Delusions of grandeur

It is no longer good enough to be a plain vanilla designer. There is an impulse among a handful of critics and designers to create a better class of designer: the designer as author. In a way, designers have always been authors. A large part of most design projects involves all the activities that any author goes through: inventing, researching, shaping, editing, revising, and so on. In the past, where this activity used typography and pictures, it was called simply “design”, and to be an author you had to sit down and actually write an imaginative or documentary text using words. But the new, improved designer/ authors do not need to confront the problems of writing a systematic argument, they can work on something Rick Poyner has called “new forms of communication”.

Two recent publications, Fuel 3000 by Fuel, and Life Style by Bruce Mau, typify this new form. They might look like old-fashioned books, but you need to put aside that out-moded style of thinking and concentrate hard to appreciate how this new form has, in the words of Fuel’s Stephen Sorrell, “something to say”.

Mau’s book, so big it is a coffee table as well as a book, does have text written by Mau – rather well written, in fact – but instead of pursuing a single argument, he favours feeding us easy-to-digest-nuggets. He lays out, among many other things, his “rejection of the opaque”. Like his “klangfarbenmelodiekompozition”, a homage to Schoenberg and Stockhausen, which is merely a ridiculously elaborate way of describing using different quantities of cream and blue on different pages of a book. And one book is described as having a “pantheistic surface”, you look avidly for any sign of divinity, and then you read that this means that in Mau’s office the pages are “charged with potential life”. (Meaning, I think, you can put pictures and text on them.) Maybe something got missed in the reproduction. And the most toe-curling moment is where one essay (not by Mau), tells us that design “can have pretensions; it can aspire, not only to activism, but to science and thought”. If you are trying to understand the implications of that, Mau suggests you “Think with your mind”.

If Mau goes for high-art allusion, Fuel goes for poetry, or rather a bunch of pictures alongside a brand of poetic text that walks a line between very hard to understand and devoid of meaning. The Fuel trio did not write the text, so absorbed were they in picture research. There is a type of narrative formula common now in these designer/ author books: unsystematic, portentous maxims juxtaposed with documentary, medical or technical photography. It is a style pioneered by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fior in Medium is the Massage (sic), polished by Dan Friedman in Artificial Nature, patented by Tibor Kalman and trotted out when designers need to express deep and meaningful thoughts.

Old-fashioned designers can still find value in these two new books. But what they tell us is not what their publicity and their authors claim. For example, Fuel’s book can be read as a series of experiments that explore the possibility of expressing three dimensions in two dimensions, a theme central to art for thousands of years.

What worries me most is that the language used to describe books of this ilk in critical articles and publicity; design which is “content” and design, as Rudy Vanderlans puts it, that is providing “more than a service”. I think this is part of an argument that gets very nasty. The argument goes like this; what is produced for mass consumption, what is “commercial”, is of little or no integrity. Worse, it is malign and corrosive. Things like dog biscuits, butt toners and cigarettes. Instead of contributing to the expansion of a corrosive commercial environment, designers should pursue a “personal agenda”, says Poyner, one in which design “instead of its usual servile role provides much of the content”, as Vanderlans puts it. What is nasty about this line of thought is that it is a rehearsal of the old division between high culture, that explored profound human values, and low culture, which is ephemeral, emotionally cheap and exploitative. Only the select few could clearly see the value in high culture, and the wastefulness of low culture. A clique of designers now seem to want to elevate one edge of design, make it “pure”, and, of course, elevate themselves with it.

Since the message of these tomes is not for those of us addicted to butt toners, I wonder who buys them? And who reads them? Obviously, no “ordinary” person will, not one who isn’t intimately interested in graphic design. And if the production values are high, and the profits low, how can the designersí afford to do them?

Of course, books of this sort serve a commercial function. As one star-struck hack given a publicity preview of Fuel’s book wrote, “It wouldn’t surprise me at all if, by the autumn, the boys are back at the top of the ad agencies’ hit lists”. That is it, the prime target, these books open the doors to the Croesus wealth of the advertising agencies and multinational corporations. The books can earn an invitation to work on campaigns and international brands, compared to the vast majority of graphic designers, trying to make a living from designing dog biscuit packets and beer labels. For all his disdain for the “predatory colonisation” of the market, Mau is happy to work for the carnivorous Universal Studios, Disney, and Swatch. Fuel work for Sony and Levi’s. Sorrell of Fuel puts it very succinctly, “I think we earn more than the average graphic designer”.

Now that is something to aim for; you are lifted out of the everyday grime as a special kind of person – a “graphic author” and you get paid a king’s ransom to do type for TV ads. A neat symmetry: the critique of commercial culture is what shows you the money.

Fuel 3000 by Fuel is published by Laurence King Publishing, priced £30

Life Style by Bruce Mau is published by Phaidon Press, priced £39.95