a quote from Gadamer (one of the few passages in
‘Truth and Method’ that an audience of prospective clients could be
expected to swallow) where he states that understanding and playing
seem to have a common structure.

I used to feel a tremendous sense of guilt for the amount of time where
I appear to achieve next to nothing. It was only when I read about the
way that the novelist Doris Lessing — who, in terms of output alone,
I’d consider to be a ‘high achiever’ — works, that I realized the value of
all those hours of apparent idleness, playing around and not ‘getting
on’ with things. In fact, I don’t now think I could do what I do without
spending a significant amount of my time playing. But the bugbear

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of ‘e›ciency’ — a narrow and hollow conception that doesn’t allow for


what we now know about ourselves — is still there to haunt us.

Can one relax sitting ergonomically correctly in an o›ce chair with their
focus stuck on a screen 16” away? How the hell can one daydream in that
posture?
I’d agree that the computer, with its ever increasing clock speeds (a
revealing metaphor, if ever there was one!) and its interface that seems
to be making a polite but pointed statement when it is not being inter-
acted with, is not conducive to procrastination. Its sheer physical pres-
ence dominates our workspace, literally marginalizing any activities
that don’t happen on the keyboard or the mousemat. Which is one of
the reasons why I think that ‘laptops’ — with their much slighter pro-
file and unassuming presence — will revolutionalize the way we work.
There’s room for a layout pad alongside a laptop, but it is elbowed
out of the way by a desktop. It’s also possible to have a conversation
with someone over the top of it, which is practically impossible with a
desktop. And a laptop becomes just a tool among many, to be pushed
aside when you are not in the mood for it. A·er a week away from the
studio (with my little powerbook at my side), I begin to realize quite
how oppressive — and domineering — is the influence of the giant tel-
evision I’m now staring into as I type.

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Extensions
5 June 1988

jerry:

As an educator, I stress the importance of beginning a piece, at least


through thumbnail stage on paper, not the computer. That is where the
thought processes take place. The resultant work of the students who
take my advice, reflects the thought and ‘soul’ put into their design. I
can tell very quickly the students who produced the thumbnails a·er the
assignment was complete. The number of students who have an aversion
to picking up a pencil, is maddening to me!

This may sound pedantic: it’s not meant to be. But it is my understand-
ing that ‘where the thought processes take place’ is in the brain — not
on paper, nor on screen. Both pencil and computer are extensions; very
useful ones, at that. However, extensions have their drawbacks — cer-
tainly when it comes to the way they impact on their users’ thought
processes.

The anthropologist Edward T. Hall, one of my favourite writers,


described the phenomenon that happens when extensions are con-
fused with the mental processes that are extended (he named it
‘Extension Transference’). As far back as 1976, he said:

‘Now popularly acclaimed, the ET process is at work in technol-


ogy as well, with the result that technology has become an end
in itself and is viewed as the arena of study and problem solving
in today’s troubled world — problem solving not by social scien-
tists but by engineers.’

There’s a rather discomfiting ring of truth about that statement, when


one thinks about graphic design in the late nineties. It seems to me
that we are increasingly seeing problem solving not by designers but
by ‘engineers’ (or ‘engineers’ posing as designers). What’s the solution
to a communication problem? Throw some technology at it.

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But the point is, I think, that that process becomes almost inevitable
once one starts shi·ing the locus of creative thought away from the
head and into the extensions. There’s not actually a lot of di‹erence
between ‘thinking aloud’ using a layout pad, and doing the same on
screen. The constraints and possibilities of each are di‹erent, but in
both cases one is playing around with visual configurations until some-
thing starts to look right. The big di‹erence is between those processes
and the ability to ‘envisage’ — to mentally conceive of a solution. Sadly,
though, the idea that one needs to have ‘vision’ — not just in design,
but in every sphere — is deeply unfashionable.

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Creativity
5 June 1988

randy:

Design licensing is asserting there’s no such thing as creativity… or at


least coming to the understanding that ‘true’ creativity is incredibly
rare and that what we call creativity is simply a rehashing of existing
material in a skilful enough fashion as to claim it original.

‘Creativity’ and ‘originality’ are two quite distinct things, at least in


my book. We’re an instinctively creative species, and ‘true’ creativity
is nowhere near as rare as you suggest. In fact, most of it is probably
never recognized for what it is — largely because we have a tendency to
confuse creativity with originality.

This confusion has been a real bugbear in design, however, because it


shi·s attention and interest from finding ‘creative’ solutions towards
doing things that have never been done before. But actually, we work
with a very limited palette and there aren’t that many new things to be
discovered. So, instead of genuine originality, we see designers who are
just pushing out the envelope of ‘shock’ — becoming more and more
outrageous, as sensitivity to the radical becomes jaded.

Writers and musicians — likewise chefs and gardeners — make endless


re-interpretations using the same basic ingredients. So, ‘rehashing’
shouldn’t be looked down upon — Mozart ‘rehashed’ the same chords
that Bach had used, and so on. But of course, not wanting to be le·
out, some twentieth century composers have been infected by ‘origi-
nality’ — and produce bizarre discordant conceptual pieces with the
same ‘envelope pushing’ intention in mind.

If you see graphic design as a kind of historical evolution driven by


originality, it is going to have to constantly push towards the new and
the di‹erent (and may end up playing to a smaller and smaller audi-
ence of cognoscienti). But there is an alternative — and possibly more

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humane — view, which is to see it as a conversation. Conversations


don’t have to go anywhere — we engage with each other in an endless
dance of shi·ing meanings and re-interpreted themes. Conversation
taps into the naturally creative aspect of humanity, without ever need-
ing to be ‘original’. And it is also, by its nature, a way of including other
people — not alienating them.

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Capitalism
25 June 1998

randal:

Capitalism is a great force in history, and can achieved many


things — even in our current, monopolistic version. But the search for
profit is not the sole defining quality of human beings. Nor is it the best.
The arts hopefully will always be about what is good, right, true, and
real — not about what sells.

People get emotionally involved in the pro- and anti- arguments about
capitalism. However I think it is best seen as a powerful natural force,
inherently morally neutral. Properly harnessed, it can be a tremendous
power for good. Unleashed without knowledge or wisdom, it can be a
potent destructive force.

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Style
28 June 1988

christy:

Since everyone seems to be quoting I shall enter a quote from Ivan


Chermaye‹ : ‘I never wanted to have a style, because it’s contrary to
the meaning of good communications to have one’. Graphic Design In
America p.73.

I thought that was an interesting — and revealing — quote from


Chermaye‹, one I hadn’t come across before.

Why should it be ‘contrary to the meaning of good communications’ to


have a personal style? Putting graphic design aside for a moment,
one might consider whether this is true in other areas. And I’m not
sure that it is. Successful writers, for instance, are simultaneously
rated as good communicators and admired as distinctive prose styl-
ists. And the attraction of speakers — from the television age right
back to ancient Athens — was that they had well developed styles that
audiences enjoyed. Supposing Jack Kennedy had addressed a public
meeting and decided to adopt the stage manners and mannerisms of
Richard Nixon? Once the audience had overcome their astonishment,
might they not have felt cheated?

If we accept that the way in which one says something can be as — some-
times even more — important than what one says, then the definition
of a great communicator must be someone with a great way of saying
things (along with some pretty interesting things to say). But does this
have to be a chameleon type approach, like that of Meta Design who
claim to be able to design ‘in all styles’? I’m not sure. This would be
like suggesting that politicians should be actors, capable of putting on
any part the moment requires. But within our personal styles we can
achieve a dramatic range without having to sacrifice the sense of sin-
cerity and integrity — of being ourselves. And just as the perception of

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being ‘true to oneself’ can be the deciding vote clincher for a politi-
cian, so it is also — I contend — a key factor in making visual communi-
cations convincing.

Maybe Chermaye‹ is hung up on the (modernist) notion of ‘good


communications’ being the e›cient transmission of information (as
in Information Theory). But imagine having a conversation with an
‘e‹cient transmitter of information’. Would it be a fulfilling experi-
ence? Would it hell! The next time you spotted that person at a party,
you’d swi·ly head for the other end of the room. A great conversa-
tionalist, on the other hand, would be someone who could listen and
adjust to your mood, and who would accordingly appear funny, inter-
esting, exciting, perceptive, flirtatious, etc. — but also project a unique
and well-developed personality. Is there such a di‹erence between an
enjoyable conversation and an engaging design?

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Deconstructed
29 June 1998

michelle:

This is of course completely o‹ the subject but American rappers are


saying something to and about ‘American’ culture. One of the most inter-
esting things about rap is that it speaks about what’s happening from
the prospective of the rapper. It’s all a matter of perspective as in all
things. The important thing is that if you don’t understand the point
of view that you take time to educate yourself about it by listening and
looking.

It’s interesting to me that the current genre of fragmented, decontex-


tualized design appears to make an equally eloquent statement about
American culture. It is as if the whole thing about ‘deconstructing the
narrative’ is saying ‘we’ve lost the plot’ — or even ‘we’re beginning to
realize that there may not be a plot’.

I’ve been fairly vociferous about my dislike of Post-Structuralist French


philosophers, but in the context of this discussion it is revealing that
the American exponents of the ‘deconstructed’ style had to look across
the Atlantic to find the philosophical underpinnings of what they
were doing. I also find it fascinating that, despite having invented
the philosophy of Post Modernism, the French never thought to apply
it to design — and seem, thus far, to have largely resisted this particu-
lar product of the American imagination. Jean-François Lyotard wrote
some pretty torturous prose, but I wonder what he thought — if he ever
saw it — of P. Scott Makela chopping it up into little pieces and dropping
it onto his glowing orange image of a brain. Perhaps, when you can talk
late into the night about these things in the gregarious intellectual
camaraderie of a le·-bank café, there is already su›cient outlet?

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Modernism and Romanticism


18 July 1998

randal:

I think that it is o·en overlooked that most histories of modern graphic


design really start with William Morris and his project of re-evaluating
the nature and value of cra·. And the Bauhaus, though their style is
radically di‹erent from Morris’s, also had a very similar philosophy of
integrating the study of cra· into a complete education.

I’ve always found this perplexing, since there is a world of di‹erence


between Morris’ ideas and those of the Moderns. The tenuous con-
nection seems to depend upon Behrens’ admiration for Morris and
Lethaby, and his role as Gropius’ mentor.

I believe there is a much more plausible way of looking at the history of


(what was to become) graphic design — which is to see two traditions,
Modern and Romantic, existing simultaneously.

Modernism is really the child of the enlightenment, the product of a


belief in the essential rationality of humanity. Robin Kinross makes a
very good case for the Enlightenment origins of ‘Modern Typography’,
and I have little reason to quibble with his scholarship.

Romanticism was primarily a reaction against the premises of the


Enlightenment — its prosaic materialism, its insipid abstract spiritual-
ity (‘Deism’) and its determination to bring Nature to heel. William
Blake is perhaps the only Romantic who could be described as a graphic
designer, but his influence in the development of a ‘Romantic’ tradi-
tion of graphic design is profound. Blake certainly influenced Morris
and Ruskin, and one can discern a trajectory through them to Eric Gill
and others in the twentieth century. But whilst the Romantic influ-
ence seemed to have had the upper hand at the end of the nineteenth
century, it was eclipsed in the twentieth by the reincarnation of the
Enlightenment as Modernism.

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Perhaps one of the reasons for the ascendecy of Modernism is the


change of perception of industrialization and mass production between
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the nineteenth century
the reflective person could see the downsides of the industrial revolu-
tion all around them — in the deskilling of the workforce, the poverty
and squalor (and the endemic alcoholism) that resulted from capi-
talist exploitation, and in the environmental degradation as cities
spawned extensive slums, shadowed beneath dark clouds of smoke
belched by factory chimneys. In the early decades of the twentieth cen-
tury however (and fuelled by Marxist ideology) industry began to be
seen as a redeeming force (provided it was handed over to the proletar-
iat!) — bright, clean factories with smiling workers turning out light-
bulbs (the great Modernist icon) to illumine a nation’s homes (cheery,
modularized ‘workers housing’), jolly consumer goods in exciting new
materials to improve standards of living, and the industrial applica-
tion of ‘science’ to improve health, mobility and well being. [It is highly
ironic that it was to be in capitalist America that this dream would be
realized.] The anomie and sense of alienation that were to result from
a society with a surfeit of material comforts, but a lack of significant
meanings, were yet to be indetified as a problem.

At the end of the twentieth century, we’re in a confusing situation


vis-à-vis these two traditions. The sixties and seventies, with the devel-
opment of a counter-culture, growing environmental awareness and
single-issue politics, veered towards Romanticism. But in the eighties
and nineties, we’ve seen a late Modernist comeback, driven by new
technologies (and a climate of political reaction) — reaching its apothe-
osis in the ‘Information Revolution’. Which is one reason I don’t think
it is possible to talk about ‘Post Modernism’, because what is referred
to by that term includes elements of both opposition to and reevalua-
tion of the ‘modern’ (for instance, images that pupport to comment on
the fragmented, media driven society that has resulted from modern-
ism, but which are only made possible by the new technologies that
are its fruits).

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Visual culture
18 July 1998

matthew:

I have been looking at the mixing messages website and I would like to
know what you guys think about visual communication as a part of our
modern culture?

Given the enormous priority that the human brain gives to the inter-
pretation of visual data, visual communication will inevitably form a
huge part of any culture. ‘Our modern culture’ has the added benefit of
technologies (architecture, print, film and television, computing) that
allow us to make substantial visual statements that can be seen and
thought about by considerable numbers of people. So we’ve been able
to build on the advantages given us by evolution to create a set of cir-
cumstances where, in terms of sheer volume, visual communication
has reached a degree of hitherto unimaginable complexity.

Volume has not, however, been matched with a corresponding degree


of sophistication. It is true that — compared to our ancestors — we are
capable of responding in fairly clever ways to certain kinds of images,
particularly those commonly presented by mass media and advertis-
ing. But this generally extends only to a passive reception of those
images — the overwhelming majority of the population lack the skills
and understanding to be able to communicate themselves using that
same visual language.

And this, I think, is one of the real challenge for modern cultures — to
enable more and more people to be able to e‹ectively use visual com-
munication to extend (and enhance) their communications repertory.
Unfortunately, despite the opportunities provided by more or less uni-
versal education, an extraordinary communications infrastructure
and a plethora of empowering technologies (from pencils to pixels), I
believe it is a challenge we are failing. Instead, I think we’re seeing a

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widening gap between the use of visual communications by media pro-


fessionals and their clients, and its use by the population at large. Just
a few decades ago, lots of people were able to make a personal impact
on their visual environment — even if it was only cutting pastry pat-
terns to embelish a pie, or painting rustic designs in egg tempura on an
Easter box. Now most of those same people buy packaged pies from the
supermarket, rustic boxes from an ethnic store, and limit the extent
of their visual communication abilities to applying cheesy clip-art to
PowerPoint presentations.

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Corporate hoo-ha
18 July 1998

Donna:

I too have observed in my daily business interaction (and in past experi-


ence working in-house for a mid-sized company) how corporate dysfunc-
tion can self-perpetuate without bringing down the house entirely. It’s
as if the dysfunction found its balance, but the compromise is a glass
ceiling for the company’s success. This has always made me wonder what
some corporations could actually achieve if they really cleaned house.
Maybe that’s idealistic because some problems run so deeply, it’s as if
they’re wound around the company’s entrails. You know, chop it at the
heart and the organism might go into shock.

Interesting. I’m somewhat less idealistic, but in a curious way perhaps


more optimistic. I don’t think companies can achieve more, because I
don’t believe the fault is in the organization. Instead, I’d suggest that
the dysfunction we see in organizations is the result of the way evo-
lution prepared us humans to interact with the world — a marvellous
adaptation for itinerant hunter-gatherers, but far too focused on other
priorities to make the corporate ‘Quest for Excellence’ anything like
a possibility. Still, if we’d take on board some of what the ‘brain sci-
ences’ are telling us, I think we’d be less inclined to be so hard on our-
selves — and more capable of celebrating what we do do well.

Part of the real problem is the idea — which has largely come down to us
from the Enlightenment — that we are fundamentally ‘rational’ crea-
tures. When we take this view, it seems as if we and our institutions are
constantly falling short of the mark. Ironically, by believing that we are
essentially reasonable, logical and fair, we condemn ourselves to live in
a world where we are surrounded by examples of unreasonable, illogi-
cal and unfair behaviour. The contrary view, that we are stucturally
partial, prejudiced and partisan reveals a quite di‹erent world. One in

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which people do occasionally make spectacular achievements in over-


coming their biological and social conditioning, and where most are
engaged (at least for some of the time) in some kind of e‹ort to do so.

This has repercussions for the way that we work. Many of my col-
leagues — both in design and other forms of consultancy — are per-
petually disappointed by the outcome of projects in which they are
involved, and quickly become disparaging of the client organizations
with which they work. Coming from a similar background and men-
tality, I am however beginning to realize quite how delightful and
fascinating corporations are — precisely because they are so human. To
watch someone derail a project in which you have invested consider-
able time and energy can be a crushing and demoralizing experience.
But it can also be a fascinating little drama in which one gets to be
both a player and the audience. You can’t always do anything about
it, but you can learn to recognize its various acts and scenes, and how
they unfold with the predictable timing of a repertory performance.
And — this is where the optimism comes in — knowing this, maybe one
can begin to step outside the part circumstances have cast one in, and
even help others do likewise.

The great corporations are like the courts of mediaeval Europe.


Primarily they are places where power is broked, and they are full of
the tyrannies and intrigues associated with it. As a spectator, one can
see the various protagonists further their cases — the ‘soldiers’ plan-
ning belligerent campaigns into competitors’ markets, the ‘diplomats’
suggesting synergies and collaborations, the ‘clerics’ urging a return
to principles and values, and the ‘astrologers’ consulting their man-
agement texts for new nostrums. And we designers are particularly
blessed in this environment, because we are people with no real sta-
tus — thus generally managing to avoid being sucked into other peo-
ple’s schemes — but we do get to witness many of the activities of the
court, and occasionally (like the court jester of old) may even find our-
selves with the ear of the monarch.

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History of communication
20 July 1998

Randal

I don’t think we can call these ancient visual things ‘graphic design’ any
more than we can call them ‘art’. The use of such terms is not free from
our own cultural history and baggage, and as Gunnar points out, we
have no real idea why people painted on cave walls. To call what they did
‘communication’ seems a gross oversimplification.

To call language ‘communication’ is also a gross oversimplification.


But sometimes oversimplifications are useful. Our brains, for instance,
are e‹ectively programmed to make ‘oversimplifications’ — quick and
dirty caricatures of circumstances that allow us to find rapid responses.
This can cause all manner of inapposite reactions in the modern, social-
ized world. But without this tendency, our ancestors just wouldn’t
have survived to successfully reproduce — and we wouldn’t be around
to wonder about them. So the question is not one of oversimplification,
but of appositeness. And I think ‘communication’ is the apposite term
here.

Cave paintings and other ancient visual artefacts almost certainly


were communications. That is, the person or persons who produced
them were engaging in a communicative relationship — a conversa-
tion, if you like — with each other and with others (and let’s not forget
us in all this — almost all visual communications have unintended and
unacknowedged audiences who take an interest in them). Using visual
imagery in this way is unique (on this world, at least) to the human
species. But it is also characteristic of us. So here is an immediate point
of connection between ourselves and our neolithic imagemakers, how-
ever else we di‹er.

Also, trying to get outside our own ‘cultural history and baggage’ is
an impossibility. Vico pointed this out more than three centuries ago,

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and his observations are as true today as they were in seventeenth cen-
tury Naples. Yet here again is another point of contact. The ancient
cave painters carried their own baggage, just as we do. It was di‹erent
baggage — baggage we can’t hope to comprehend. But the experience of
being a ‘baggage carrier’ is the same, whether you belong to the stone
or silicon ages.

If one wants to create as expansive as possible a definition of graphic


design, I think it might be possible to say that a graphic designer is a
visual artist who is concerned with design for reproduction. This
means the profession extends back only to the first Chinese use of wood-
blocks. It has only been in the last three or four centuries that mechani-
cal reproduction has been a major factor in the creation of our visual
environment.

But this isn’t strictly accurate, even in the contemporary context. When
I take up a chisel and carve an inscription in a piece of slate, I don’t stop
doing that same thing — call it graphic design, or whatever — that I do
when I assemble artwork for printing, or a ‘page’ for the web. In all
cases, though, I’m engaged in a kind of visual ‘talking’. Communication
is not my favourite term — although its etymology is so lovely that it
deserves to be reinvested with some of its original meaning — but it is
accurate. The letterforms we use come from the architectural masonry
of the Romans, and the scribal activity of the Carolingians. Both, by
your criteria, would be excluded from a definition of graphic design.
To me, though, this can’t make sense — how can I work with their arte-
facts, doing much the same job (putting signs onto buildings, and
words into pages) and yet be doing something di‹erent?

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Kung fu
21 July 1998

Randal:

I would like to reiterate this point. I like the idea of expanding the defini-
tion of graphic design as much as anyone, but it becomes meaningless if
you go too far. Graphic design is not all I do, and I don’t need a defini-
tion of graphic designer which includes everything I am. When I cook, I
am a chef -- not a graphic designer. If my training in graphics influences
my cooking (inspiring me to create stunning plate presentations), that
still doesn’t make what I’m doing graphics rather than cooking.

