Graphic design is the most universal of all arts. It envelops us by communicating, decorating or identifying: it provides meaning and background to our living environment. We find it in the streets, in everything we read, in our bodies. We come across it in everything we read, on our bodies, in traffic and road signs, advertising, magazines, cigarette packets, headache pills, the logo on our t-shirt or the washing instructions label on our jacket. It is not only a capitalist or modern phenomenon, but the inhabitants of ancient Egypt, medieval Italy or Soviet Russia regularly faced streets full of signs, emblems, prices, product offers, official announcements and various news.
Graphic design fulfils different functions. It classifies and differentiates – it distinguishes one company, organisation or nation from another. It informs and communicates – it tells us how to debone a duck or how to register a newborn. It affects our mood and helps us form our emotions about the world around us.
An old saying among graphic designers says that “bad graphic design has never killed anyone.” This phrase could give graphic design a certain inconsequential, markedly decorative character, since it would consist of simply choosing a typeface or a color over others that could work equally well. Some journalists are notoriously fascinated by the use of the genitive “designer” to mean a cynical consumerism that distracts our attention through a striking visual appearance, such as fancy bottle caps, Victorian-style labels or new logos for corrupt companies. This has led to the coining of expressions such as “designer mineral water,” “designer jeans” or even “designer babies.” A meaning of the word wrapped in tinsel that, unfortunately, is not foreign to the use that graphic designers themselves make of it.
Imagine for a moment that graphic design were outlawed, or simply disappeared overnight. The written word would not exist, nor would newspapers, magazines, or the Internet; we could not talk about science, books would be a rarity reserved only for the wealthy classes; a few copies of literature, a handful of universities, and only the harshest of medicines would be within our reach. Everything would have to be written by hand. Without the processes of design and its components – structure and organization, word and image, differentiation – we would receive all our knowledge orally. We would enter a new period of obscurantism, an era of ignorance, prejudice, superstition, and fleeting life cycles.
Graphic design is not simply an extra frivolity; its uses and objectives are so inherent to the modern world and civilization that, to describe the human being, Marshall McLuhan coined the term “typographic man.”
What is graphic design? Barcelona: Gustavo Gili Publishing House.