I half agree with you, but think we worry unecessarily about whether
the term is meaningful in the way we want it to be. One of the reasons
I like ‘graphic design’ is that it is such a bad term — one that nobody is
quite sure what it includes or excludes. Because that is the reality of
our business. I’ve done it for years, and still am not clear what parts of
my day are or are not graphic design. But actually it doesn’t matter.

Jean and Gunnar brought up the series that starred David Carradine,
‘Kung Fu’. And I think it’s worth touching on this before we let it go — be-
cause for many of us it was the first taste (albeit watered down through
the filter of Hollywood) of a ‘comprehensive tradition’. What I mean
by that is a tradition of being and knowing which is experienced rather
than explained. The ‘Grasshopper’ bit seems overdone in retrospect, but
it did strike a chord. Our experience of ‘education’ in the seventies was
of a system where everything — pretty much — could be learned, taught
and conceived in terms of the transfer of information. What the milky
eyed Shaolin monk showed us was that some things — things to do with
what we are, rather than simply what we have retained — need to be
‘caught’. And that this process is very uncertain, sometimes failing
despite the best attempts of teacher, student and circumstances. I think
it is a testament to the quality of that tradition that enought truth was
le· in the program despite the best attempts of media moguls to con-
vert it into entertainment.

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Graphic design is not unlike Kung Fu in that it doesn’t really matter


what we call it, because it has a reality beyond the name. Grasping it
is di›cult and uncertain — and made no easier by the fact that one
can come away from a centre of education with a piece of paper that
insists one knows it. It’s a lifelong pursuit, revealing fresh insights
about old truths at every twist and turn — as much an endless journey
as Carradine’s fictional odyssey in search of his family. And it informs
almost everything we do, which is why it is di›cult to be clear about
when it begins and ends — I for one lack your certainty that it gets le·
behind at the kitchen door. We want to be seen to make graphic design
a ‘subject’, because that is what our societies do with all ‘respectable’
bodies of knowledge. But lurking under the surface, I suspect that
most practising designers also feel that it is more inscrutable and elu-
sive than that.

Now, where’s that damn pebble…

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conversations

Narcissism
28 July 1998

Mike:

Every precolombian ritual burial can be viewed as an ‘installation’; cer-


tainly the use and presence of non-gallery-based works of ritual expres-
sion outside of the western world can be seen as a precursor to and
inspiration for the very art that you dismiss as low-context. Indeed, one
possible context for these (both precolumbian and pomo) works is the
observer’s lack of grounding in the producing culture.

Since Duchamp, every fire-extinguisher and urinal can be interpereted


as a work of art. Taking that view, however, probably says more about
the interpreter’s state of mind than her/his aesthetic sensibilities.

Edward Hall talks about the reaction of the Native American peoples of
the South West — particularly the Hopi — to the intrusion of Anglo’s into
Pueblo life. What he says, I believe, explains just why Native American
rituals can’t be likened to contemporary (urban, white, middle class,
art school educated) concepts, like the ‘installation’.

‘Whenever a white man is put down in the middle of a pueblo,


the Indians must cope with his narcissism as expressed by his
almost total preoccupation with how he is doing (provided he is
well motivated) or how he is being treated (if he is less idealis-
tic). Regardless of motives, behaviour of this sort is threatening
and disruptive to Pueblo life, because the Indians are just the
opposite. Their concern is not with themselves but the group
and how the group is faring. The Indians see what we call nar-
cissism in all whites — a trait that goes far beyond and is much
more inclusive than self-love and individual di‹erence. Since
the Pueblo Indians themselves are not this way, how can they
describe what they themselves do not include in their experi-
ence? And what does the well-motivated, concerned white man

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do when he has devoted much of his life to ‘helping’ the Indians


only to discover that cultural insight reveals him as a disruptive
force in Pueblo life, even though he considers himself an ally.
Why hadn’t any of his Pueblo friends told him this?

If the narcissism and egocentricity of much contemporary conceptual


art is quite obvious to us, how excruciating it must seem to the Hopi.
And how insulted would they feel to have aspects of their culture (or
that of their neighbours or ancestors) explained in terms of such a
fallible construct of the late twentieth century ‘Western’ mind? The
huge di‹erence in perspectives, added to the waywardness and idi-
osyncracity of our own point of view, make this kind of equation an
unreasonable proposition. However, Hall does illustrate just how it is
possible tocome to an understanding of another culture — by deliber-
ately detaching from preconceptions and concentating one’s attention
on observation (rather than analysis). Comprehensive understanding
of another culture may never be possible, but insight into it most cer-
tainly is — provided we can put aside some of our own intellectual and
cultural baggage long enough to look.

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conversations

Suspensions
29 July 1998

michael:

True; but the putting aside you mention is only a superficial suspen-
sion (if you’re not sure about that assertion, consider how much of our
language supposedly contains deeply embedded racial, class, wealth, or
sexist biases) and the insight is Western insight. What we must put aside
is the ‘baggage’ that judges this or that practice as unmodern, undesir-
able, dirty, wrongheaded, senseless, whatever — and also the practices
and customs that seem sensitive, open, receptive, generous, graceful, etc.,
because our judgments of those ‘good’ customs are just as susceptible to
our foreign biases as judgments of ‘bad’ customs, at least until a later
time when their purposes are revealed to us in the context of the society
that supports them.

I don’t believe that ‘putting aside’ need only be a superficial suspen-


sion. Many people can and do adapt to alien cultures, becoming fluent
in languages initially foreign to them. And of course there is the para-
doxical issue that some ‘aliens’ become better observers of a culture
than the ‘natives’ — witness de Tocqueville in c18 America.

It is clearly impossible for us to have the world disclosed to us through


the medium of Japanese language and culture in the way that a
Japanese child has — if we were born into a white Anglo Saxon family
in Britain or America. But there is actually nothing to stop a person of
western origin becoming su›ciently ‘Japanized’ to be made the ceo
of Matsushita, achieve celebrity as a writer of Haiku or even become
a Zen master. When we were in San Francisco in the spring, we found
ourselves in the middle of the ‘Cherry Blossom Festival’ — and I was
intrigued by a stall that sported Japanese swords collected by a local
group studying traditional swordmaking under a traditional Japanese

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swordsmith. Such was the dedication of of this group that some could
undoubtedly become rated experts by cognoscienti on the other side of
the Pacific. It is possible to make that bridge.

But by no means everybody can make this kind of adjustment. Culture,


as Hall points out, is like an iceberg — the bigger, and more dangerous
(for the unwary), part of it is below the waterline of consciousness.
Whether someone succeeds or fails to make a cultural adaptation
depends in large part on how familiar they are with the less-than-con-
scious parts of their own culture — how observant they are of non-verbal
communications, and how well they come to know themselves. Even
so, all cultures are concerned with the same kinds of things, and we
start our encounter with another culture with the tremendous boon
of having already acquired such a system ourselves — if we choose to see
it as a boon, and not as a curse.

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Scarcity
14 August 1998

nancy:

It seems that we do most of our thinking with our preconscious minds


-- to wit, our emotions or instincts. This means that most human activ-
ites are governed by non-linear, non-logical processes. And most human
activities should be so governed. Here’s where I talk about global/per-
ceptual skills again, such as sorting the laundry or playing the violin.
These kinds of daily activities requires us to simultaneously coordinate
thousands of choices for physical actions with perceptual cues and pre-
determined goals. Linear/logical thinking interferes. Ever tried to follow
the techniques you learned in a book while you were out on the golf
course or juggling bean bags? So, yeah, a lot of what we do isn’t ‘smart’.
And that’s exactly why advertisers and designers seek to tap into audi-
ence emotions.

Most of the ‘smartness’ of the human brain consists in its ability to


filter out information. But, of course, this involves decisions being made
about which information is relevant, and which isn’t. It also involves
making quick and dirty caricatures based on that information.
Looming shadow, loud thundering noise, strong whi¤ — hairy mam-
moth coming up behind, get out of the way!

Unfortunately, it is exactly these kinds of templates — essential to


our ancestors’ survival — that make us susceptible to manipulation.
A simple one is the scarcity proposition — if we believe something is
going to be in short supply, if becomes much more desirable. No doubt
this is a legacy of realizing that opportunities had to be seized, or
lost forever. If one saw a bush laden with fruit, one picked and ate it,
because tomorrow it might all be rotting on the ground. The advertiser
who announces ‘Discount sale — all prices slashed to 50%, for one day
only!’ plays on this susceptibility. And although we didn’t really want a

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new garage door, the thought that we might miss such a unique oppor-
tunity makes the o‹er irresistible. The mechanism is crass — yes — but
the template is crude (and undiscriminating).

The various factors that make us susceptible to manipulation are bril-


liantly described by Dr Robert Cialdini in his book Influence — which is,
in my mind, a ‘must read’ (also a very enjoyable, funny and insight-
ful book). Cialdini devotes a chapter to scarcity, for instance, which
he illustrates in a number of ways — including a hillarious account of
how he nearly got sucked in to going to a ‘for one day only, ever’ visit to
inner sanctum of the Mormon Temple in Phoenix. Cialdini is a social
psychologist, and his interest in these things is from a psychological
and evolutionary standpoint. This subject are also discussed in various
marketing textbooks, but from a totally distorted perspective — mar-
keteers would have you believe that ‘cognitive dissonance’, for exam-
ple, was invented to help them shi· product.

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Governance
14 August 1998

daniel:

Nancy — at the risk of being nit picky — you don’t mean this as purist
as appears in your statement do you? It sounds as if these activities are
at some point free of governance. What I mean is that the process you
are describing is by nature self-referential and the flow of information
is both directions. From the other levels of unconscious thought toward
conscious thought and back the other way. I can’t imagine any activ-
ity that isn’t so governed. I think it is the amount of governance that is
in question — excessive linear thinking can get in the way but when
assimilating new experience it is very important to ‘focus’ on those most
recently learned adjustments until they become ‘internalized’, ‘auto-
matic’ and ‘unconscious’ and even a·er that there is some degree of over-
sight taking place.

It is interesting that you equate conscious with governance. Most of the


evidence seems to show that we are governed by factors that rarely enter
into consciousness, and that our conscious mind distorts or censors
what is really happening to suit a constructed self image. An example is
the instinctive tendency to try cover our mouths when we are lying, or
when we think that someone else is lying — which manifests in all sorts
of hand to face behaviour (like nose scratching). Ask the freelancer who
has just showed you the big project he did for Landor why he scratched
his nose at that point in the interview, and he’ll tell you it was because
it was itchy. And he’ll probably believe this explanation.

But this also works the other way around. Ask the interviewer why she
didn’t believe the freelancer’s story about having designed the FedEx
logo (or whatever) and she’ll say that she had a hunch he wasn’t being
straight. In fact, she will have noticed — beneath the threshold of con-

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sciousness — a cluster of gestures, intonation, and other subtle signals


that signal dishonesty. The ‘governing’ factor was a smart, but uncon-
scious part of her mind, which messaged the consciousness — but the
consciousness, unable to explain how she arrived at that knowledge,
comes up with an unsatisfactory answer.
Most of our behaviour seems to be of this kind. We’re driven by things
we don’t see, and — as Nancy suggests, these are o·en e‹ectively han-
dled (chanelled, defused, redirected) — by talents we don’t know we
have. But consciousness,which has a conceit that it is in control and
driving things (whereas, like senior management in any organization,
it largely ignored and usually the last to know) — paints a distorted pic-
ture of what’s going on (again, just like the ceo claiming that he was
responsible for the company’s success).

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Graphic design books


24 August 1998

Michael:

As for graphic design books, there are many out there, and I will defer to
other subscribers to recommend good ones.

In the end, though, graphic design books would seem to be about as


much use as trying to learn kissing by watching the couple at the next
table. That is, none of the really important bits are visible, you’re prob-
ably never going to be smooching with either of them, and your obser-
vations quickly become clouded by the desire to do it for yourself. If
you’re a novice, it’s unlikely you will come away any the wiser. And if
you’re beyond that, you’ll just end up as a voyeur.

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Teach yourself
28 August 1998

randy:

Ok… where can I take a crash course in the basis principles of design? I
don’t beleive these distinctions are something folks can just dabble in or
self-teach themselves.

Sure they are — the same way we teach ourselves to hold conversations,
to express our feelings, to make love. Graphic design is learned through
doing, doing, doing. There are no rules that are worth anything, save
those that you discover for yourself. All that a course will do — whether
it is a one day crash introduction or a seven year PhD — is to provide an
environment where you are constantly brought back, confronted with
the task in hand. But it will also mislead you that there are authorities,
experts, conoisseurs, masters. All of which will have to be subsequently
unlearned. In graphic design, there are really only travellers. Some of
us have been on the road a long time, travelled to strange places, expe-
rienced wondrous (and not so wondrous) things, worn out more boot-
leather. But we’re all either en-route, or fallen by the wayside.

Looking back at other people’s solutions is counterproductive, unless


you’ve reached the point of being able to see in them living responses
to specific circumstances, and not as a pallette of dead styles to be imi-
tated, elaborated or otherwise appropriated. And the only way one can
reach this point is, again, by doing, doing, doing. Mentors, too, can
be unhelpful, unless you’ve grasped that the value of someone else’s
opinion is to help you sharpen your own discrimination and judg-
ment — and not as a substitute for it. Real learning comes from taking
risks and making mistakes — betting on your instincts, and finding (for
yourself) their failings.

Fortunately, fate has ordained that there are ‘starter clients’ for ‘starter
designers’ to make their mistakes with.

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Fighting fires
28 August 1998

randal:

The majority of demand for design in the ‘real’ world is really demand
for bad design. It is only by setting up ideal job requirements, putting
in completely uneconomical amounts of time on a job, and holding alo·
perhaps unrealistic ideas of what design can be that one really learns
quickly what one can achieve. A person driven to be a designer will even-
tually learn to create exercises for themselves which meet those unrealis-
tic goals (and put in the required months and years of unrecompensed
work). It is sometimes easier to let a teacher help you and make you do
them.

‘Unrealistic’ ideas of design will remain just that — unrealistic. Design


is — and always should be — about a real process, a process of communi-
cation between real people.

If I suggested that to be any good as a fire-fighter, you should avoid the


mediocrity of ‘real fires’ and only apply your talents to exercises that
meet unrealistic goals, you’d be right to think I was completely o¤ my
head. So what’s di‹erent about design?

Just as with fires, no two circumstances that designers have to meet are
likely to be the same — and any apparent similarity should be treated
with more caution than confidence. In Fire School, they can create con-
trolled blazes that allow you to test all the skills — and let’s not forget
the teamwork — that you’ve been taught. But faced with your first real
fire, the outcome is likely to be scary and unpredictable. It’s up to you
show your mettle, to demonstrate your knowledge and discipline in
the face of uncertainty. Then, the person you look to isn’t the theory
teacher, but the firefighter who has already got a good few blazes under
his belt.

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Learning to be a student
31 August 1998

gunnar:

I’ve taught at a few places where most of the faculty (including me) were
working designers. There is a tendency for each teacher to try to supply
the ‘real world’ assignments that they are sure that the students aren’t
otherwise getting. The result is o·en that students get a mishmash of
their teachers’ last problems without anyone really asking what students
need to know and how can that be taught in a reasonable order.

One of the roots of this problem is a misunderstanding ‘real world’


educators have about their role. Succinctly put, academia exists to
teach people how to be students — not to teach them to be designers (or
anything else). A thousand years of history has gone into all the struc-
tures, methods and trappings to do this — and it’s not going to be over-
turned by someone going in and setting a ‘real world’ project.

I’ve ‘taught’ both in and out of Colleges, and the di‹erences are sig-
nificant. It has always been easier to teach in the workplace, because
the ‘student’s’ motivation (and desire to please) is greater. Workplace
learning is underlined by the bottom line, and consequently the gloves
are o¤. ‘Here we do things like this’ — Eric Gill’s famous line — is a tre-
mendously potent instrument. I’ve also found, both in my own experi-
ence and from watching those who have worked with me, that more is
‘caught’ rather than ‘taught’ in the workplace. It’s awfully di›cult to
factor ‘caught’ into an examined curriculum.

Having said that, there are exciting things that one can do within the
structured — but unpressurized — College environment. It’s not easy
for a creative director to suggest to a junior that she look at Picasso,
read Plato or go to Paris — but a College Tutor can do a great deal to help
a student open her or his mind to possibilities that will greatly help his
or her development as a designer.

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Beginner’s mind
3 September 1998

‘reader’:

When ‘Mr. Cheapo’ meets ‘Mr. Mean, gets the job, delivers fancylooking
PrintShop-files to a PostScript based service bureau, and there are six
spot colors, lowres images, bitmaps with rgb, mixed up with cmyk out
of print range, and the service bureau encounters problems, and who is
to pay the bill?

This is not inevitably the case, and it is more than a little unfair on
the unqualified designer. There are lots of cowboys, in design as well
as outside it, and they have to answer for their own actions. But any
responsible person will want to make sure they are doing things prop-
erly. If they carefully read the documentation that came with the pro-
grams they use, they won’t make these mistakes. Also, most printers
and output bureaux are o·en incredibly helpful to the newcomer,
qualified or otherwise — and enjoy working with someone who is keen
to learn. Rarely does anything in real life happen the way the textbook
suggests, and dealing with real life print jobs is the only way to acquire
a working knowledge of repro.

Nor is the colour issue a true caricature of the di‹erence between the
trained and the untrained. When I started, the only thing my clients
could a‹ord was one (or, at most two) colour printing (process colour
was then considerably more expensive). So I learned to do inventive
things with black and white, which discipline has proved indispensi-
ble. I later discovered this to be typical of others who came into design
in a similar way. Subsequently, when I was working at ‘name’ consul-
tancies, I found there were graduates from prestigious Colleges who
insisted on four colour plus specials plus varnishes as the indispen-
sible requirement of being able to demonstrate their skills. It didn’t
impress the clients — nor, for that matter, did it impress me.

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Sometimes, also, the unschooled approach is — through its naive-


ty — capable of delivering the simple solution that has that degree of
‘inevitability’ that characterises the greatest design. The College envi-
ronment tends to encourage designers to look for quirkier, more indi-
vidualistic and more complex solutions — o·en these are too clever to
work e‹ectively. As in Zen, it’s the ‘beginners mind’ that we should all
be looking for.

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Older but wiser


24 September 1998

Neeleesh:

I’ve just graduated from a course that ‘trained’ me to be a design consult-


ant. Design was seen as a wholistic (no not a religious thing but as one
subject) practice and not separated by disciplines and we were taught
the ins and outs of product, graphics, nmedia and eco design with a
focus (practical) on one discipline. All good and well but a consultant
needs experience and it can take a lifetime to get experience in just one
of those fields. But I can see the advantages the course has in relation to
consultancy as now I have an overall view of design and can impliment
strategies in di‹erent fields rather than stick to the one discipline I know,
well once the experiences start piling up.
It does take ‘a lifetime’ to acquire experience in any and every field.
Perhaps one of the most poignant lessons of growing older is to show
us just how little we knew ten (or even five) years ago, how much we
fool ourselves about what we know now, and how little we appreciate
what there still is to know. If designers grow somewhat less ‘creative’ as
they get older, there is at least a chance they may grow wiser. And I like
to hope that one day we may have an approach to design that reverses
the blend of ‘hi creativity’ and correspondingly little wisdom that is
currently fashionable. But I doubt if this is the same thing as ‘Design
Consultancy’!

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Assimilation
27 September 1998

I was reading something the other day about the relentless way com-
merce appropriates ‘style’ — so much so that what is featured in a radi-
cal magazine one month appears on a billboard selling some consumer
product the next. It was one of those pessimistic ‘what can we do about
it?’ pieces. Needless to say, I didn’t have much sympathy for its whiney
tone — or its rather crude characterisation of late capitalism as a kind
of rapacious monster exploiting the innocent designer.

But it did set me thinking. Not least because I wondered what will
happen to people like Emigre. Here in the UK there’s currently a
massive poster campaign for toothpaste that uses the typeface Keedy
Sans — so well, in fact, that for many people it may well become an icon
of the dentrifice industry, rather than a subversive statement of the
early nineties. Likewise, another campaign is using Rudy Vanderlans’
‘Suburban’ — which has been tamed by the might of advertising into
quite a sweet little scripty face. Presumably, though, as the orders flood
in from Madison Avenue, Rudy Vanderlans and Zuzanna Licko don’t
feel too much of an ethical dilemma.

Of course this is one of those issues where some design history helps.
Anyone who knew how 50s corporate America embraced modernism,
and turned it from the rhetorical device of a few European reds into the
voice of the establishment, would see that the scattered seeds of post-
modern design could scarcely avoid the same fate. But I’m intrigued by
the paradox that avant-garde graphic designers are constantly trying
to stay one step ahead of acceptability, and yet in so doing focus on the
one thing that poses no real threat to the appropriators — style.

However it struck me that this stu¤, which now looks so tame, did once
seem disturbing, shocking, alternative. What happened to that edge,
exactly? Well, I’ve come to the conclusion that it had to do with the

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framing, the context in which the work was seen — and not much to do
with the work itself. If this is true, it would be a bitter pill for graphic
designers to swallow — that it is the climate of ideas that filters the way
we receive design rather than any quality of that design itself. And
that as the context changes, the meaning of the work mutates in ways
over which the designer has no control. But how else can we explain
the historical facts? For instance the way that modernism, which was
once seen as so subversive, is now the face of every trendy metropoli-
tan eaterie. Or the way that Carson’s The End of Print has become a style
manual for marketeers selling to bored kids?

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Backwards into the future


29 September 1998

peter:

I have seen clothes go full circle in approx 20 years. When you consider
that there are style changes every year or two, and the number of vari-
ations possible, to have gone through all the permutations and back
again in around twenty years is indicative of the high rate of change.
That was before the mass popularity of the internet that has propelled
the rate of exposure to new things to what must be an all-time high.

I think, however, that it must be a pretty small circle. Twenty years


ago, many people were dressed in a similar fashion to the way they
are today — and have been through most of the last two decades. 1978
was two years a·er punk — I seem to remember worn denim, white tee
shirts and black leather jackets being generally popular (pretty much
what James Dean wore in the fi·ies, and what I’m wearing today).
Compare this similarity between 1978 and 1998 with the di‹erence
between 1908 and 1928, when there really was a radical change.

Even more than television I think the web has overloaded ‘nextbigthing’
meter. Look at the way we went from single font text on grey background
to all-singing and dancing multimedia with interactivity in around five
years. Nobody knows what’s going on anymore.

Well, the web is just about catching up with the cinema and television.
Perhaps the only significant di‹erence is that you can ‘push’ a button
on screen to make something happen (but this is much overestimated,
since what one can actually achieve through this kind of ‘interactivity’
remains sorely constrained). It’s now even possible to have web pages
that look like graphic design. Almost.

But it’s a big jump from this to suggest that nobody knows what’s going
on. The nineties has actually been a fairly conservative decade — most
of the big ideas are just extrapolations of things that were conceived

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decades ago (the Internet iteself, for instance). Likewise graphic design
has spent most of its energies reacting to the legacy of the past (it’s no
coincidence that words beginning with ‘post-’ dominate the theorists’
vocabulary). Even the future is still conceived in ways that derive from
Ridley Scott’s and William Gibson’s 1980s technological dystopias.

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What happens when we communicate?


11 September 2006

At first glance, this looks like an obvious question. So influenced


are we now by communications technologies that most of us would
probably answer: ‘we transfer information, of course!’ The problem is,
however, that when we look at what goes on in our everyday interac-
tion, information exchange doesn’t appear to be all that significant.
Much of what we say, for instance, is o·en already known to the person
we’re talking to. This is the ‘Hi Honey, I’m home!’ syndrome. And for
some time linguists have been telling us that ‘information’ comes a
poor third to ‘involvement’ and ‘persuasion’ in the purposes for which
we use language. As feminist linguist Deborah Tannen writes in her
That’s not what I meant!: ‘Very little of what is said is important for the
information contained in the words. But that doesn’t mean that the
talk isn’t important. It is crucially important, as a way of showing that
we’re involved with each other, and how we feel about being involved.
Our talk is saying something about our relationship.’

Even if we look at communication from an evolutionary perspective,


as Merlin Donald did in Origins of the Modern Mind, it’s apparent that
there was no driving need to exchange information behind the evolu-
tion of language. The things our early hominid ancestors needed to do
didn’t require words to communicate. And this has hardly changed
today. Many complex activities can still be picked up simply by watch-
ing someone doing them. It’s not necessary to be told how to change
a tyre, swim backstroke, ride a bicycle or bind a book. And, actually,
explanation can o·en get in the way.

Robin Dunbar proposes an interesting theory about the origins of


human communication in his Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of
Language. He suggests that language came about as a substitute for
grooming. Primates comb through each others’ fur, picking out insects
and bits of twig, as a way of managing relationships in their groups.

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Who grooms who is important, and it establishes a pecking order that


helps keep the group together. However when our remote ancestors
started living in bigger groups, the amount of time that needed to be
invested in grooming – which is a one-to-one activity – became unman-
ageable. Language, Dunbar suggests, was a means of achieving the
same ends, but allowed for more e›cient one-to-many exchanges. His
theory certainly makes sense of much of the kind of day to day commu-
nicating we all do: talking not because we have something important
to say, but because the engagement with each other is important.

I’d like to go a step further than this, and make a suggestion that ties
information back in with this idea of communicating as a form of
interaction. This is that we should see communication as an exchange
of energy. Energy meaning here something that e‹ects a change of
state. And interacting with each other is clearly a way of changing each
other’s state. We only have to look at everyday conversation, where one
person can delight, thrill, horrify, intimidate or seduce another simply
through the process of talking. But the same thing can also happen in
impersonal communications, too: something written or recorded by
someone we don’t know can move us just as much as a conversation
with a loved one. Plato or Homer, for instance, can reach us across cul-
tures – and across the centuries – to bring about a significant change,
not only in what and how we think, but in how we feel and act, too. In
the same way that physicist David Bohm described matter as ‘frozen
light’, we could describe information as ‘frozen interaction’ – poten-
tial for transforming our thinking, feeling and behaviour, locked up in
the content of the communication.

Looked at in this way, ‘information’ and ‘presentation’ – content and


form – aren’t separate, but are part and parcel of the same process.
Primates communicate energy, maintaining and changing the politics
of the group, by running their hands over each other. Early hominids
learned they could achieve the same thing with several others at the
same time by articulating meaningful sounds. Later humans found
that energy could be transferred to a far bigger group through visual

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marks – with the advantage that the ‘speaker’ didn’t need to be physi-
cally present with the ‘listeners’. Today, we do the same thing on an
even vaster scale, using new technologies. But what really matters is
the process that takes place in the individual – the change in their
state, as a result of this energetic encounter. In the case of ‘Hi Honey,
I’m home!’, this is the day-to-day maintenance of a loving relationship.
In the case of Plato or Homer, it can be a complete revitalisation of our
intellect, emotions and behaviour.

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Not paying enough attention


12 September 2006

In advertising and journalism, at least, there is some awareness of the


importance of attention. A snappy headline or a particularly arresting
image is o·en described as ‘attention grabbing’. And there is a recog-
nition that, in a crowded marketplace, attracting and holding atten-
tion is not just desirable, but essential. Otherwise the ‘attention factor’
can seem something of a Cinderella in communications. We take it for
granted, make use of it every day, yet rarely we pause to think about it.

Attention is a key component of all human communication, from the


non-verbal to the abstrusely intellectual. Indeed, it could be described
as the key component. If we don’t have someone’s attention we are not
communicating. There is almost nothing else we can say that about.
If we don’t share a common language, we can still communicate. If
the medium is not functioning properly – a breaking-up telephone
line, for instance – we can still communicate. If the message isn’t fully
understood, we can still communicate. But once the other person isn’t
listening any more, it doesn’t matter how well everything else is work-
ing. There is no communication.

When we start to investigate attention, this totally unremarkable eve-


ryday faculty becomes extremely interesting. Attention is involved in
everything human beings do, by no means just communication. It is
tied up, in a fundamental way, with who we are – with our most basic
sense of self. It is also something most of us have very little control
over. Try to focus your attention on to a particular object, it doesn’t
matter what, and maintain it without distraction. I’ll bet that a·er
only a few seconds your mind is already wandering o¤, taking it’s own
course. We can’t even direct our own concentration, let alone the trail
of associations that lead us away from it.

It’s this, in fact, that makes the relationship between attention and

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communication all the more extraordinary. Because when we are


paying attention to somebody (or, for that matter, to a communica-
tion they have created) we are able to maintain the focus of our atten-
tion, o·en for quite long periods at a time. OK, there are situations
– and people – that switch us o¤. But unless we su‹er from some sort of
attention deficit, these are not the norm. Most of the time communica-
tion engages us: it attracts and holds our attention. You’re with me so
far, right?

Attention has many di‹erent facets, all of which are fascinating. The
one that concerns me most here is the phenomenon of ‘paying atten-
tion’. Something strange happens when someone pays attention to us,
that has the ability to make us feel much better. We take pleasure in
receiving attention (assuming, that is, that it is not ‘unwelcome’ atten-
tion!). It has the ability to enhance our moods, boost our confidence
and self-esteem, a‹ect the way we think and feel about things. Even
negative attention can be preferable to none at all, as anyone who has
small children will testify. Attention has an e‹ect apparently regard-
less of the content or context. It’s being attended to that is important.

One of the least recognised e‹ects of paying attention to someone, but


one that can be easily demonstrated, is its ability to moderate their
beliefs, feelings, positions. The simple act of listening to a person who
holds extreme, even distorted, beliefs can help them begin to so·en
their position. But by listening I don’t mean agreeing with them – just
accepting them as a worthwhile human being and giving them the
attention they need. Indeed, engaging too much with a person’s beliefs
– debating and challenging and arguing with them – can have exactly
the opposite e‹ect of entrenching them even more strongly.
How this works is still something of a mystery, but it is clear that it
has nothing to do with the beliefs per se. More likely is that attend-
ing works on the sense of social isolation that goes with extreme posi-
tions, on the sensation of being marginalised that allows paranoia
and hostility to flourish. We’ve all had the feeling of being ignored
and neglected by someone, believing all sorts of negative things about

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our relationship with them, and then a surprise meeting or telephone


call suddenly makes us feel much better. Psychological research sug-
gests that even unrelated experiences can improve perceptions in
this way: subjects who ‘found’ a planted five dollar bill on the floor of
an American shopping mall responded more positively to questions
about the happiness of their marriages, their satisfaction with their
jobs, their general state of health and happiness than a control group
who didn’t. They even claimed their washing machines broke down
less o·en! Their attention needs had been unexpectedly met, in this
case by a trivial inanimate object.

However, there are many marginalised people in our societies who


are not receiving enough attention. When a child isn’t attended to, he
starts playing up. But when an adult doesn’t receive enough attention,
the consequences can be far more serious – from mental (and even
physical) illness through to outbursts of anger and violence. We’ve all
seen elderly people given short shri· in a shop, for example, because
they wanted more attention with their transaction – to pause and talk,
rather than just to pay and walk away. Isolated and lonely, their atten-
tion demands aren’t being met. Most of us probably don’t feel we have
any responsibility for providing for them, either, but the consequences
of not doing so are potentially so serious that we have to ask ourselves
whether we can really a‹ord not to. We now have plenty of evidence of
what can happen when groups of people feel alienated and ignored.

I would suggest that giving attention should be part of the ‘licence to


operate’ of every organisation, a fundamental of the contract that it
has with the society it serves. A·er all, organisations also make atten-
tion demands, believing they have a right to ‘grab’ our attention for
their own ends. And helping employees to understand the value of
paying attention – which in skilled hands can be qualitative, rather
than timewasting – can be good for business, too. Even though we may
not always recognise this in ourselves, there is no doubt that we like
attention along with our change. Sometimes we even buy things just
for the attention – a point that is well worth considering.

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Engineering trust
13 September 2006

It’s not hard to imagine a time, not very far hence, when it will be pos-
sible to do a ‘Yellow Pages’ type search on the Internet and get an ‘eBay’
type response. Want a plumber? 297 people gave positive feedback
on this chap and only one negative. Looking for a Lawyer? “Lapwing,
Roebuck and Whelp were wonderfully helpful with my divorce, but
when I eventually got the bill it was more than three times what I had
been led to believe!” There is a kind of inevitability behind what people
are calling ‘The Social So·ware Revolution’ that makes this kind of
thing not just possible, but very very likely indeed.

eBay hasn’t solved the problem with trust, but it has given us a remark-
able mechanism with which to address it. If you think about it, the
kind of endorsement that is provided by a number of happy customers
through a trusted intermediary is about as good as we can get. It has
the benefit of saving us the background research we know we ought
to do, but never get around to, while giving us some genuine peace of
mind. And in areas where we are taking a real risk, with someone we
don’t know at all, it makes a huge di‹erence.

What interests me most about this phenomenon is the way that it


threatens to make the concept of the ‘brand’ obsolete, at least in the
form that we know it. Brands came into existence as a guarantee of
quality and consistency, at the beginning of the age of mass produc-
tion and national distribution. A brand is a ‘promise’, as marketeers
like to describe it. Unfortunately, however, in an era where the con-
sumer hasn’t had much opportunity to answer back, these promises
have frequently been overstated – and under-substantiated. The experi-
ence rarely turns out to match the expectations.

The eBay model turns this concept of the brand inside-out. Instead of
relying on the vendor’s claims, it puts their reputation firmly in the

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hands of their customers. If the experience was good, one can hope that
they will recognise it. If it was bad, on the other hand, one can almost
guarantee that they will say so. Instead of rhetoric about ‘putting cus-
tomers first’ or ‘being committed to quality of service’, it’s possible to
see the real, unvarnished, performance.
Of course we’ve had something similar in the form of professional
reviews for many years. Restaurant and entertainment columns appear
daily in newspapers and can be highly influential – a damning remark
from a theatre critic can still close a play. There have also been periodi-
cals like Which conducting comprehensive tests of similar products to
see which is the best buy. In some areas, like computers, hi-fi or cars,
there are competing monthly magazines devoted to making compari-
sons and reviewing products. Enthusiasts wouldn’t dream of choosing
without first hearing what they have to say.

But there is something di‹erent about what is happening in ‘Web 2.0’


that moves the whole idea of the empowered consumer up a notch. It
has to do with the creation of communities of interest, and the way
they are taking over the role of the expert. In The Wisdom of Crowds
Business Columnist James Surowiecki shows how, under the right cir-
cumstances, groups are o·en much smarter in making decisions than
individuals. We can listen to Jeremy Clarkson telling us that the people
carrier we were thinking of buying is a dog. But much as we might
enjoy his opinions, we also know that they are influenced by the fact
that he frequently gets to drive Porsches and Ferraris as well. What’s he
making a comparison with? The fact that several hundred people like
us had good experiences with this particular car, and only a few had
bad, says a whole lot more.
One of the implications of this revolution is that we will have to recon-
cile ourselves to the end of hyperbole: we’re entering an age of grum-
bling realism. Human beings are slow to praise, but quick to blame.
Ask anyone who has ever given out feedback forms to an audience. You
will hear how people who seemed all smiles and excitement ended
up giving just an ‘average’ score, while others who surely benefitted

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a great deal wrote lengthy complaints about the co‹ee or the air con-
ditioning. Marketeers might pretend that such and such a product is
the answer to our dreams, but even the most satisfied customers are
unlikely to give it more than a “yeah, it’s OK!”

The challenge for marketing in this new era is going to be one of


engagement. Communities of customers tend to be feisty, critical and
realistic. Perhaps the most interesting example of this in recent years
have been Macintosh users. Apple Computer has benefited enormously
from having a group of people who believed in their products and who
evangelised for them on an informal basis. But Macintosh users, who
were the only community based around an individual product brand
to be represented in mass circulation magazines, have by no means
towed the company line. They frequently disputed Apple’s corporate
strategy, debunked its CEOs, trashed its marketing and deprecated var-
ious product lines. Instead of passive consumers, they became active,
articulate stakeholders.

Web 2.0, with its emphasis on social so·ware and networking, prom-
ises to accelerate and spread this kind of active consumerism across
pretty much all sectors, from government to b2b. Thinking of voting in
a local election? 495 people said that Cllr Perkins dealt with their prob-
lems in four to six weeks. But, hang on, what’s this about him here?
Want to give some money to charity? 56% of funds raised by ‘Flowering
Deserts’ went for work in the field – putting them amongst the top ten
performers. And so on. By putting our institutions into a virtual gold-
fish bowl where all can see and comment, the technology is bringing
about real transparency.

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Lines and boxes


28 September 2006

Over the last few days, I’ve been playing with a fascinating program
called ‘Omnigra‡e’. Although I don’t consider myself a particularly
analytical person, I o·en have to create ‘box and line’ diagrams and
this is a very elegant tool for doing so. Indeed, it’s the kind of so·ware
I have always loved – the kind that with just one click can take a typical
hierarchical tree structure and turn it into a ‘bubble’ diagram, with
all the elements radiating from a single hub. And everything is beauti-
fully spaced, too. None of the lines cross over, nothing gets garbled as
a result of the conversion. Needless to say, it’s a Mac only program. But
the point of this piece isn’t to sell someone else’s so·ware (or to get you
using a di‹erent kind of computer). Because, despite the pleasure I’ve
got from this beautiful and clever little application, it has also helped
me to see some of the real limitations of the whole lines and boxes
paradigm.

The Mulla Nasruddin – the butt of a thousand Sufi jokes, who is either
a fool or a wise man (depending on how you interpret his antics) – once
observed: ‘There are two kinds of people: those who divide everything
into two kinds, and those who don’t...’ And I have to admit I have prob-
lems with the whole idea of ‘analysis’, of breaking things down into
labelled parts as a way of understanding them. Not that it doesn’t work:
clearly, it does. Nearly all of our technologies have come from someone
looking at a phenomenon, a process, a system, and turning it into a
lines and boxes diagram. Treating things in this way makes them con-
trollable. It doesn’t matter whether you’re designing a chemical plant,
building a website or running a department. In every case the analysis
is helping you to identify the necessary components and determine
what sort of sequence they need to be arranged in. Nothing wrong with
that, except what gets le· out.

Putting things into boxes emphasises entities rather than relation-

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ships, yet it’s o·en the relationships that are the most important part:
the lines that connect the boxes. Consider a simple example. We have
three people: Peter, Brian and Sammy. Peter is Brian’s father, so let’s
put them in separate boxes and join them with a line. Brian is Sammy’s
father, so ditto. That probably seems quite straightforward, and it is if
we are considering the three individuals, and the fact of their being
connected. But suppose that instead we are interested in the experi-
ence of having, and being, a father. Then everything is reversed – sud-
denly it’s the lines that we’re interested in, and the people in the boxes
much less so. What’s more the lines become much more complex than
we’ve represented because they mean di‹erent things depending
on which direction you follow them. Brian’s relationship with Peter
– son to father – is not the same as Peter’s relationship with Brian. It’s
a quite di‹erent experience being someone’s son to being their father.
Something that Peter will understand, because his relationship to
Sammy, whilst obviously being unique and personal and not reducible
to a generality, is of a similar kind to Peter’s relationship to him (and of
a quite di‹erent kind to his relationship to Peter). Our diagram fails to
represent both the two way nature of these links, and the connections
between what are shown as separate relationships.

Let’s push this a little further. Brian, who I’m going to put at the centre
of my diagram, is also connected to Francesca, Sammy’s mother, Rose
his sister, Qasim his boss, Winston his friend. He’s got six boxes around
him, with six lines. But each of those lines means something com-
pletely di‹erent. Having a brother is totally di‹erent to having a hus-
band. Friendship can be said (at least, in a very general way) to mean
the same in both directions, while the employer-employee relation-
ship clearly cannot. So at best, our diagram can show how individuals
are connected (emphasis on individuals). And Brian being surrounded
by six separated people doesn’t really tell us anything: it’s a ‘so what?’
kind of diagram. However, if Rose is Qasim’s neighbour, and Francesca
turns out to be having an a‹air with Winston, and Sammy is teaching
Peter how to download free music onto his iPod, we’ve got some more
links in there and the diagram is beginning to model a pattern of con-

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nectedness that might otherwise be complicated to explain.

Supposing, though, we turn it around and model how individuals are


connected (emphasis on connected). Brian, in the middle, has these
six links around him. And who is Brian? He is the person who lives up
to the expectations, assumptions and roles these links demand: he’s
‘Dad’ ‘Son’ ‘Darling’ (and, of course, ‘Brian who must never find out’),
‘Bruv’, ‘Deputy Assistant Marketing Manager’ and ‘Bry, are you free
for a drink?’. The only person who’s missing from this constellation of
di‹erent Brians is the one that comes from the link between Brian and
Brian: ‘Me!’. Should the seven Brians really all be in the same box? Is the
Brian whose dogged loyalty so endears him to Qasim the same as the
Brian Francesca finds so unexciting? No, because Qasim can’t a‹ord to
lose him and Francesca is wondering whether she should.

Okay, what’s this soap opera got to do with the kinds of diagrams we all
need to produce? Lots, in fact. Because although our day to day models
may be less colourful, we face exactly the same problems of exaggerat-
ing the boxes and downplaying the lines. What goes in the boxes isn’t
as stable, consistent or united as the diagram suggests. And the rela-
tionships that we represent with the lines lose most of the information
they can give us through such a simplistic depiction. In fact, in almost
any situtation we choose to model, it’s the relationships that define the
entities. Circumstances alter cases: context is everything. If we look at
ourselves, this should be obvious: I may be chief executive of Bloggo
enterprises, but when I’m changing my daughter’s nappy I’m a poor
substitute for Mummy. “Do you know who I am?” “Yes, Mr Prescott, but
you’re still getting a ticket because your Jaguar is parked on a double
yellow line!” Emphasising boxes give us control, but few opportunities
for understanding. Emphasising lines, on the other hand, facilitates
understanding. Particularly if we don’t feel the need to control.

One day, I like to fantasise, I might get to play with a program that
doesn’t just turn one style of diagram into another, but can at the click
of a button foreground the relationships and diminish the entities, or
vice versa. Now that would be something!

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The end of Leadership


29 September 2006

In recent years ‘leadership’ has become a boom industry in manage-


ment circles, resulting in a deluge of programmes, books, seminars
and gurus. Everybody aspires to be a leader these days, it seems. Do a
google search on ‘leadership’ and it will return 270,000,000 entries.
Yes, that’s right, a mind-boggling two hundred and seventy million
web pages that cater to this demand! By my reckoning, that is one entry
per twenty four people on the earth. (Based on a global population of
6,530,000,000 in August 2006).

But what about the followers? Searching ‘followership’ on google gives


a mere 210,000 entries. If we use the respective numbers of pages as an
indication of the appetite to lead or follow, that results in an equally
astonishing one follower for every 1,286 would-be leaders! Surely some-
thing’s got to be wrong here? If everybody wants to be a chief, who’s
going to be the indians? And that, to my mind, is the really noteworthy
thing about this. Not the desire to be in control, respected, directing
things. But the collapse of any interest in being led.

We can see this in the whole phenomenon of celebrity. Vast amounts


of attention is given by the world’s media to various kinds of ‘celebri-
ties’, most of whom, frankly, are non-entities. People are interested in
them not because they believe in them, admire them, are prepared to
take their stand behind them, but because they want what the celeb-
rities have got. We don’t want our celebrities put on a pedestal, like
the heroes of yesteryear (Scott of the Antarctic, Lawrence of Arabia,
Florence Nightingale), out of reach of our prosaic aspirations. We wan’t
them pulled down to our level, or below. Revealed to be rude, lying,
coke-snorting love-rats. It’s the same, albeit in a blander grey-suited
kind of way, with the leadership circus.

So what’s happening with human beings? Actually, something very

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interesting and extremely positive. We are coming quite rapidly to a


point in our cultural evolution where the influence of external sources
of authority is collapsing. The idea that who we are is what other people
tell us – our ‘elders and betters’ – is running out of steam. Increasingly
who we are is who we define ourselves to be. It’s a gesture that comes
from the inside out, rather than from the outside in (as has been the
case through most of human history).

In fact this process started many centuries ago and has merely been
accelerating in recent decades. We can easily trace it as far back as the
Protestand Reformation in Europe, where the central issue was the
right to define one’s beliefs for oneself, privately and – most impor-
tantly – according to one’s own conscience. That word conscience,
although it seems a little quaint and old-fashioned today, is the key
here. Because what it really means is not a narrowly conditioned moral
sense, a feeling of ‘must’ and ‘ought’ and ‘should’ (which are always
the internalised voices of external parental figures) but the expression
of something beyond this, of who we really are as unique individuals.

The Reformation was only one of the first stirrings of this, though. When
we look back, we see the early Protestants as still fixated on authority
and conformity – although this is clearly not how they saw themselves.
But religious reform quickly led into political reform, witnessed by
the three great revolutions of the Western world (where most of these
developments have first taken place): the English, the American and
the French. These first mooted the ideas of political self-determination,
that people were equal and that they had the right to shape their own
a‹airs. Again, though, it has taken years to shake o¤ the hedges and
assumptions that originally accompanied these changes: to recognise,
for instance, that women had as much right to a place in the national
polity as men or that the franchise belonged as much to uneducated
labourers as to the property owning classes.

The revolutions of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries


extended this idea of the ‘freedom of conscience’ first into the work-
place (with the organisation of labour) and eventually into the home

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(with the women’s movement). But this has o·en been seen, frequently
in Marxist terms, as a purely political development (as the famous
feminist slogan ‘the personal is the political’ indicates). The two big
changes at the end of the twentieth century, the empowerment of
consumers and the freedom of information (particularly through the
Internet), are thus not usually recognised as being part of the same
evolutionary process.

All of these developments, however, have had the e‹ect of increasingly


transferring the locus of power and authority from others to ourselves.
Even within the family, we’ve witnessed a huge shi· in the relation-
ship between parents and children: within living memory parents have
gone from being patriarchs and matriarchs, whose word was law, to a
kind of big sister/big brother armed at best with the ability to persuade.
Looking ahead, it’s not di›cult to forsee a time when the kinds of radi-
cal educational experiments carried out by A.S. Neill and Homer Lane,
where children take control of the running of their school, become
mainstream thinking. We’re not quite ready for that yet, but it may
only be a couple of decades away.

It can be hard to recognise quite how much, or how fast, we have


changed. But look back to the 1950s and it is clear that then most peo-
ple’s beliefs, attitudes and expectations depended crucially on those
around them: their parents, their teachers, their peers and the society
at large. To challenge the environment one grew up in was still a rare
– and hugely consequential – act. The forces that kept behaviour in
check: disapproval and shame, were still potent. Compare that with
the situation now, where we routinely reinvent ourselves and where
few people feel any obligation to follow the tastes or beliefs even of
their friends, let alone of their parents. These days we challenge our
doctors, break the law when we feel it shouldn’t apply to us and laugh
at those who assume they can tell us what to do. ‘Do you know who I
am!’ ‘Am I bothered?’

And this is the bald fact about ‘Leadership’: there are no followers any
more, nobody who wants to be led. Only those of us who, through iner-

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tia or low self esteem, don’t feel able to take control of our own lives,
of our own destinies. Leadership sells because we all feel able to be in
the driving seat, but the only people we are going to be driving are our-
selves. And this is where the Leadership industry needs to recognise
what is happening and change direction – from teaching some kind
of updated Public School vision of the ‘Jolly Good Chap’ to showing
people how to lead themselves. Of course, this requires an understand-
ing of which part of us should be leading (which is another subject
altogether).

In the world we are rapidly entering, working with others will be a


quite di‹erent proposition from what it used to be. Some of us have
already tasted this and can share our experiences with those who
haven’t. Basically, it means understanding how to work together: the
lively harmony of jazz musicians jamming, not the formal ‘command
and control’ of conductor and orchestra. It means learning to recog-
nise how others’ strengths complement ours, and how we complement
them. And how to o‹set our weaknesses against each other.

Professor Arthur Deikman called this new paradigm ‘the eye level
world’ (in his book The Wrong Way Home). At the end of the book he gives
this particularly beautiful and poignant description:

‘The eye-level world is the perspective that arises when the


parents in the sky disappear and their images superimposed
on other people dissolve and vanish. As you look around, no
one towers above you, everyone looks back at the same human
height. Although the parents are gone, the landscape is not
threatening, it spreads out in all directions, inviting explora-
tion. It is open and calm, in contrast to the world of childhood
fears.
‘The child fears that the disappearance of parents would release
anarchy, hatred, and destruction because in the parents’ world
the child knows no power, no control that is not imposed. In the
eye-level world freedom is of a di‹erent kind, more responsi-
ble than ever before because the choices are your own, they are

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uncoerced and unbribed. “Free will is the experience of being


the author of the law you obey.” This world is di‹erent from
that shaped by the dependency dream.

‘Although we have no parents in the eye-level world, when we


face each other we find companions. We share the same need for
meaning, the same intimations of transcendence, the certainty
of death, the saving joy of love. We can sense a new connection,
a linking of equals that makes all of us one family, yet individu-
als. Only in the eye-level world do we emerge as ourselves, true
to our own perceptions and strengths, able to respond realisti-
cally to the world that surrounds us.’

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Diagnosed with Consumption


30 September 2006

For a long time I’ve believed that our choice of words conditions the
way we see things (in linguistics this is referred to as the ‘Sapir-Whorf
Hypothesis’). For example, I dislike the use of the word ‘patient’ in the
health service. It implies that someone has no role in understanding
and resolving their health issues, which contradicts everything we now
know about the importance of a positive, active attitude towards our
own healing. It’s a dependency word. And, indeed, this is how people
have o·en been treated – I remember once waiting on a surgical ward
to see the consultant and his group of acolytes, ordered by the Sister to
keep quiet and not say anything! Needless to say, I saw this as a provoca-
tion rather than an instruction.

One of the words I’m struggling with at the moment is ‘consumer’.


Not only has it become a pejorative, thanks to the Marxist critique of
‘consumer fetishism’ (which has somehow found its way into contem-
porary media theories), but it is also, frankly, inaccurate. I might ‘con-
sume’ a cappucino – hardly the most fetishistic act, I have to say – but
I certainly don’t consume a microwave oven, a holiday or an insurance
policy. And whilst I’m in ranting mood, I ought to add that I’m tired of
the sneering way it is used by theorists who are just as likely to be down
at John Lewis on a Saturday morning as I am.

In Freudian terms ‘consumption’ is an oral word and I’m not going to


deny that there aren’t oral aspects of our behaviour as ‘consumers’.
The desire to surround oneself with lots of stu¤ is o·en, like compul-
sive eating, driven by the need to fill some kind of hole inside ourselves.
And the kind of anxiety that some people try to assuage with compul-
sive spending can be similar to the feeling of hunger. But this is patho-
logical, and it doesn’t help that the term we use to describe a universal
and unavoidable feature of modern life has these kinds of pathological
overtones. Most of us are not driven to ‘consume’. We do so because

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that’s the way the world works.

So I think the time has come to ditch consumer, consumption, con-


sumerism and find something altogether more appropriate. Another
word that includes all of the activities in which we spend our money,
as well as others that don’t involve financial transactions at all. In fact
the transactional aspect is a bit of a red-herring here, because we are as
much ‘consumers’ of intangibles like ideas, emotions and experiences
as we are of stu¤ that we have to pay for. In most significant aspects, for
instance, the marketing of politics is the same as the marketing of soap
powder. The di‹erence is that nobody swipes our plastic and we don’t
walk away with something in a carrier bag.

A·er considering this matter for a while, the word I would like to sug-
gest in place of consumer is respondent. It’s not o‹ered as an exact
equivalent, because I’m more concerned with drawing attention to
the phenomenon of o‹er and take up, which is fundamentally about
communications. This o‹er could be as straightforward as a retailer
promoting a product, or as abstract as an author presenting an idea.
And I like the word respondent to describe someone having an inter-
ested reaction because it implies an active stance. We respond to some-
thing because it moves us, and our response may be in any number of
di‹erent ways. It suggests involvement as well as choice, dignifying
rather than belittling the person so described.

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And statistics...
4 October 2006

There’s something that fascinates and perplexes me, in equal measure.


Over the last ten years I’ve spoken at seminars for the company with
which I do most of my work. Every few weeks 30 people from prospec-
tive client organisations are invited to come to listen to our ideas and
enjoy a nice breakfast. It’s an e‹ective form of marketing. But the thing
I find so intriguing is that, almost without exception, there is a con-
sistent percentage who drop out. They’ve responded to a letter to say
they would like to come. They’ve been phoned up the day before and
confirmed they’ll be there. And then they don’t show up.

The extraordinary thing – to my mind, anyway – is that if you speak


to any of them a·erwards, each has a perfectly plausible and quite
unique excuse: “my assistant called in sick”, “I was summoned to an
urgent meeting”, “the dog ran o¤”. But the percentage of ‘no shows’
rarely varies. Four or five people simply will not be there on the day.

This seems to be a fairly universal problem, and businesses that are


constantly juggling their capacity – like airlines or hotels – make
allowances for it. Most of us have had the experience of checking-in
for a flight, only to find it was over-booked. It doesn’t o·en happen but
every now and then something surprising occurs and everybody shows
up. (The day it happened to us at the seminar I remember well because
I didn’t get anything to eat!)

Because we are operating on a small enough scale I have had an oppor-


tunity to see this from two quite di‹erent perspectives. One of them is
the individual: “the alarm clock didn’t go o¤”. The other is, for want of
a better word, the statistical: about fi·een percent won’t be there. And
the thing is that the two perspectives aren’t congruent. It’s not as if
people are lying and really they have been moved by some impersonal
force that dictates human behaviour at a group level. But equally it is

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such a consistent phenomenon that we can generally rely on it for fill-


ing the room and ordering meals.

It strikes me that this is one of the big issues that faces marketing. There
are patterns of behaviour that can be discerned from looking at human
behaviour en masse and it is very tempting to do so. Predictions can be
made on this basis, strategies developed, decisions implemented. But
looking only at the statistical picture blinds us to what is really going
on. These meta-patterns are made up of many individual events, each
of which are quite di‹erent. Statistics give us an overview of the ‘what’
of human behaviour but they cannot give any insight into the ‘why’.
The forces that are driving trends are not impersonal and collective,
but personal and individual. On the other hand, looking at particular
cases, which some of the newer marketing practices like ethnography
try to explore, can give us the individual ‘whys’ but conceal the bigger
picture.

Many years ago a friend’s dad, who understood more about physics
than we did, explained that in a boiling kettle there are tiny particles
of ice. What appears to be a homogenous mass of water at 100°C is in
fact made up of molecules with all sorts of di‹erent energy states. It
only seems like the whole is boiling because the average of those bil-
lions of individual micro-states is at boiling point. It might even be that
not a single molecule is at exactly 100°C. Looking at the aggregated
picture enables us to use this phenomenon – and make a cup of co‹ee.
But focusing on the detail enables us to understand how this is actu-
ally happening. And to realise that just because the whole appears to
be boiling it doesn’t mean that each molecule must be boiling too.

Thus far I haven’t really said anything that isn’t already widely under-
stood. But what I would like to add is that we need to find e‹ective
ways of looking at phenomena that allow us to integrate the two per-
spectives better. So, for instance, when we look at the statistical level
to remember that we are looking at a diverse community of events,
challenging the temptation to think that everybody is doing the same
thing for the same reason. And when we drop down to look at the indi-

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vidual events, to remember that they combine to reveal a greater pat-


tern. Bearing in mind that any sense we have of individual behaviour is
equally an aggregate of shi·ing desires, moods, priorities – of di‹erent
people inhabiting the same body.

The American Linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf used a metaphor about


language that I’ve always loved, likening it to a pattern that – as one
steps back from it – reveals further patterns that emerge at di‹erent
scales. We have individual letters that combine to form words, words to
sentences that are semantically more than the meaning of the individ-
ual words, sentences to paragraphs, paragraphs to chapters, chapters
to books and so on. Everything is really of this kind. What’s important
is not to get stuck at any one level but to be able to move backwards and
forwards between them, appreciating what each can show us.

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A dark place
17 October 2006

The recent controversy over ‘size zero’ models raises some fascinating
and disturbing questions. How has the fashion industry got itself into
such an unhappy situation? Why is it that it can’t seem to get out of
it? And how come this is so far removed from everyone’s possible ‘best
interests’, from shareholders to consumers?

Size zero is not about business, even of the most cynical kind. Indeed
the average British woman’s dress size has gone up over the last few
years to 14, while these skeletal waifs are only 4s in our measurements.
Nobody wears size 4. Customers aren’t queueing up to buy such tiny
clothes, they are starving themselves to fit into them. Nor is there any-
thing alluring about what has been called ‘heroin chic’. Many years
ago the novelist Anthony Burgess described a relationship he had with
a model as ‘like making love to a bicycle’. And this girl was positively
ample by today’s standards! For every reason one can imagine, from
the evolutionary to the aesthetic, men are not attracted to emaciated
women. Sex with bones is no fun.

But it is not the models who are responsible. These girls are the vic-
tims. Victims of what, though? Some kind of collectively traumatic
misogynistic fixation that seems to have infected the whole industry,
but most especially the designers, stylists and photographers who are
responsible for the look. There are some deeply disturbed people at the
top of the fashion industry, too — I know, because a friend works for
one of them. His trail of smashed up hotel rooms and drug-frenzied
rages makes even Keith Moon look like Father Christmas.

And the key point about size zero is that it is about abuse. Most girls
are already bigger than this by the time they turn ten, so there is noth-
ing ‘natural’ about someone in their twenties or thirties having these
measurements. The only zeros we might otherwise see are women

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su‹ering from acute, anorexic malnutrition or in the advanced stages


of opiate addiction. This is a really bleak, distressing reference group.
What appeal could it have for anyone? The same morbid fascination,
I would like to suggest, that we see with self-harmers and cutting
(and how much longer will it be, I wonder, before razor scarred arms
become the next catwalk accoutrement?) It is the lure of the dark side:
demonic, dangerous, destructive. A frisson from the malevolent forces
of chaos and disorder.

What does the fashion industry say in support of size zero? Opposition
to the proposed bans focuses around the argument of ‘creative free-
dom’, which in itself raises interesting questions. How free are the
designers? Given that this look has obsessed fashionistas since the late
1980s, it appears more likely that they are in the grip of something
that is controlling them — not the other way around. And some com-
ments from the industry even suggest a sigh of relief that someone else
is taking charge of this situation. Fashion is in a thrash. It has not been
able to pull itself out of this downward spiral, and the consequences
have become more and more destructive. We should remember that
what made the debate recently hit the headlines again was the death
of 22 year old Uruguayan model Luisel Ramos, e‹ectively of starvation.
Style has become a killer.

I see analogies here with tendencies in other ‘creative’ disciplines. Rap


music, for instance, has equally been unable to shake o¤ its dark side —
its fascination with violence and criminality. Some commentators cel-
ebrate this as the authentic voice of the ghetto, but the problem is that
it reinforces exactly those tendencies that make the world’s ghettoes
such bleak and despairing places: gang culture, gun fetishism, the pro-
motion of excessive drug funded lifestyles, prostitution. Even graphic
design hasn’t been innocent. Its flirtation with chaos, fragmentation,
disorder — ‘grunge’ — that began in earnest at the end of the 1980s is
still with us. Darkness doesn’t release its victims easily.

I remember being shown some student work at a Design History con-


ference in the early 1990s. This had come out of the newly integrated

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South Africa and was characterised by the most surprising positivity


and optimism: mandala like forms, images of holism and unity, vital-
ity and ‘lightness’. It made an extraordinary contrast with the work
we were used to seeing from colleges in Britain and the United States.
The teacher whose students had produced this work commented that,
a·er so many years of apartheid, none of them could bear to contem-
plate the failure of the country’s multi-racial experiment.

The more I’ve gone on in this business, the more convinced I become
that design doesn’t just reflect the unease of a society — it amplifies and
broadcasts it too. The analogy I would draw is with trauma. We don’t
just su‹er traumas, perhaps as children, living quietly and patiently
with them ever a·er. Instead, as time goes by, they begin to influence
more and more of our behaviour. In the worst cases, they take control
of this behaviour totally, driving us to traumatise others. Investigate
an abuser and you will find someone who was abused. The hurt, which
throbs away in the backround, is reactivated at times of vulnerability.
Only heightened awareness and conscious restraint stops it.

There is also a background pattern of trauma, where individual trau-


mas become aggregated into collective forces, creating a climate of
violence and abuse. This can be seen very clearly in some of the com-
munities of the Near East whose identities and memories have become
contaminated by hatred and persecution. There can be a kind of exul-
tation in this, too — a twisted enjoyment which stops people from
standing up to it. This is what I believe has happened in the fashion
industry.

Creative people have a responsibility. Whatever ‘wavelength’ we tune


into, we also transmit. It may not be cool to transmit positivity and
optimism and awareness and integrity, but it is necessary. More neces-
sary than ever before, in fact. As I have said many times before: some-
thing that is created with love and delight communicates love and
delight, while something that is created with other qualities commu-
nicates those qualities. Designing an artefact to shock or o‹end others
is no di‹erent from telling them to fuck o¤. It adds, pointlessly, to the

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weight of insult and hurt in the world. And rips through the fabric of
our aesthetic faculties in the same way as a knife through body tissue.
We need to stop it. Now.

Would fashion really be so terrible if it stopped sexualising infants


and celebrating abuse and designed gorgeous, flattering, comfortable
clothes for healthy women — those whose body measurements and
statistics reflect the ideals of wellbeing as well as the make-up of the
population at large?

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Design for the New Age


24 October 2006

Whether we like it or not, the ‘New Age’ is now an unavoidable part


of our lives. From the proliferation of alternative and complementary
medical practitioners through to the incorporation of Eastern terms
into our languages, and from the prevalence of beliefs like reincarna-
tion and angels to the popularity of practices like meditation and mar-
tial arts, it has brought about significant changes in the ways we look
at the world. Few of us haven‘t been touched by it in some way, or don‘t
subscribe to some New Age idea or other.

Underlying the many di‹erent New Age philosophies and practices


are some general themes. First, that humanity is going through some
kind of evolutionary development, of which the adoption of these new
ideas and practices is both a symptom and a driver. Second, that there
is a growing convergence between the concepts of theoretical Physics
and the observations of great mystics of the past. These include such
foundational ideas as everything is connected, there is only energy and
we create our own reality. Third, that the diversity of the world’s reli-
gious expressions masks a fundamental unity. And that the time has
come to go beyond the conventional aspects of religious practice to the
spontaneous spiritual experience where this unity resides.

These themes have proved to have extraordinary attraction, dynamism


and resilience. But curiously one of the areas that has so far been most
resistant to their penetration is design. Curious, because designers fre-
quently define themselves in terms of a radical, questioning and play-
ful creativity that both challenges the status quo and is open to a wide,
eclectic range of influences. And designers of the early ‘modern’ period
were o·en very interested in the precursors of today’s New Age ideas —
the original Bauhaus pioneers in Theosophy, for example, or architect
Frank Lloyd Wright in the Russian mystic George Gurdjie¤. However,
as the twentieth century progressed, design disciplines from archi-

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tecture to graphics increasingly began to identify themselves with a


skeptical secularism. Looking at design at the beginning of the twenty-
first century, it seems primarily concerned with ‘outward show’, ‘nice
things’ and ‘material culture’.

Contemporary designers still o·en see themselves as being at the cut-


ting edge of society, inaugurating fashions and surfing the zeitgeist. In
reality, however, they have been largely blind to the role the New Age
has played in shaping this zeitgeist. So while recent films like What the
Bleep..., as well as authors like James Redfield and Paolo Coelho, have
stimulated an unprecedented explosion of popular interest in New Age
ideas, writings by and about designers give no hint that these have had
any influence on design whatsoever. Indeed, in contrast to what has
been happening in the rest of the world, the theoretical bases of design
have tended in recent years to look backwards rather than forwards for
their inspiration. While the rest of the population were discovering
how to balance their chakras and live in the now, design students were
taught obscure Marxist and post-Marxist French philosophers. And on
both the theoretical and the practical sides, there has been little on
o‹er for designers drawn to New Age ideas.

But what would design be like if it did embrace the New Age? Many of
the central themes of New Age philosophies and practices have con-
siderable relevance — and resonance — for design. And there may be
answers here for how designers can find a positive and productive role
for themselves in the emerging era.

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Identity crisis
8 November 2006

A few months ago I was seated on a crowded commuter train opposite a


group of Muslim girls who were all wearing ‘hijabs’. It turned out that
they were medical students from a local teaching hospital, and they
were chatting about their experiences. At a certain point the conversa-
tion turned to another girl, not present, who was only known to one of
them. “Is she a Hijabi, like us?”, one of the others asked.

It was at this point that I understood something I hadn’t grasped


before. A hijab is no longer a garment, a way of dressing that some
Muslims have traditionally adopted to meet the Qur’anic injunction
that believing women should dress modestly. It is a badge of identity.
Indeed, I was struck that the girl didn’t ask: “Is she a Muslim?”, which
would have been a more reasonable question. But no. The issue was
whether she demonstrated her commitment to ‘the group’ by what
she wore.

From my teens onwards, I have been fortunate to have associated with


some rather remarkable people who also happened to be Muslims.
From them I learned that one didn’t wear one’s religion on one’s sleeve
(or, given the penchant for religious people of all faiths to adopt ‘silly
hats’ and other facial adorments, on one’s head). This didn’t just reso-
nate with my very English distaste for ‘displays’. It also points to the
real factor behind the need to be seen to be something: compensation.
And certainly I’ve always felt that those who have the greatest urge to
preach the ‘Word of the Lord’ are o·en the ones who privately have the
greatest doubts and insecurities about it.

However, we live in an age of ‘Cultural Identity’ where faith very o·en is


reduced to these kinds of trivial externals. Only this week, for instance,
I saw a girl no older than seven or eight wearing a hijab. In traditional
Muslim cultures pre-pubescent girls have not been expected to be veiled

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(and it is now widely understood that the Qur’an does not require this
of any woman — it is a cultural practice, not a religious one). Why were
her parents dressing her in this way? To my eye this practice is just as
distasteful as sending a seven year old out dressed like a streetwalker
(which, of course, also happens these days). In di‹erent ways both types
of apparel sexualise children. The hijab also politicises them.

My Muslim friends held to a very sensible, ancient Sufi dictum: ‘Eat


whatever food you like, but wear the normal clothes of the place in
which you live’. While this might seem to be a simple, straightforward
statement it is actually a surprisingly subtle and powerful principle for
life. It holds that we have a free choice about what we ‘feed’ ourselves
with (and to the Sufi ‘food’ is by no means confined to the products
of the kitchen but includes all that nourishes us, including ‘impres-
sions‘). But when it comes to the way we present ourselves to others
(and, again, ‘clothes’ stand for all the ways we express ourselves) we
should be considerate of their sensibilities. “Speak to everyone in
accordance with their understanding”, as the Prophet Muhammad
said. One friend, herself a lineal descendant of the Prophet, managed
(it seemed to me) to successfully meet the requirements of modesty and
dignity by wearing jeans and a tee-shirt. So what is served by extreme
statements?

If it sounds like I am being intolerant of others’ ‘cultural identity’, I


am. Personally, I don’t have any time for it: in the era in which we live,
it seems an entirely unnecessary and burdensome concept. Each of us
already has a unique ‘identity’ which is, quite simply, the sheer fact of
our individuality. We don’t need any more identity than this, let alone
a group of cultural conservatives telling us what we should think, feel,
believe and do. And there are no absolute standards for what makes a
Muslim, a Briton or anything else: these labels have meant di‹erent
things to di‹erent people, at di‹erent times. In fact societies have
always been in a constant, continuous process of change, exchange
and diversification. ‘Cultural identity’ is really just an expedient myth,
of recent orgin, designed to control and organize people — and to high-

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light their supposed ‘di‹erences’ from others. The concept is divisive,


in its very core.

The demand for Cultural Identity, I believe, is driven by a craving to


belong. I use the word craving because it looks much more like a patho-
logical condition than a real requirement for human beings. We are
social creatures, and as such have reasonable needs to get along with
each other. But ‘belonging’ appears to be something else — a substitute
and an avoidance of the kind of deep self-encounter that alone can pro-
vide a real experience of who we are. Once more, each of us already has
a unique identity which is, quite simply, the sheer fact of our individu-
ality. And this individuality can only be experienced in the present — in
the Now — not in the illusory ‘collective memory’ beloved of identity
theorists. However, we are o·en reluctant to let go of our baggage: to
relinquish the secure feeling of being on the back seat of the car, with
‘parents’ taking charge of us. Some of this reluctance even goes so far
as active denial, creating monstrous constructs of belonging to act as
barriers to change. Witness our ‘Hijabis’. Allah wants pure hearts, girls
– not wrapped faces.

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The primacy of feeling


13 November 2006

I was listening the other day to a philosophical discussion in which


somebody raised the old objection that the claims of religion cannot
be verified. I’m not very interested in this kind of discussion, so my
attention wandered elsewhere. And I was struck by the thought that,
actually, we live in a time where almost nothing lends itself to verifica-
tion. Forget religion. Will any of us ever know for sure who killed John
Kennedy or Princess Diana? Or if Saddam Hussein really had weapons
of mass destruction? Or whether Neil Armstrong genuinely stepped
onto the Moon?

It’s not that I want to dwell on conspiracy theories — far from it. Because
it occurred to me that almost any news story is unverifiable for us. Did
Sven really have that a‹air? Jade that punch-out? Tony and Gordon
that famous falling out? Everything we are told about these events is
hearsay, from people who have a vested interest in elaborating, embroi-
dering and sometimes plain distorting. Most are contested. And there
is precious little concrete evidence in the public domain.

When we come to Science, this is no less true. We are told, for instance,
that if you bring together a critical mass of fissile Uranium, a nuclear
reaction will take place. Advocates of Scientific Rationalism — die-hard
materialists like Richard Dawkins — assure us that this is ‘an established
fact’. But I have no more possibility of testing its supposed replicability
than I have of establishing the veracity of the virgin birth of Christ (or,
for that matter, of finding out who has been in Robbie Williams’ bed).
Sure, I can learn the theory. I might even be allowed to witness the
detonation of a nuclear device (although this lies in much the same
realm of unlikelihood as becoming, at 46, an astronaut or a brain sur-
geon). However there is no possibility that I will ever be allowed to play
with masses of Uranium. Indeed, just as with the religious dogma, I am
really being asked to take this ’on authority’. And at a time when many

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‘authorities’ reveal themselves to be far more partial, and have far less
credibility, than most of us would like.

But fortunately it’s not entirely a matter of faith. In investigating


the claims of modern science, there are some tools that I can use —
although these aren’t quite what one expects. For instance, if I want
to satisfy myself that the Copernican theory of the Earth revolving
around the Sun makes more sense than the Ptolemaic theory of the
Sun revolving around the Earth (and neither can be ‘proved’ — all we
really know for sure is that the planets and Sun are in movement rela-
tive to each other), I can apply the principle of Occam’s Razor. This prin-
ciple, which many of us will remember from dreary schooldays, holds
that one should always look for the simplest explanation. Ptolemaic
astronomy, with its numerous ‘epicyles’ (adjustments to the cycles of
the planets to account for their observed movements), is a much more
complicated system than Copernical astronomy, with its simple rota-
tions around the Sun. Using the razor, Copernicus’ explanation seems
like the correct one. (However I should point out that until Kepler sug-
gested that the planets have elliptical orbits, more than half a century
a·er Copernicus’ death, the Ptolemaic version still gave the more accu-
rate predictions).

Now the interesting thing about Occam’s razor (and, like many of these
things, no such principle appears in the writings of William of Occam)
is that there isn’t a logical or rational justification for it. It is no more
reasonable that a natural phenomenon should have a ‘simple’ expla-
nation rather than a complicated one. It is, instead, based on a feeling
for evidence. And, indeed, the fundamental principles that underpin
the whole edifice of modern science are all, similarly, rooted in feel-
ings. For instance, the ‘Scientific Method’ is based on the feeling that
all natural phenomena must be repeatable and predictable. There is
no reason to believe this, even if it appears to be true for some aspects
of our experience. However, because the method that hangs o¤ of this
feeling gives us the power to predict and replicate complex phenom-
ena, we rarely look at where it comes from.

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At this point, let me return for a moment to William of Occam again.


Because his work, most of which was concerned with logic, leads to
the conclusion that the human mind can actually prove nothing. As
a Franciscan, he was most concerned with how it might be possible to
prove the existence of God or the immortaility of the soul. And in the
end, he held, such knowledge can only come through revelation. What
did he mean by ‘revelation’? An experience that produces the feeling of
certainty.

In the twenty-first century, our interests may be somewhat di¤erent


from those of Occam, but the same conclusions are almost inescapable.
Why do we think it ulikely that people are being abducted by aliens?
Or that AIDS is God’s wrath on an immoral world? Only because we
feel that there are simpler explanations, and that these explanations
are more likely to be true. But we are so concerned with the supposed
rationality of our beliefs we don’t see the primacy of feeling — how
behind our whole modern way of looking at the world is a felt per-
ception of how things must be. Ironically, even the ’rationality’ of our
beliefs is itself based on a feeling — a feeling for reason.

When we can verify almost nothing of what we are told, either because
we will never have access to the true facts or because we will never have
access to the apparatus to put them to the test, it has become vital that
we can access these feelings (and recognise them for what they are).
The only rigour that can exist in an unverifiable world is the degree to
which we can be true to these feelings — which are not only to do with
evidence, but also with things like justice, integrity, health and pur-
pose. And I should point out that I’m not talking about a feeling that a
particular belief is ‘right’, which sensation is most o·en simply a con-
ditioned response, but something much deeper and more fundamen-
tal. The feeling that there is such a thing as ‘rightness’, for instance.

Unlike beliefs, which vary enormously, these feelings are broadly con-
sensual. And evolving. Before the Scientific Revolution, for instance,
the feeling for evidence I have mentioned wasn’t widespread. Before
the Middle Ages, the same was true of the feeling for logic. These feel-

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ings emerged in an avant-garde, sometimes over hundreds of years,


before being disseminated through humanity at large. And there are
new feelings emerging in contemporary humanity, o·en brought into
prominence through works of imagination: film, story, music. The New
Spirituality, which I’ve alluded to in a previous post, is a case in point
— underpinned by a feeling for the nature of human beings which chal-
lenges some of the assumptions of the former ‘scientific’ paradigm.

If we recognise the primacy of feelings, it becomes possible to see the


way that they are giving rise to new ways of thinking, acting and being.
O·en, now, within a very short timescale.

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Makeover madness?
22 November 2006

As you can see, Transforming Communication has had its first makeo-
ver! This is a response to my beloved Maria insisting that my grey web-
site was saying something about me! And there is more than a grain of
truth to this. When I first thought about what I wanted to do with the
site, it was to open doors to all kinds of new ideas, approaches, energies
– to bring exuberance and vitality into the o·en stale and staid way we
communicate. And arguably there is still nothing like enough exuber-
ance and vitality in the site design. But it is a start!

Anyway, introducing the new look gives me an opportunity to say


something about a subject that particularly fascinates me: makeovers.
And hardly anyone can have failed to notice that the last few years have
been makeover crazy. Popular TV shows, books, magazines, almost
every kind of media you can imagine have been given over to make-
overs. Celebrity makeovers. Home makeovers. Business makeovers.
Fashion makeovers. Even social skills makeovers. What is happening
here?

For my part, I think the makeover phenomenon is connected with a


development that I described in The end of Leadership. For millennia we
have been locked into patterns of liking and disliking, of tastes and
preferences, that have reflected the societies around us. We adopted
these because they were the price of approval. And for most of this
time the idea of dissent was unthinkable. The number of people who
questioned whether they should worship a certain god, obey a certain
ruler, conform to certain mores, dress a particular way, eat this or that
food, was tiny. ‘Freethinker’ was synonymous with ‘threatening, sus-
pect, dangerous‘.

In fact, we can chart the rise of freethinking from its first emergence
in the Classical era (witness Socrates’ rejection of the gods) through

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its e‹ective disappearance in the Dark Ages to its re-emergence in the


Mediaeval stirrings of conscience that gave rise to such things as the
Protestant Reformation, the demand for political representation and
the emergence of various sub-cultures. And it is the relationship of free-
thinking to sub-cultures that I am most interested in discussing here.
Subcultures emerge when there is a shi· in the power balance of a
society. The ‘host’ culture must first loosen its grip: it must become
less prescriptive, more tolerant, unobtrusive. What usually produces
this is a diminution of the general sense of threat, for instance when
peace and prosperity and abundance relax the brooding anxiety that
simmers under the surface of most people, most of the time. Smaller
groups of people thus find that they can establish their own norms
and modes, free from the surveillance and interference of the people
around them. Indeed, some sub-cultures come into existence just to
put the anxiety and intrusion back into people’s lives, appealing most
to those who feel uncomfortable without the ‘structure’ they were used
to. Other sub-cultures arise, however, because greater freedom allows
for the open expression of ideas and practices that had previously been
supressed. Then there are subcultures of style and fashion that reflect
the desire of (usually younger) people to define themselves in contrast
to others – to create a sense of identity without necessarily challenging
fundamental beliefs and assumptions. And, of course, there are many
other kinds of sub-cultures as well.

Some commentators saw the nineties, which were really the begin-
ning of the makeover era, as bringing a new ‘tribalism’, discerning
new sub-cultures in all sorts of di‹erent areas from surfing to street-
gangs. What seemed to be di‹erent about these ‘tribes’, compared with
the youth cultures that had been with us for the last forty years or so,
was their fluidity, spontaneity and multiplicity. Unlike, for instance,
more established groups of Mods, Hippies or Goths, these sub-cultures
tended to emerge, mutate, and disappear, quickly. Marketeers who
saw them as an opportunity were frustrated by how elusive, and how
resistant, they could be towards traditional techniques of promotion.

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And so we saw the development of such things as ‘viral marketing’ in


the attempt to reach them, provoking further transformations as the
members sought to avoid assimilation into the mainstream.

At the same time as this was happening, the makeover phenomenon


was beginning. I believe that the two are closely linked, too – although
perhaps not in an obvious way. The new tribalism represented an evo-
lution of youth culture where the desire to be part of a big group had
already become associated with an undesirable degree of conformity.
The need for the approval of peers was still there, but the groups were
becoming smaller, more fragmented, looser in their requirements.
New technologies, such as the Internet, were also making it possible
for them to be virtual. It no longer mattered if nobody in your neigh-
bourhood dressed like you, thought like you, behaved like you. You
could now sit up all night connecting with like-minded people in other
parts of the globe.

The natural consequence of this fragmentation (and the reason I


believe the tribal phenomenon was only a transitional stage) is that,
at a certain point, one realizes one can be in a ‘tribe of one’. At this
point even peer approval changes, because what we have in common
with others is not our similarity but our di‹erence. And as conformity
ceases to be an issue, newer and far more radical possibilites emerge.
One of these is that the process of reinvention which, in the past, was a
rite of passage for joining a subculture (and a highly consequential act),
becomes a triviality. Without fear of disapproval, and with a myriad of
options and role models available to us, we at last feel free to trans-
form aspects of our life with impunity. Fancy trying Mongolian food?
A tattoo? Painting your front room purple? Why not? Tomorrow you
might change your mind, and then you can try something else. And
it’s possible to see now that this first generation of makeovers was itself
only tentative, concerned with relatively superficial aspects of life. We
are already pushing the envelope of reinvention much further – into
work, sexuality, spirituality even.

It’s wrong, I think, to see the makeover phenomenon merely as enter-

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tainment. In fact a huge revolution is sweeping through our societies,


challenging mores that have long been obsolete. Like the Berlin Wall
(which seems to be a potent symbol for what is happening) we are real-
izing that the disapproval we were previously afraid to take on hasn’t
had any real authority for a long time. And is o‹ering little or no resist-
ance to us as we tear down conventional morality. Having tasted this
freedom, having enjoyed the many possibilities that are now availa-
ble and, above all, having experienced what it means to become ‘the
author of the law you follow’, humanity may never be the same again.

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Communication as giving
5 December 2006

Over the last few months Mark Walter has written an extraordinary
series of posts for his blog eternal awareness on the subject of The Art of
Giving. These posts o‹er deep and unexpected insights into the nature
of a process that a‹ects almost everything we do. They have certainly
helped me to understand why some activities become a virtuous circle
of increasing returns while others (which may not appear all that
di‹erent) peter out into oblivion. I would strongly urge anyone who
isn’t familiar with Mark’s writing to take a look.

The Art of Giving series has also prompted me to think about how the
process of communication might be similar to giving, and about how
we might usefully apply these insights to make it more e‹ective. But
before I go on, I should first summarise one of Mark’s key points, which
is about the relationship between the four principles of giving: respect,
appreciation, gratitude and value.

As I understand these, respect is having a correct attitude towards


the source of the thing one is giving. If we were talking about giving
money, respect might be directed towards one’s livelihood or towards
those from whom one is raising funds.

The next principle, appreciation, is concerned with the value one


adds to what one has to give. In this case, it might be as simple as decid-
ing where the funds could be most e‹ectively used. On a much bigger
scale, for instance in a charitable organisation, it might be the manage-
ment of the process of giving: having representatives on the ground,
mechanisms in place to facilitate distribution, checks and balances to
avoid wastage and loss.

The third principle, gratitude, is less familiar to us. Yet this is the one
that makes the crucial di‹erence between whether the giving prospers
or goes to ground. This is about returning a tithe of what is given to the

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source. If we go back to the example of a charitable organisation, this


might be about investing in the donors – making them feel involved
and valued, providing feedback, etc. (However, this is where the exam-
ple also shows its limitations, because the circle of fundraising, dis-
tribution and involvement I’ve described confines the process to flow
of finance – while The Art of Giving challenges us to develop a deeper
understanding of the nature of ‘source’).

The fourth principle, value is not another stage but describes the
intention of the process, the increase and sharing of value.

Perhaps another example will allow us to look at how giving can work
with intangible value. Imagine a counsellor with a client. The first
thing the counsellor does is to listen, and this is respect. The more the
counsellor can attend to the client, to give him full attention rather
than allowing herself to be distracted by interpretation and judgment,
the more value comes through. She then appreciates what she has
heard, by using her knowledge, experience and skill to frame a ques-
tion that can help the client to resolve the issues he has been describ-
ing. There is a circularity here that many people would think achieves
what counselling sets out to do: you talk about your problems, I help
you to understand them, you can then resolve them.

But the third principle of giving, gratitude, requires us to do more


than this. The counsellor also needs to help the client become a more
aware person. To understand this, we need to see that the ‘source’ of
what the counsellor is able to give is her greater awareness (which may
have been stimulated by her training and experience, but now stands
before it). The client is caught up in his own problems. He doesn’t
understand them, can’t see past them. The ‘problems’ may be the press-
ing issue, but his inability to understand them is symptomatic of the
level of his awareness. By ‘tithing’ a percentage of what she gives to the
client to the task of increasing his awareness, the counsellor is li·ing
what is happening outside the merely transactional into what could
be described as ‘service’. The client leaves counselling not just able to
deal with the issues in hand, but as a more aware human being.

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How is communication giving? To find an answer, we need to look


beyond the usual parameters of ‘I have a message, I select an appropri-
ate medium for it, I communicate my message’ and, instead, look at
communication as a process of engagement. As an illustration, let’s
take the example of an everyday marketing communication. I want
to tell you about my product. First, though, I need to ‘listen’ carefully
both to the product and to you. I need to understand what makes the
product good and also what might interest you about it (which means
understanding something about you, your needs and your interests). I
then appreciate this understanding in the usual kinds of ways: with
good writing, nice imagery, well cra·ed type, good printing (or coding,
if it is communicated through the web) etc.

Where is the gratitude? This is a good question, and I believe that this
is where many communications fail. Or, indeed, where some unexpect-
edly succeed – without anyone really understanding what their suc-
cess is based on. What could it mean for a communication to ‘tithe to
source’? At the most basic level, something like good writing or design,
if it li·s the communication beyond being just a product promotion
into something that is also beautiful, appealing, interesting in its own
right, is making a tithe back to the place where the skills and experi-
ence of the communicator(s) come from. At the same time, it’s giving
something back to the audience: if one is making demands on their
attention, it is not enough to give them your marketing message in
return. There needs to be an element of ‘something in it for me’. If
the communication is funny, joyful, life-enhancing, it is increasing the
amount of positive energy in the world, regardless of whether anyone
is interested in what it has to say.
But this isn’t going that far back ‘upstream’ (even though many mar-
keteers are resistant to giving away even this much). The ‘source’ of
communication is much deeper. It comes from the place that mystics
describe as the Logos, the coming into being of our world as language, as
‘words’, as meanings that are comprehensible and distinct. To mouth
a sentiment which might seem a bit rich for some readers, communi-

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cation has a Divine source. ‘In the beginning was The Word...’, and all
that. How do we return a part of the communication to that Source?
Not necessarily by smothering our promotional materials with hymns
and prayers (although it is interesting to note that this is exactly what
happens in some cultures, for instance in the almost obligatory ‘786’
that sits above the signs of many Indian Restaurants, which refers to
the Islamic invocation ‘In the Name of God, the most Compassionate,
the most Merciful’).

Tithing to Source in this sense doesn’t have to be so explicit, or so over-


whelming. When a communication is conceived and executed in a
state of ‘presence’ – if the designer has made a conscious intention
to create it in a state of heightened awareness and ‘rememberance’ of
her or his own Higher Self – it will convey some of this quality. How?
Through the way that the elements are composed, which will result
in a harmony in their relationships and proportions. And through the
intangible ‘energy’ that inheres, mysteriously, in words and images.
In this case only the intention needs to be conscious: the way in which
these things are achieved will flow, e‹ortlessly, from the supra-con-
scious being of the designer.

The Art of Giving can enable our communications to bridge between the
essence of what human beings are and the mundane, everyday activi-
ties we involve ourselves in, without becoming portentous and obscure.
All work has this potential. The ‘tithing’ that gratitude requires doesn’t
demand total devotion, only a hint, a ‘whi¤’ of something else. And, as
I’ve said so many times before, ‘something that is created with love and
delight communicates that love and delight, but something that is cre-
ated with other qualities communicates those qualities’. The engrav-
ings that William Blake made for Joseph Flaxman’s ceramics catalogues
came, unmistakably, from the hand that penned ‘To see a world in a
grain of Sand. And a heaven in a wild flower...’ But they sold pots.

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Promoting ethics
7 February 2007

I saw this on the ‘Design Observer’ site today and was intrigued by it.
Like others I had no idea that the Vatican had a code on advertising.
Nor, indeed, that I would be so inclined to agree with it. Here, anyway,
are their ‘ten commandments’ of ethical advertising from a report by
the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, 1997.

1. Advertisers are morally responsible for what they seek to move


people to do.

2. It is morally wrong to use mainpulative. exploitative, corrupt and


corrupting methods of persuasion and motivation.

3. The content of communication should be communicated honestly


and properly.
4. Advertising may not deliberately seek to deceive, by what it says,
what it implies or what it fails to say.

5. Abuse of advertising can violate the dignity of the human person,


appealing to lust, vanity, envy and greed.

6. Advertising to children by exploiting their credulity and suggest-


ibility o‹ends against the dignity and rights of both children and par-
ents.

7. Advertising that reduces human progress to acquiring material


goods and cultivating a lavish lifestyle is harmful to individuals and
society alike.

8. Clients who commission work can create powerful inducements to


unethical behaviour.

9. Political advertising is an appropriate area for regulation: how much


money mat be spent, how and from whom money may be raised.

10. Advertisers should undertake to repair harm done by advertising.

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These principles raise some important questions for me, though. For
instance, if advertisers are to be held ‘morally responsible for what
they seek to move people to do’, where exactly does that responsibility
lie? With the client, for sanctioning the advertising? With the direc-
tors of the advertising agency, as the people legally responsible? With
the creatives, who made that advert? Or shared (equally, or in varying
amounts) between everybody involved, from the commissioners who
paid for it through to the shopkeepers who stocked the product on
their shelves? If anything is to change in the way advertising is done,
somebody needs to have ‘the buck stops here’ on their desk - to actively
take that responsibility. Otherwise this moral responsibility is simply
going to disintegrate in ‘kitchen fitter’ syndrome: “No, mate, it’s the
electrician’s job” “That’s plumbing, that is!” “Blame the cabinet maker,
it’s the doors what won’t fit” “I’m only the plasterer, me...” “This is John
Doe Design. Currently nobody is available. If you want to leave a mes-
sage, please speak a·er the tone...”

And I like the way the Vatican puts the emphasis on ‘moral’ responsi-
bility in these protocols – rather than arguing in favour of regulation
or legislation (except in the case of political advertising, which most
people would prefer to see banned in any case!) But there are lots of
words here with ambiguous, if not totally slippery, meanings. What
constitutes ‘manipulative’, ‘exploitative’, ‘corrupt’ and ‘corrupting’
methods – and how do these di‹er from more innocent sounding ‘per-
suasion’? I have my own ideas, but these words will need a much tighter
kind of definition if anybody is actually going to be able to make this
distinction. In fact, I think it will call for a totally di‹erent attitude to
communicating, if we are to really get away from the kind of mental
ju-jitsu that uses the ‘weight’ of the consumer against them. Whether
this is what is meant here by communicating ‘honestly and properly’
isn’t clear.

Finally, I’m curious to know how the authors see advertisers ‘repair-
ing the harm done by advertising’ (and this prompts the mischievous
thought that perhaps the Vatican ought to be asked to repair the harm

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done by religion). Indeed this is by no means a straightforward issue.


What exaclty is the harm done by advertising? Should advertising be
held responsible for the rise of consumerism in our societies, with all
the ills associated with it? Again, my earlier question applies. Which
‘advertisers’ should have to do this? Those who make the adverts, or
those who pay for them? And how ‘repair’ the damage? By footing the
bill, like the tobacco companies have been made to do in the US, or
through some kind of ‘community service’ where they are obliged to
produce a certain number, or proportion, of pro bono advertisements
for good causes (to be selected by who? The Catholic Church?)

I’m in no doubt that advertising can do, and does, quite a lot of harm. If
we look at a whole ra· of social concerns, from climate change through
to childhood obesity, we can see how irresponsible advertising has
made the situation much worse than it might otherwise have been.
But consumers should equally share this responsibility. Advertising
asks, but it cannot demand. By accepting and acting on the message
– which we do because it appeals to what we already want to do – we
make the choices that cause the harm.

Maybe ‘the buck stops here’ should be stamped on every banknote and
credit card?

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Musammem
23 February 2007

I recently attended the wedding of a friend to her Egyptian fiancee.


I had not met Muhammad before, although I had heard a great deal
about him. Inevitably, then, when we met for the first time he asked
me what I did for a living. Since this is a more complicated question to
answer than it is to ask, I replied that I was ‘a designer’. He didn’t know
the word ‘designer’. Nor could his best man, another Egyptian who
had lived for some time in the UK, explain it. So I reached for Melanie’s
Arabic dictionary and, a·er a bit of searching, found what seemed to
be the right word. “Ah! Musammem, musammmem...” It did the trick.
“What kinds of things do you design?” Hmmm.

Like most ‘foreign language’ dictionaries, Melanie’s was a simple word


substitution one. What I mean by this is that it had an Arabic word on
one side and its nearest English equivalent on the other. But as I have
been learning Arabic, on and o¤, since I was nineteen (originally with
another wonderful Egyptian, Ahmed Tewfik Ayyad) I know that there
is a great deal more to a word like musammem than this. Arabic, like
the other Semitic languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac etc.), is based
on a series of three letter - or, more accurately, three consonant - roots.
So, for instance, the word musammem comes from the root s-m-m (the
‘mu-’ at the beginning signals that we are dealing with what is called
the ‘de-verbal’ noun form, or the noun that best expresses the concept
of the verb that comes from the root). And each root has a whole range
of meanings.

What is most interesting about the Arabic roots (and Arabic preserves the
range of meanings better than, for instance, Hebrew, which was actually
‘reconstructed’ by the Arabized Jews of Spain, in the middle ages, having
become more or less a ‘dead’ language) is that there is a distinct sense
of connection between the words that make up this range of meaning.
However this is more of a poetical rather than a logical connection.

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Usually each root expresses a concrete meaning as well as abstract


meanings which relate to it in a metaphorical way. This is true of many
other languages as well, of course. In English, for instance, we can take
a word like ‘grasp’ which means, in a concrete sense, to take with the
hand, and use it in an abstract sense in an expression like ‘I grasped
the concept’. But Arabic has a far wider range of related meanings than
English (and has them for every root). There is o·en an ‘emblematic’
noun for the root, too. With the root s-l-m, which should be familiar to
most readers from the words Islam (submission to God), Muslim (some-
one who is submitted to God) and Salaam (peace, or perfection), the
word salam means an Acacia Tree. And this acts as an emblem for the
whole root, as in the custom of people who have made the pilgrimage
to Mecca adorning their homes with acacia branches, or as a symbolic
image in art or poetry.

Anyway, this has been a long-winded introduction to what I wanted


to talk about, which is the range of meaning behind the Arabic word
musammem, designer. Back at home, I looked the word up in my ‘rooted’
Arabic-English dictionary, ‘Wehr-Cowan’ as it is o·en called (a·er the
original compiler and more recent editor). This gave the meanings for
the s-m-m (really a rare two consonant root, with a doubled m) as:

samma (verb) to be or become deaf, to close, plug, cork, stopper (some-


thing, e.g. a bottle); (in the II verb form) to deafen, to make up one’s mind,
determine, resolve, be determined, decide, persist, to design, to plan.

samim (noun and adjective) innermost, heart; core, essence, marrow,


pith; true, sincere, genuine (hence samim al qalb, from the bottom of
the heart, wholeheartedly, most sincerely)

samimi (adjective) cordial, hearty.


asamm (adjective) deaf, hard and solid, massive (rock).

tasmeem (abstract noun) determination, resolution, decision; resolute


action, tenacious pursuit (of a plan); planning, projecting, design,
designing, plan, design, sketch.

musammem (adjective and noun) determined; fashion creator, designer.

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What emerges from this root is a fascinating word picture. ‘Design’, in


the Arab conception, is an activity that wells up from the heart, core
or essence of a person. The designer needs to be ‘true’, ‘sincere’ and
‘genuine’ with respect to this inspiration, which means being deaf to
the voices of others that would try to deviate it from its intention and
having a determination or resolution that is as unmovable as a rock.
But for those who are in harmony with the design, it is a cordial activ-
ity - it is ‘a path with heart’.

What else is there to say about design that this ancient language hasn’t
already beautifully expressed?

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No man from Porlock


18 May 2007

Over Easter, I had a fascinating dream. I was at a conference organised


by the Institute for Cultural Research at which there were a number of
speakers including, I recall, management guru Peter Senge, (the late)
maverick biologist and cybernetician Francisco Varela, and an esteemed
mentor of mine (who I find it di›cult to categorize) Henri Borto·. Yes,
it was one of those highly realistic and intricately detailed dreams that,
in that drowsy moment of being still half asleep and half awake, can be
hard to distinguish from something that actually happened.

In the dream, I was looking through the conference programme. And


on the second page was an illustrated feature that caught my atten-
tion. It was a synopsis of one of the presentations where the speaker
suggested that the phenomenon of branding could be perfectly under-
stood using the ‘calculus of indications’ developed by British mathe-
matician (and also maverick) George Spencer-Brown. (Well, I did warn
you that it was a very detailed dream!)

Now I should admit that when I had the dream I was, to some extent,
already familiar with Spencer-Brown’s work, through Henri Borto·’s
magnificent book The Wholeness of Nature (although to be honest Spencer-
Brown is confined, here, merely to a long end-note). I also enjoyed read-
ing Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana’s The Tree of Knowledge a
few years ago, although I didn’t know that Varela had also done a great
deal of work extending and applying Spencer-Brown’s mathematics to
the life sciences. Peter Senge I’d heard of, but I had never read any of his
books. For those who aren’t familiar with him, he is the man credited
with coining the phrase ‘the learning organisation’.

Returning from Italy a·er Easter, I thought about what I knew of Spencer-
Brown’s work — which, to be honest, wasn’t much — and realised that it
could be applied to branding. This was something that had never previ-

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ously occured to me. Not only that, but looking at it in this way revealed
the whole idea of branding in a much more interesting light. But before
going on to that I think we may first need a math lesson.

Spencer-Brown’s calculus, as outlined in his 1969 book The Laws of Form,


is interesting for a whole range of reasons. But perhaps the most unu-
sual thing about it is that it sets out a non numerical arithmetic. What
does this actually mean? Well, it allows us to make calculations of things
that don’t involve numbers or quantities — it is a calculus of qualities.
However, it is easier to understand this from the actual doing.

Let us imagine a distinction. A distinction about what? Doesn’t matter,


just a distinction. If it helps, think of your school algebra. We were
taught to think about x and y. ‘Excuse me, Sir, but what is x?’ ‘Any
number, boy!’ ‘But what number, sir?’ ‘Any number at all!’. As with x,
Spencer-Brown introduces us to a symbol which he calls the mark or
cross, that represents any kind of distinction. Remember Genesis I?

1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was
upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the
face of the waters.

3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the
light from the darkness.

That’s a distinction. First there was formlessness — an undi‹erentiated


state. And then, by introducing light, there was the distinction of
‘light’ and ‘darkness’. Actually, in Spencer-Brown’s terminology, this
is more than a distinction. It is an indication, because there is a value
attached to the distinction: light.
The symbol Spencer-Brown uses to show a distinction is like the device
we used to use to separate the dividend from the divisor in long divi-
sion (didn’t know that’s what they were called? Neither did I, actually!)
In other words the shape made up of two sides of a rectangle. And there

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are only two axioms in Spencer-Brown’s arithmetic. The law of call-


ing follows one distinction with another. It holds that no matter how
many distinctions are made in this way, it is the same as making a
single distinction. How so? Imagine the Genesis example. You go from
darkness to light and back to darkness, then to light again. This must
be the same as just going from darkness to light. The second axiom
is called the Law of crossing and holds that when one distinction is
nested inside another, it is equal to no distinction at all. This is a bit
more di›cult to explain (or perhaps it’s just that a proper explanation
is beyond my powers!). I guess it is the same as saying that one makes
a distinction, then undistinguishes it again. Anyway, Spencer-Brown
shows, in proper mathematical fashion, that it is a necessary proposi-
tion of this calculus.

But that’s enough math! (And there are some excellent sites on Spencer-
Brown on the web, if anyone is interested). On to branding. How is this
similar?

The simplest answer is that branding is all about making value laden
distinctions — indications. I’m going to talk about the area I know best,
which is corporate branding. But in principle this applies to product
and service branding too.

When we brand an organisation, what are we doing? We are distin-


guishing, not physically but conceptually, between what is inside that
organisation’s ‘domain’ and what is outside. What is governed by that
organisation’s distinctive ethos, culture and values, and what isn’t. In
this way, we are defining boundaries. But this is not a ‘valueless’ distinc-
tion — it’s not just an arbitrary distinction between ‘this’ and ‘that’. It
is the distinction of something that is associated with a value. However
it is important here not to confuse this value with so-called ‘brand’ or
‘corporate’ values — the value I am talking about is simply the sense in
which an organisation or o‹er is a coherent, integral entity.

And Spencer-Brown’s axioms tell us something very interesting about


branding. First, that it is enough to signal only once that someone is
entering the boundaries of the branded domain. Bringing this down

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to a perhaps trivial example, it is enough only to stamp a logo at the


point of entry into this world — on the homepage of a website, at the
entrance of a building or on the cover of a brochure. All subsequent
repetitions are redundant — they follow the law of calling. It also fol-
lows that any organisation that brands itself twice — and some do
— e‹ectively unbrands itself. This is dictated by the law of law of cross-
ing. Two di‹erent logos, both representing the same thing, undo each
other.

Francisco Varela introduces a third axiom, which actually follows from


Spencer-Brown’s mathematics, which shows how distinctions can
become self-referential. He uses this to illustrate the function of biologi-
cal entities, and the way they preserve a sense of their own identity.

According to Varela, all autonomous systems are structurally open


and functionally closed, which leads to paradoxical qualities particu-
larly evident in higher order cybernetics... Varela’s concept of biologi-
cal identity contains paradoxical elements, implying that a system is
open precisely because it is closed and closed because it is open. That
is, biological systems retain cohesive identity because, as Prigogine
and Stengers (1992) might say: they exist in far from equilibrium condi-
tions with an exchange of matter, energy and information across open
boundaries. At the same time, this identity can evolve dynamically pre-
cisely because of the system’s autonomous functioning.

Needless to say, this applies equally to organisations. But it is much too


big a subject to do more than mention here.

I’d also like to humbly suggest a fourth axiom, which comes not from
mathematics but from my experience of branding organisations. This
is that when several di‹erent indications (i.e. value laden distinctions)
are nested one inside the other, they can be collapsed to two — the
greatest and the smallest. This is di‹erent from the law of crossing in
that each distinction indicates a subset of the one that is greater than
it, rather than the same distinction. If you’re wondering what I’m talk-
ing about, think of the hierarchy of any organisation. Since I work a lot
with universities, I’ll use a university as an example. At the top level,

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you have the indication that distinguishes the institution itself. Inside
this, you may have a faculty. Inside the faculty, a school. Inside the
school, a department. But when you take these together, the ‘middle-
men’ can be e‹ectively dismissed. One is dealing with a general sense
of ethos, culture and values that are defined by the university brand
and a specific attitude that is defined by the department. The ethos,
culture and values as well as specific attitudes of faculties and schools
are subsumed within these. And I’d like to propose that this axiom
be called the law of subsidiarity because it demonstrates exactly that
principle. How it might be mathematically proven, I leave to the math-
ematicians.

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Being ourselves
25 September 2007

Who am I? How do you answer this question? And what’s the first thing
that comes to your mind when you try? Is it your name? “I’m James!” Is it
a feeling? “I’m me, of course!” Is it your body? Your abilities? Your memories
and experiences?

Identity is a fascinating subject which seems to become increasingly


elusive the more we try to pin it down. We’re used, for instance, to this
immediate association between our name and our sense of ourselves.
But can a name ever be more than some kind of indicator, some kind
of sign, for who we feel ourselves to be? We clearly are not our names.
In a similar way, the other possible ‘answers’ to this question begin to
unravel the more we examine them. Who is me? The best we can say
about this response is that it points us towards a feeling rather than a
concept: I am who I feel myself to be. But what is this ‘me feeling’? To
explore that further, we need to leave behind the familiar, intellectual
approach of questions and answers and delve into the realm of feel-
ings. Something most of us are not comfortable, or confident, doing.

Then there is the physical identification. Am ‘I’ my body? The odd


phrasing with which we have to frame this question, with its implied
separation of ‘I’ and ‘mine’ raises doubts already. And which bit of my
body? If I am unfortunate enough to lose my limbs, is my I-ness dimin-
ished? Of course not! So am I only a part of my body? A brain? A part
of the brain? But then this in turn seems to contradict the sense of
ourselves as a whole, integrated physical entity. As well as contradict-
ing the lingering sense that our bodies, our genes, our experiences are
perhaps not us at all.

This is not just an entertaining, ultimately futile parlour game.


Identity is a critical issue in all areas of our lives, from the personal
to the political, from the sexual to the spiritual, from the cultural to

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the commercial. Perhaps it is the issue. As individuals and as groups of


people, we’re not confident in our identity. We try all sorts of ways to
claim, to assert a sense of identity. And, increasingly, we get caught up
in conflicts over identity.

Like Nasruddin looking for his housekey on the sidewalk — an image I


find myself using more and more o·en — ‘because there’s more light
there’, rather than in the darkness of the house where he actually lost
it, I think we’re looking for our identities in completely the wrong
places. The feeling point is a big clue here, that the question may be
in words but the answer is in feelings, but it’s not the whole story. The
problem seems to be that we’re always looking for a qualifier. “Who am
I?” “I am this”, where this is a personal, cultural, ethnic, linguistic, reli-
gious, political, professional or social ‘identity’. Which, actually, is no
more than saying: “I identify myself with this: ergo, this is who I am”.
Of course it is an ‘identity’ because we have already ‘identified’ with it.
But it tells us nothing about the I who identifies, except perhaps that it
is drawn to make that identification.

The wisest observers of human identity, I have found, have stopped


short of associating the I-feeling with anything. When they inquire:
“Who am I?”, the answer they come back with is: “i am”. A bold, simple,
complete statement of being. What is this feeling of “me”? Nothing
short of the awareness of pure existence. And if I can be this, I can
equally be that. In philosophical terms, this and that are accidents:
outward attributes that can be swapped without prejudice to the being
that presents them. Existence is the only ‘necessary’ quality we have.

I am not of the East nor the West, no boundaries exist in my breast.


My place is placeless, my trace is traceless.
Wrote Rumi nearly eight hundred years ago.
This is not to suggest that we don’t need to make defining choices. Or,
indeed, that they aren’t imposed upon us. My choice to work as a com-
munications consultant shapes the way I see the world, unconsciously
as well as consciously. Had I chosen to be a lawyer, or a miner, or a

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bank-robber, I might see the world very di‹erently. Likewise the acci-
dents I didn’t have any choice about: my nationality, my ethnicity, my
family and my education, for instance. The fact that we would find the
same feeling answering to “Who am I?”, whether we had been born
into this family or another, whether we are brought up a Muslim or a
Catholic, doesn’t wipe away the enormous impact these factors have
on the things we identify with. We’re like a troupe of actors who have
taken on roles. But then, from years of playing those roles have come to
believe we are those roles. (Interestingly, the word ‘personality’, which
very nicely describes this kind of outwardly conditioned sense of our-
selves, derives from the Latin persona, a mask.)

Not only does “I AM” express our most fundamental sense of identity
— the true identity conferred by the simple act of being — but it is also
the ultimate source of all our energy, our passion. Everything we do
receives its vitality from who we are. And another way of looking at
this being is as pure possibilitity: it is our potential to be. Essentially, it
stands apart and before (‘ontologically prior’, a philosopher might say)
our particular identifications. It is that part of ourselves that could be
anything, the fluidity to take on any role (even those that are inconceiv-
able to us). It is also morally neutral: it includes as much our potential
to be a serial killer as a philanthropist, a genius as much as an ‘ordi-
nary Joe’. And even though we may live a dozen demanding roles, it
remains detached from all of them.

Conversely, the more identified we become with the particular circum-


stances of our lives — the more we confuse i am with “I’m a...” — the
more we lock up this potential energy into petrified, sclerotic forms. To
see this, we only have to compare the young with the old: to compare
those who have fewer defining identifications behind them, and feel
more unconditioned possibilities open to them, with the opposite. Of
course reclaiming that frozen energy is possible to us at any time. All
it takes is for us to realize “I am not this!”. Look, for instance, at how
much energy women reclaimed when the women’s movement opened
the possibility to challenge accepted gender roles.

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Much of my work is concerned with helping groups of people to rep-


resent their sense of identity (in the low-energy terminology of mar-
keting what is o·en described as ‘corporate branding’). And there is a
simple moral to be drawn for this kind of work from the observations
above. The more that a group of people try to represent themselves
in terms of the roles or activities they identify with (or are identified
with), the more lifeless and unengaging the results will be. It’s equiva-
lent, I would suggest, to calling someone Johnny Hairdresser or Sally
Lawyer: it draws our attention immediately to the outwardness of the
person, to a narrow definition of human potential in specific, limiting
roles. We don’t do this with individuals any more, although our sur-
names still contain the residues of these kinds of designations. We do
do this with organisations, however, because we fear that if we don’t
present ourselves in terms of these specifics, we won’t project any iden-
tity. Nothing could be further from the truth, though: these kinds of
identifications don’t project any real sense of identity at all, any sense
of “we are”. Better to hint at the unconditioned potential of a group of
people with an imaginative, colourful, can-be-whatever-you-want-it-to-
be kind of name. And imagery to match.

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Exquisite tact
9 October 2007

Tonight, Tuesday 9th October 2007, is the 27th night of the Islamic
month of Ramadan*. Which, by tradition, is the night celebrated by
Muslims as The Night of Power. ‘And what will explain to thee what the
Night of Power is? The Night of Power is better than a thousand months.
Therein come down the angels and the spirit by God’s permission, on
every errand: Peace! This until the rise of morn.’ (Qur’an 97:1-5)

The Night of Power comemorates the night on which the Qur’an was
first transmitted to the Prophet Muhammad. Although there is actually
some question about when this occurred, as the Prophet is reported to
have forgotten which day it was, and to have said: ‘seek it on the twenty
first, twenty-third, twenty-fi·h, twenty-seventh or on the last night’.
Why do I mention this? Because I want to talk about a prayer that
Muhammad gave to his young wife Ayesha, when she asked him for
something to say on this night. And why do I want to talk about this
recondite (and apparently o¤-topic) subject? Because, for me, it exem-
plifies a quality that we rarely see in communications these days: exqui-
site tact. Indeed, although I wouldn’t describe myself as a Muslim, I
have long admired the prayers of the Prophet for this very quality. They
show the cra· of communication at its apogee: simple, succinct, but
revealing vast depths. And putting things in the right order, which is
how his tact most clearly manifests itself.

The Prophet had beautiful manners. (Having known some of his


descendants, it seems to me that these were also passed on to his
family). What do I mean by manners? Not the kind of cringeing, stulti-
fied ‘Please?‘ and ‘Thank You!’ and ‘More tea, Vicar?’ that I was brought
up on (although I’m sure he remembered his Ps and Qs — or, at least,
his Bas and Qafs — as well as anyone else). Instead, what comes across
from the accounts of his life and diction is a truly lovely consideration

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and a›rmation of others — and, most especially, of God. He clearly was


a person who listened carefully, without judgment. And, particularly,
without that curse of our times, of wanting to say something without
hearing someone out. When he spoke, he said something that appreci-
ated what the other person had said (in the true meaning of apprecia-
tion: to add to, to build upon, to give more than was there to start with).
He also had, by all accounts, a great sense of humour. And although
this doesn’t concern us here, I mention it to counter the image of him
as some kind of glowering grey-beard, like many who claim to follow in
his footsteps today.

This prayer was narrated by Ayesha, who long outlived her husband to
become the grand old lady of early Islam, recounting many stories of
his life to subsequent generations. And for those who are interested in
such things, it was transmitted by the compilers of tradtions Ahmad,
Ibn Majah and Tirmidhi. In English it translates something like this
(with an rough transliteration of the Arabic as well):

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Before I go on, though, some explanation of the original is necessary.


‘Afuw does mean ‘forgive’ but there are other Arabic words which are
closer to the English meaning of forgiveness. Al ’Afuw is one of the
Names of God given in the Qur’an, and it means the One who oblit-
erates without trace, who e‹aces or wipes away. This is therefore not
about saying ‘Sorry!’ (and hoping that one’s apology will be accepta-
ble). It is an invocation for one’s wrongdoing — by which I understand
one’s heedlessness and forgetfulness of who or what one really is — to
be completely eliminated. What is the di‹erence? Well, saying Sorry!
leaves one forever under the shadow of that apology — ‘conscious of
one’s own sinfulness’ — as an old-fashioned Christian upbringing
would have it. What is being asked for here, on the other hand, is for
the trace or legacy of that heedlessness to be removed. It is like asking
for a trauma to be healed, rather than asking fogiveness for actions car-
ried out under its influence.

If you look at the transliteration, you will see that a word from the root
’a—f—w (from which Al ‘Afuw comes) occurs three times, in each of the
first three lines. First as ’afuwun, forgiving, then as al ’afwa, forgiveness,
and finally as ’afuw ’aniyy, forgive me. The prayer can thus be seen as a
play on this root (and spoken in the original the repetition gives it a
rather unearthly cadence).

But to return to the main thrust of this piece. The four short lines of
this prayer establish an extraordinarily tactful relationship between
the invoker and the Invoked. First God is called in the most personal
way: ’Allahumma, My God. Since I am less religiously and more mysti-
cally and psychologically minded, I see this not so much as a call to the
‘God out there’ as to one’s own indwelling divinity, to the ‘God in here’
(or what Jung referred to, in a more secular sounding way, as the Self).
Divinity is then recognised with the quality of forgiveness, or wiping
away: ‘You are forgiving’. Like many of the Prophet’s prayers, this
begins with an a›rmation of the qualities of Godhead — the request,
the asking for oneself, comes a·er establishing the Divine nature of
the quality that is to be asked for. You are forgiving.

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Then comes something extraordinary. Forgiveness is linked with love.


And not just with any love, but with passion: hubb, from which we get
the word used here, tuhibb. Thousands of Arab love songs designate
the object of deeply erotic passion using another word from this root,
habibi, ‘my beloved’. However, it probably sounds faintly heretical, if
not ridiculous, to suggest that an erotic feeling could be implied here.
If so, it is because we forget that Eros was originally Divine. The urge to
bring the cosmos into being, which is described in another tradition
of the Prophet Muhammad (where the first person refers to God), also
uses this word: ‘I was a hidden treasure and I loved to be known, so I
created the creation that I might be known’.

The desire to create is thus expressed as the release of an erotic charge.


But why might ‘forgiveness’ or ‘obliteration’ be the object of Divine
eroticism? Again, though, there is a curious echo of our own sexual
feelings, which combine a love to be known, an urge to procreate and
a desire to lose ourselves. We could say that God loves obliteration,
wiping away, because it is the erasure of the marks or imprints of sepa-
ration, of our assertion of a separate existence, which is (at least, in a
mystical sense) ‘sin’. Just as we long to e‹ace our sense of separate exist-
ence in the petit mort of orgasm.

Having thus established the Divine nature of forgiveness, and having


linked it with the energetic charge of love, only then does Muhammad
petition God – through the immanent ‘God in here’, who is ‘closer to
you than your Jugular vein’ (as the Qur’an has it) – for the obliteration
of his ‘missing the mark’ (if I can transpose the Christian Greek hamar-
tia into an Islamic context). The tact of this is beautifully expressed, lay-
ered and developed through the prayer. But we can also, perhaps, see
how this tact is related to a profound understanding of the ‘magical’
nature of the universe; how it is necessary to invoke Divinity through
a specific quality or outward expression and to energize this invoca-
tion by feeling inside onself a resonance with the Divine passion that
brings the universe into being. Only then does the framing of a peti-
tion make sense.

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Finally the prayer ends with the invocation of another quality, Divine
Generosity or Nobility. It is worth observing here that karamat, from
the same root as Al Kareem, also means ‘miracles’ in Arabic. A miracle
is asked for, from the Divine generosity: the miracle of wiping away,
of obliteration. But whether this petition receives an immediate or a
deferred, a direct or an indirect, response, the Generosity and Nobility
of the Divine (which also inheres within ourselves) is explicitly recog-
nised and remembered.

Communications can be sublime: I think this prayer is a beautiful reminder


of quite what tact and power human expressions are capable of.

* The Islamic year is based on a lunar calendar, so the dates of Ramadan vary.

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Misplaced belonging
29 October 2007

In his book We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love Jungian


psychologist Robert Johnson propounds a fundamental insight into
modern, Western societies. Since the middle ages, Johnson argues,
we have increasingly directed our religious impulses into romantic
involvements. The need for fulfilment, the longing for transcendence,
the hope of salvation that we once sought in spiritual experience are
now projected onto the relationship with a ‘significant other’.

Today we might consider ourselves resolutely secular, but the ‘ration-


ality’ of our position is undermined by our susceptibility to the mad-
ness of love. It is the most powerful energy system in Western societies
today, Johnson points out. And we continue to allow it to hijack our
lives, overturn our careers, sabotage our relationships. The worst of it
all, though, is that it doesn’t — can’t — deliver what we hope from it.
As Johnson goes on to explain, it is as if we try to pass a million volts
of intensity through a system designed, at most, to work with a few
hundred.

The problem with romantic love, if we may put it in these terms, is that
ordinary human relationships are not able to sustain its expectations.
However wonderful he or she may be, another person cannot continue
to meet our constant demand for meaningfulness. At a certain point,
the ‘magic’ vanishes and we are le· looking at our partner in their
unvarnished ordinariness. Instead of seizing this opportunity to build
a truly human relationship, one based on an appreciation of the other
as they are, strengths and weaknesses, faults and virtues, we tend then
to start looking for the ‘magic’ elsewhere.

Johnson’s explanation for this phenomenon is that what we look for in


our romantic loves is, in fact, ourselves. Specifically, that part of us that
Jung described as the anima/animus: the oppositely gendered arche-

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type that is our model of masculinity or femininity. And the more


someone can be a blank screen — onto which we can ‘project’ our tem-
plate or archetype — the more likely we are to ‘fall in love’ with them.
(This explains, amongst other things, why lovers tend to give up their
strong opinions and preferences to satisfy the other, and why women
o·en complain that men are turned o¤ by intelligence and a point of
view). But the anima (the female archetype in the male psyche) or the
animus (the male archetype in the female psyche) is not just a model
of what we look for in someone else. Indeed it is not really this at all,
which is where all the problems start.

In the Jungian conception the animus/anima is the go-between medi-


ating our little island of consciousness, our ego, with the vast ocean
of unconsciousness that makes up the remainder of our psyche. This
unconsciousness includes both a superconscious identity (what we
might call a ‘Higher Self’) and a dark ‘shadow’ made up of the things
that we have consciously or unconsciously rejected as well as our
unlived desires and aspirations. The animus/anima manifests in all its
archetypal splendour as an ideal man or woman in dreams, fantasy
and artistic expression (where it may even, if we have formed a nega-
tive relationship with it, take a malevolent form). But as a transparent
part of our everyday makeup it is responsible for our moods, our atti-
tudes and our self-esteem.

In the sphere of corporate identity, the animus/anima frequently crops


up as a symbol or logo. Britannia, the goddess who used to appear on
the old British penny, is one familiar example of an anima figure. The
intricately carved figureheads that used to grace the bows of sailing
ships are another. And anima figures are characteristic expressions
of patriarchal societies, of societies dominated by a kind of collective
male psyche. A more contemporary example is the image of Prudence,
the face of the Prudential corporation, re-envisaged in by my former
employer Wol¤ Olins in the 1980s as a throughly modern, assertive and
confident goddess. But as patriarchy releases its grip on our society,
anima images as emblems of corporate endeavour have become less

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common. In the social and cultural sphere, however, there is no cor-


responding diminution of the desire to project animus/anima images
outwardly: this remains the basis of every Hollywood blockbuster, of
every ‘popular’ novel, of every ‘serious’ love.

The remedy for our romanticism, Johnson tells us, is to realise that we
are mixing levels. Our romantic longings properly belong to our inner
world. Expressed in that world, they lead to psychic health and integra-
tion. Turned outwardly, they create a kind of hell for us as we try to live
up to — or, rather, expect others to live up to — their impossible expec-
tations. And for as long as we are under the spell of romantic love, we
are incapable of human love: the everyday appreciation of each other
that makes for enduring, realistic relationships.

This extraversion, this turning outwards, is at the root of many of


our contemporary di›culties. Modern humanity is in denial of
its inner world. Everything is sought outwardly. Yet the urges that
drive us towards inner completion and fulfilment will not go away.
Unrecognised for what they are, they are attributed — and directed
— towards things that cannot satisfy them.

A similarly misplaced impulse, it seems to me, is that of belonging. Like


romantic love, which appeared in the West only recently in human
history (around the twel·h century, with the troubadors and their
message of courtly love), belonging is also a comparatively late phe-
nomenon. Our remote ancestors belonged, it is true, to some kind of
tribe or grouping. But their belonging wasn’t driven by the kind of com-
pulsive need we see in contemporary societies. And, interestingly, their
words for themselves (some of which remain in modern languages)
generally meant ‘people’ or ‘folk’ — they belonged to humanity, as they
knew of it, rather than to a self-consciously di‹erentiated part of it.
They had no desire to belong because, simply by virtue of being born
into the group, everybody already belonged. The same remained true
as we entered the mediaeval period. Here everybody belonged to some-
one else: the peasant to the feudal lord, the lord to the king, the king to
God... No choice was involved with any of this belonging, nor was there

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any thinkable alternative, so nobody hungered a·er it.

In recent history, however, these structures of ‘natural’ belonging and


ownership have disappeared. In their place, we have seen the emer-
gence of wholly new, arbitrary kinds of belonging, such as nationalism.
And alienated from traditional patterns of connection, we now project
our sense of belonging onto elective constructs: things that we choose
to identify with, like political parties, subcultures, brands. There is
a hunger to belong. But as with romantic love, structures of belong-
ing seem impotent to satisfy it. We want too much intensity from our
belonging: more than our organisations are capable of providing.

It’s this demand for intensity — and its impossibility of fulfilment —


that provides the clue to what is going on here. The only thing that can
meet our desire for belonging is OurSelf, the totality of who we are. But
we are not in touch with this Self, are only conscious of being outward-
looking egos. And like romantic love, outward ‘belonging’ is a disaster
zone, a recipe for tension and dissatisfaction in all of the situations in
which we join with others. The outer world requires something calmer,
more allowing, more grounded: a means of associating together with-
out unrealistic expectations, and without the blame and dissatisfaction
that comes from their inevitable disappointment. Our inner world, on
the other hand — the place where such intensity is not only appropri-
ate, but necessary — languishes for want of any attention at all.

The next time you hear the story of a suicide bomber, consider this.
The problem may not be that he devoted himself to a toxic cause, but
that rather the cause itself became toxic because — like so many causes
in the modern world — it couldn’t support the intensity of belonging
demanded of it. Without an understanding of what our urge to belong
relates to, we will attach it to institutions that buckle under its weight.
We belong truly only to OurSelves. And unlike outward causes, that
realisation alone can give us the fulfilment we seek; will never fail us.

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Design for the New Age (part 2)


31 December 2007

My previous post, Design for the New Age, ended with this question:
‘But what would design be like if it did embrace the New Age? Many
of the central themes of New Age philosophies and practices have con-
siderable relevance — and resonance — for design. And there may be
answers here for how designers can find a positive and productive role
for themselves in the emerging era.’ A·er a few months for reflection,
this is my attempt at an answer.

One of the central themes linking many New Age philosophies is the
concept of harmony. Harmony is usually conceived on the model of
musical harmony: two or more notes sounding together to give a pleas-
ing concord. And the interesting thing about musical harmony is that
although it can be described in mathematical terms, as the ratio of
pitches, it depends on human aesthetic sensibilities to distinguish
between what is, and what is not, harmonious.

By extension, then, the concept of harmony can be applied — if only


metaphorically — to other situations in which two or more similar
entities appear together. In visual communication, for instance, it can
be used to describe a satisfying relationship between shapes, colours,
types, images etc. But it can also be applied to the relationship between
people. A group can be said to be in harmony if there is a fundamental
concordance between them. The nature of this concordance may be
explained in di‹erent ways (sometimes in quite outlandish terms) but
nonetheless what is being described depends on the same perception
of harmony that occurs to in music. What’s more, harmony appears to
be an objective (or at least consensual) factor. Someone with a poorly
trained ear may not be able to accurately discern what is harmonious
or not, but a trained musician will. And although di‹erent cultures
have di‹erent musical preferences, the ability to perceive harmony is
not cultural but biological.

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You might argue that designers have always applied such acuity of per-
ception in their work. For instance, even the Modernists —not other-
wise known for their considerations of harmony — talked about the
‘balance of unequal masses’. What was lacking before, however, was an
understanding of the harmonious as the basic principle of well-being
throughout the whole of existence: a principle to be strived for as a pri-
mary consideration in all enterprise. This understanding of harmony,
and the harmonious, has’t been a part of Western thinking since the
Renaissance.

The concept of harmony has a number of aspects, each of which has a


slightly di‹erent bearing on the understanding of design. The aspect
of congruence, for instance, which musically is experienced in the phe-
nomenon of a beautiful, ‘warm’ note with a strong, clear fundamental
reinforced by successive, harmonious overtones, has considerable rel-
evance for how we see the designer’s skill. A composition, which in
the terms of visual communication might consist of messages, words,
type, decoration, imagery, colour, materials etc., works most e‹ectively
when all the elements support a clearly expressed intention.

Intensification takes congruence a stage further and shows us that


when a number of elements are related in a harmonious way, they
reinforce each other’s strengths (and, correspondingly, diminish
each other’s weaknesses). As we all know, a group of people harmo-
nised around a shared intention can achieve much more than a single
individual. But although we think we know this, we rarely put it into
practice – either in human or design terms. The organisation is, a·er
all, the padigm case of what a group of people can achieve when they
are able to diversify their functions and individuals can employ their
specialisations in concert with others. However, much of what we call
management consists of imposing a single point of view rather than
leveraging this ‘whole is more than the sum of its parts’. And in design,
how o·en have you seen an image asked to do a job that images can do
better than words, without the painfully anxious need to repeat the
message in words as well?

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The aspect of resonance holds that, just as a tuning fork can spontane-
ously begin to resonate when the same note is played near to it, so com-
munication might work by a similar resonation of the ‘tuning forks’
within the human being. This analogy also goes some way towards
explaining the phenomenon, mentioned earlier, of how suitably sen-
sitised people have the same perception of what is harmonic and what
is not.

The really interesting things about resonance is the way that it shows
us that harmony involves the communication, or transference, of
energy. The tuning fork doesn’t just start to ‘sing in tune’ because of
some process of sympathy, but because its state is actively energised by
the instrument played near to it. This point, I believe, is of the greatest
possible significance to our understanding of design — and particularly
to our experience of designed communication. What is communicated
is energy. Not as a secondary or incidental part of the process of com-
munication, but as the principal activity. Communication doesn’t
transfer ‘information’: information is, instead, the outward and vis-
ible aspect of the transmission of energy.

It’s this recognition that I believe will signal a truly ‘New Age’ design.
By which I don’t mean an approach to design that is all incense, crys-
tals, tinkly music and half-understood eclectic spiritual jargon, but a
genuinely new kind of designing that echoes the central themes com-
monly associated with ‘New Age’ ideas. A design that reflects a new
humanism: design as if people mattered, design that respects the
integrity and — above all — the possibilities of the individual, design
that heals.

And that’s the last, and perhaps most controversial, point about har-
mony that I’d like to make. New Age thinking sees harmony not just as
a reflection of wholeness but also as healing. Disharmony is dis-ease
but that which is itself harmonious exerts an influence that predis-
poses towards harmony and thus to healing. This was well understood
to the ancients, whose ‘sacred art’ was considered not merely symbolic
and representational but also therapeutic. For the communication

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designer, however, this is perhaps the biggest challenge because the


intent of so many designed communications is not to represent whole-
ness but instead to present ideas, goods and services as if they could pro-
vide the wholeness for which a population, out of harmony with itself,
craves. Real change in this area will only be possible when organisa-
tions reconceive their own purposes, putting ideas like harmony above
the pursuit of profits. In fact, this is already happening. An indication
is the way the idea of profit achieved at others’ expense is shi·ing to
a more harmonious notion of abundance under the influence a new
genre of New Age ‘motivational’ bestsellers such as The Secret.

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The Narcissistic Brand


20 May 2008

Over the last few months I’ve become fascinated by the psychology of
narcissism. Since this was first identified as a pathological condition
by Freud, it has stimulated a great deal of investigation with some very
interesting findings. What I find so striking about it, however, is the way
that it seems to describe a fundamental condition of our whole society.

Like the ancient Greek myth of Narcissus, who was doomed to fall in love
with his own reflection until — unable to consummate this impossible
love — he pined away, a narcissist is someone who is heavily invested
in an image of himself or herself but, behind the image, may be living
a much impoverished reality. So, for instance, a narcissist may give a
great deal of attention to other people’s problems, because he wants to
present an image of a ‘concerned’ person, but may fail to attend to his
own needs. Indeed, he may berate himself because he doesn’t live up
to the image he has created. This description might sound strange to
those who imagine that narcissism is related to vanity, but a moment’s
reflection shows that the ardent supporter of causes may be just as
vain as the fashionista or dandy.

The standard work on psychological diagnosis, The Diagnostic and


Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM IV-R) describes narcissism as
a ‘a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and a lack
of empathy’. Again, it may be surprising to suggest that a ‘concerned’
person might be su‹ering from lack of empathy. But in fact one can
see this frequently in the behaviour of celebrities or politicians who
seek to highlight others’ plight to win admiration but who, beyond the
cameras, are merely exploiting those they purport to help.

The DSM also gives a list of indicators of narcissism, with the display
of more than five of these suggesting that a person is su‹ering from a
Narcissistic Personality Disorder. It states that such a person:

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has a grandiose sense of self-importance

is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power,


brilliance, beauty, or ideal love

believes that he or she is ‘special’ and unique


requires excessive admiration

has a sense of entitlement

is interpersonally exploitative

lacks empathy

is o·en envious of others or believes others are envious


of him or her

shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes

[source: wikipedia]

For a moment, let’s consider these characteristics not in relation to a


person but to an organization. Can you think of any organizations that
project a grandiose sense of self-importance? Are preoccupied with
fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love?
Would like to get you to believe that they are special and unique? More
to the point, can you think of any organizations that don’t manifest at
least five of these qualities?

Of course these characteristics don’t all relate to the organization’s


image. The exploitation, lack of empathy and arrogance may be hidden
away in the impoverished reality of the organization — the unpublicised
day-to-day experience of its sta¤, and perhaps some of its other stake-
holders as well. So, for instance, behind the lovable, cosy supermarket
brand there may be an unhappy history of nailing down farmers and
other suppliers to unrealistic prices. And behind the self-important
bank brand there may be a pattern of intimidating, overworking and
bullying sta¤. This is the Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde nature of narcissism:
the outward need for admiration and approval but the inward reality
of exploitation and unconcern.

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Interestingly, there is a connection between these two sides that is not


always obvious. The narcissist may, for instance, be seen as someone
who cares inordinately about his or her appearance: someone who
spends hours each day in the gym, undergoes expensive cosmetic sur-
gery, constantly worries about her diet. But none of these behaviours
reflect a concern about the body: indeed the body is made to su‹er for
the image. And it is the same with organizations: there may be great
concern, for instance, with ‘corporate social responsibility’ but the
narcissistic organization will su‹er for its looks, make great sacrifices
to be newsworthy, but its motives will always be to cultivate an image.
(This is one reason, incidentally, why the world’s great spiritual tradi-
tions all censure public displays of charity — Jesus’ ‘when you give, do
not let your right hand know what your le· hand is doing, so that your
giving may be in secret’ can be seen as a protective against worsening
one’s narcissism.)

The phenomenon of the brand can be seen as one of the most potent
expressions of a widespread corporate narcissism in our societies.
Behind the managed image that is a brand a very di‹erent reality may
be in place: as with the narcissistic individual, the more investment
there is in the image, the more ‘impoverished’ this reality is likely to
be. Meaning, here, that the ‘body’ of the organization, the wellbeing of
its sta¤ and the integrity of its social fabric, is made to su¤er the dis-
sonance of an image so far out of kilter with the reality — a dissonance
that will ultimately produce irreparable damage to that fabric, just
as the body obsessed narcissist ultimately does irreparable damage to
their body. But it is the impoverishment of the real self that is even
greater in narcissism: the authentic feelings, perceptions and values of
the individual are ignored in favour of those that look good and a cal-
lousness su›cient to put the cultivation of image above all else.
‘An enduring truth, a wise friend once explained to me, is that
important social change nearly always begins in hypocrisy. First,
the powerful are persuaded to say the appropriate words, that
is, to sign a commitment to higher values and decent behavior.

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Then social activists must spend the next ten years pounding on
them, trying to make them live up to their promises or persuad-
ing governments to enact laws that will compel them to do so.’

So the feisty American journalist William Greider perceptively


observed. And it may be that through the hypocrisy of narcissism, its
splitting of image from reality, real change becomes possible to both
people and organizations. To do so, however, there has to be a point at
which the cause celébre transfers from image to reality: where ‘green-
wash’ becomes real environmental stewardship. My sense, however, is
that corporate narcissism is not so much a route for change to take
root in our society as a disastrous pathology that will, as it does in the
case of the individual narcissist, result in a crisis of very significant
proportions. It is the point at which the image becomes unsustainable
— where its facade begins to crumble, where its demands can no longer
be met, where it is seen to be hollow and empty inside — that the nar-
cissist comes to the point of breakdown. It’s at this point, too, that its
real poverty is revealed: the total lack of authenticity, the neglect of the
real self, the ravages on the body.

a good film.’

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references
transforming communication

338
references

Further reading

Barfield, Owen
Saving The Appearences isbn 0 8195 6205 x
The Rediscovery of Meaning isbn 0 8195 6124 x

Owen Barfield was one of the most interesting, and neglected,


thinkers of the twentieth century. Saving the Appearances influ-
enced Marsall McLuhan and quantum physicist David Bohm, but
its author remained relatively unknown. Its basic thesis of a recent
evolution of consciousness, witnessed through our changing use
ot language, is a central theme in Barfield’s work. The Rediscovery of
Meaning is a collection of essays that shows the range and vitality of
Barfield’s though — and its relevance to many of our concerns.

Bortoft, Henri
The Wholeness of Nature isbn 0 86315 238 4

At first sight this book, ostensibly about the unique method of sci-
ence developed by the great German writer Johann Wolfgang Von
Goethe, wouldn’t appear to have much interest for designers. Let it
su›ce to say that it has extraordinary implications for the practice
of design — not least in the parts that deal with Goethe’s system-
atic cultivation of a rigorous faculty of imagination, and its role
in understanding holistically. Towards the end of the book, Borto·
examines the nature of language from a phenomenological per-
spective and his revelations are so astounding that this in itself
justifies reading The Wholeness of Nature.

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transforming communication

Cialdini, Robert
Influence isbn 0 673 56751 1

Influence is an enormously entertaining and very insightful survey,


by a prominent social psychologist, of the six principal techniques
we use to manipulate one another. Using real examples, Cialdini
shows how our evolutionary development makes us particularly
susceptible to these tricks. This is a book of such importance for
anyone involved in communication that it should be required read-
ing on every graphic design course. It’s only when we understand
how these things work that they lose their power, allowing us to
develop less exploitative forms of interaction.

Claxton, Guy
Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind isbn 1 85702 451 6
Wise Up isbn 0 7475 4069 1

In Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind Guy Claxton gathers together a substan-


tial body of research to show that our non-conscious ‘slow minds’
provide us with most of our practical intelligence, reliable judg-
ment and wisdom. It is a seminal book that challenges the myth
that it is the conscious, deliberative and analytical part of our brain
that is the most valuable. Wise Up presents us with a new model
of education for lifelong learning, based on Claxton’s three Rs:
Resilience, Resourcefulness and Reflection. His observations make
such good sense, and are so well researched, that it almost makes
you want to go back to school and demand to know why your teach-
ers couldn’t teach like this.

Deikman, Arthur
The Wrong Way Home isbn 0 8070 2915 7

In The Wrong Way Home, psychologist Arthur Deikman explores the


phenomenon of cults — and draws a disturbing conclusion, that the
bases of cult behaviour are prevalent throughout or professional,

340
references

commercial and governmental institutions. Deikman finds four


main ingredients of cultishness: deference to authority, compli-
ance with the group, avoidance of dissent and antipathy to outsid-
ers. More recently, these same factors have been identified in hte
breakdown of civil society and the intolerant polarizations of socie-
ties such as the former Yugoslavia. But The Wrong Way Home doesn’t
just show us some of our darker side. It’s also a book that holds out
considerable hope. Deikman paints an appealing picture of an ‘eye
level’ world where interactions take place between equals, without
the coercive trappings of authority — and where we can let go of
harmful dependency fantasies that fuel cultist responses.

Dunbar, Robin
Grooming , Gossip and the Evolution of Language isbn 0 571 17397 7

Robin Dunbar proposes that we developed language as a substitute


for the grooming activities of other primates. Grooming plays a
very important role in the lives of of apes and monkeys: it is the
way groups bond together, alliances are made, conflicts resolved,
politics negotiated. Based on his and others’ observations, Dunbar
noticed a correlation between the size of the group and the amount
of time spent on grooming. Because each animal can only groom
with one other at a time, as the size of the group increases the pro-
portion of time spent on grooming increases. At a certain point,
it becomes unsustainable — either the group must split or it must
find some other activity to take the place of grooming. Dunbar’s
hypothesis, which is supported by many palæolinguists, is that as
early human groups were forced out of the forest by over-popula-
tion, it became necessary to form much larger groups for mutual
protection against predators. Developing language, which allowed
speakers to ‘groom’ with more than one other at a time, enabled
our ancestors to resolve this problem of size. Grooming, Gossip and
the Evolution of Language is a fascinating intellectual detective story,
as well as a powerful case for communication on a human scale.

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transforming communication

Gadamer, Hans Georg


Truth and Method isbn 0 7220 9281 4
Philosophical Hermeneutics isbn 0 520 03475 9
The Relevance of the Beautiful isbn 0 521 33953 7

Gadamer’s Truth and Method is a monumental work which inves-


tigates questions of interpretation and understanding from the
standpoint of a humanist tradition of philosophy. Gadamer is
o·en scholarly, but rarely as impenetrable as his mentor Martin
Heidegger (he has the ability to make the most profound state-
ments in such a modest way that one can sometimes miss their sig-
nificance). Philosophical Hermeneutics contains a selection of essays
that acts as an excellent intoduction to Gadamer’s work. The title
essay of The Relevance of the Beautiful explores the work of art from
the point of view of the liberating and celebratory concepts of play,
symbol and festival. It is as relevant to the creation of life-enhanc-
ing design as it is to art.

Hall, Edward
Beyond Culture isbn 0 385 12474 0
The Dance of Life isbn 0 385 12448 7
The Hidden Dimension isbn 0 385 08476 5

The great American anthropologist Edward Hall has spent a life-


time exploring what he calls ‘primary culture’ — the ways in which
human beings use fundamental things like time and space. But
unlike other anthropologists, who have researched the rituals and
practices of obscure cultures, Hall’s principal interest has been in
the way these hidden patterns influence everyday activities (like
commerce or the use of technology) in our societies. Beyond Culture
covers many of the ideas for which Hall is famous — particularly the
‘contexting system’ which has been very influential on my think-
ing. The Dance of Life is about our use of time, and rhythm, and the
way we unconsciously synchronize our rhythms with each other.
The Hidden Dimension looks at the subtle e‹ects of space.

342
references

Heidegger, Martin
Basic Writings isbn 0 415 10161 1

Martin Heidegger is by no means the easiest of philosophers, even


if the poetic quality of his writings is a powerful antidote to the
dry logic of Anglo-American philosophy. To my mind, there are a
handful of really important essays in this collection, which explore
Heidegger’s basic insight that truth, aletheia, simultaneously reveals
and conceals. The Way to Language reflects on how this happens
in human communications, and introduces the concept of propri-
ation — ownership — as central to speaking. The Question Concerning
Technology, prophetically ahead of its time, shows how the problem
with technology isn’t anything technological — but the way it
frames our thinking, making us look at everything as a potential
raw material for a mechanistic process (the end product of which
simply becomes a resource for yet further processes).

Jung, Carl Gustav


Man and his Symbols isbn 0 330 25321 2

Whilst there has been considerable recent interest in semiotics,


which describes itself as the ‘science of signs’, our understanding
of symbolism has waned. The consequence of this are not di›cult
to see: the shallow surface referentiality of signs has given us many
of the characteristics of modern marketing, such as the idea of the
brand. But if we wonder why our corporate and other heraldry has
so little real resonance, it is probably because we can’t distinguish
between the sign and the symbol. This is the point where Jung
starts his own contribution to Man and his Symbols.

Maturana, Humberto & Varela, Francisco


The Tree of Knowledge isbn 0 87773 642 1

Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela have caused something


of a stir in the life sciences by developing a view of cognition that

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transforming communication

extends from the cellular level right up to embrace human culture


and language. This view challenges the traditional ‘conduit’ model
of communication as the transmission of information with a new
view that sees it as a ‘behavioural coupling’. The Tree of Knowledge is
a fast paced, well laid out and profusely illustrated book that does
full justice to the authors radical and exciting views. Unfortunately,
their thoughts can be hard to follow at times, and require persever-
ance. It could be that they don’t translate well from the original
Spanish — but my suspicion is that they challenge our assumptions
at such a fundamental level that their implications can at times be
di›cult to grasp.

Milgram, Stanley
Obedience to Authority isbn 0 06 131983 x

Most people know about Milgram’s experiment, even if they don’t


recognize his name. It’s the one where a volunteer ‘teacher’ is
asked to test a ‘learner’ on memory tasks, administering a series
of increasing electric shocks when the learner (actually the exper-
imenter’s collaborator) makes a mistake. What it shows about
human nature is disturbing in the extreme — that we’ll obey flimsy
authority in an unquestioning manner even when it contradicts
our common sense or humanity. Communicators of all kinds play
the authority game. We all ought to know what this means.

Nørretranders, Tor
The User Illusion isbn 0 14 023012 2

Nørretranders builds up a case that consciousness is not all it’s


cracked up to be. Indeed, it seems to be capable of ‘processing’ a
mere 40 bits per second of information — compared to something
in the region of 11 million bits per second that reaches our brains
from our senses. Mechanical analogies generally make me uncom-
fortable, but Nørretranders argues his case convincingly. In a sense,
this book is a perfect companion to Claxton’s Hare Brain, Tortoise

344
references

Mind — making a case for the less-than-conscious ‘slow mind’ from


the very di‹erent perspectoive of information theory. This book
contains some fascinating insights, not least Benjamin Libet’s dis-
covery that we consciously will an action half a second a·er our
brains have actually decided to carry it out. It becomes obvious
that we’re not the sovereing, self-determining creatures we imag-
ine ourselves to be — that consciousness is more like a monarch who
is made to believe he is in charge, by signing proclamations while
his executive is already putting them into action. Nørretranders
final chapter on the ‘sublime’ shows how accepting the limitations
of consciousness can actually enrich our lives — a theme that I’m
sure will run and run in the decades to come.

Ornstein, Robert
The Psychology of Consciousness isbn 0 14 022621 4
Multimind isbn 0 333 43803 5
The Evolution of Consciousness isbn 0 13 587569 2
The Roots of the Self isbn 0 06 250789 3
The Right Mind isbn 0 15 100324 6

Back in the early seventies, Robert Ornstein was responsible for


bringing the new disoveries about the specializations of the brain
hemispheres to the attention of a general public in first edition
of The Psychology of Consciousness. A quarter of a century later, he
revisits this subject in The Right Mind, showing how in the interven-
ing period we’ve trivialized the idea of the ‘right brain/le· brain’
dichotomy, ignoring more recent research that shows how impor-
tant the co-operation of both hemispheres is in many tasks (includ-
ing language). Ornstein is a phenomena in the brain sciences, and
his many books have proved amongst the most reliable — as well
as accessible — guides to really important discoveries coming from
this field. Of all Ornstein’s books, Multimind is the one I’ve found
most illuminating. It presents a view of the mind as a collection of
competing, sometimes contradictory priorities.

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transforming communication

Page, Russell
The Education of a Gardener isbn 0 14 007254 3

Significantly, this is the only book on design I’ve included in this


list, and it is concerned with a very di‹erent discipline from graphic
design. Nonetheless, Russell Page expounds an approach to design
that I’ve found more inspiring than anything I’ve read by graphic
designers. Tucked away in technical descriptions of soil, planting
or climate are real gems of perception into the design process — not
as most of us practice it, but as it could be (and clearly was for
Page). It’s a view of design that is based on a real insight into ‘the
language of things’: the way our world speaks to us, and how this
can be intensified by the designer. Page works with the local, the
particular and the timely, giving a unique insight into a humanist
approach to design that is almost unknown elsewhere.

Shah, Idries
The Pleasantries of the Incredible Mulla Nasrudin isbn 0 86304 023 3
The Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Nasrudin isbn 0 86304 022 5
The Subtleties of the Inimitable Mulla Nasrudin isbn 0 86304 021 7

Learning How To Learn isbn 0 14 019513 0


Knowing How To Know isbn 0 86304 072 1

Surely everyone knows the Mulla? Asked to identify himself,


Nasrudin pulls out a small mirror. ‘Yes, it’s me alright!’ What’s less
well known is that Shah’s collection of Nasrudin jokes forms a kind
of grammar that allows one to understand everyday experiences in
a new and illuminating fashion. It’s not really possible to explain
this, you have to experience it for yourself.

Otherwise, Learning How To Learn provides an excellent and accessi-


ble entry point into the work of one of the most exciting and impor-
tant thinkers of our times. Knowing How To Know probes into many
areas of interest to communicators, and suggests how di‹erent
many aspects of our lives will be in the twenty-first century.

346
references

Seligman, Martin
Learned Optimism isbn 0 671 01911 2
What You Can Change… And What You Can’t isbn 0449 90971 9

Learned Optimism was a watershed book in the understanding of


how inappropriate explanatory styles produce depressive states of
mind. As such, it has helped hundreds of thousands of people con-
front a lifetime of pessimism — and the rigid framework of ‘abso-
lutes’ (life is always like this, bad things always happen to me,
there’s nothing I can do) that stop us realizing our potential and get-
ting on with our lives. What is even more striking from a designe’s
point of view, however, is that these ‘universal, pervasive and per-
sonal’ explanations are exactly the bases of Modernism, and the
reasons why twentieth century design was so anal. The project of
creating a life-a›rming approach to design must therefore con-
front the same issues as the depressive, pessimistic person. By con-
trast, What You Can Change… confronts the myth that we can ‘change’
our way out of any predicament — an unwarranted assumption that
similarly condemns us to dissatisfaction, rather than learning to
accept and live with the things we can’t change. This, of course, was
the other side of Modernism: the idea that we should rebuild the
whole world from zero, a project whose inevitable failure turned-
many Modernists into bitter and unhappy old men.

Tannen, Deborah
That’s Not What I Meant! isbn 1 85381 512 8
You Just Don’t Understand isbn 1 85381 471 7
Talking from 9 to 5 isbn 1 85381 546 2

Deborah Tannen is fascinated with conversational styles, and the


problems that can occur when they clash. You Just Don’t Understand
became a bestseller because of the way that it exposed the di‹erent
ways that women and men use language, and why so many misun-
derstandings develop in relationships. Tannnen has also developed
a unique style of exposition, including examples from literature

347
transforming communication

and everyday life, which makes her books very enjoyable to read
but infuriatingly di›cult to quote. Reflecting on her points makes
one realize quite how ‘masculine’ our tradition of visual communi-
cations — explaining why graphic design awards, conferences and
publications are still dominated by the status displays of young
men (and why today’s ‘Young Turks’ become tomorrow’s stifling
establishment). Tannen infuriated many feminists by daring to sug-
gest that men and women are di‹erent. But her books are a power-
ful argument for more inclusive approaches to communication.

Winn, Denise
The Manipulated Mind isbn 086304 025 x

Denise Winn’s book is an admirable survey of what’s known about


the use of conditioning and manipulation. Together with Cialdini’s
Influence and Milgram’s Obedience to Authority, it provides a sound
basis for understanding how these things work — and, more impor-
tantly, what we can do to disarm them. Why is it so essential for
communicators to know this? Because the recent history of the
communications business has been primarily concerned with the
increasing use of sophisticated forms of manipulation. In their own
areas of application, these have seemed harmless enough. But in
a broader context we’ve become a society obsessed with pushing
each other’s buttons, rather than developing more authentic ways
of interacting. Reading The Manipulated Mind, it’s a miracle that
there haven’t been more abuses — something we owe to the relative
stability of Western societies since the second world war. However,
like other dangerous technologies in less-than-responsible hands,
we shouldn’t let recent history lull us into a false sense of security.

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