Timothy Samara - Design Elements: A Graphic Style Manual

To understand the meaning of design is... to understand the part form and content play... and to realize that design is also commentary, opinion, a point of view, and social responsibility. To design is much more than simply to assemble, to order, or even to edit; it is to add value and meaning, to illuminate, to simplify, to clarify, to modify, to dignify, to dramatize, to persuade, and perhaps even to amuse.

Design is both a verb and a noun. It is the beginning as well as the end, the process and product of imagination.

A graphic designer is a communicator: someone who takes ideas and gives them visual form so that others can understand them. The designer uses imagery, symbols, type, color, and materialwhether its concrete, like printing on a page, or somewhat intangible, like pixels on a computer screen or light in a videoto represent the ideas that must be conveyed and to organize them into a unified message. Graphic designers perform this service on behalf of a company or other organization to help that entity get its message out to its audience and, in so doing, evoke a particular response. Graphic design, as an industry, is a cousin to advertising, both of which were born from the tumultuous period of the Industrial Revolution of the late 1700s and early 1800s, when the working classfinding itself with time on its hands and money to spend in the pursuit of comfortbegan to look for stuff to buy and things to do. Graphic design and advertising share one particular goalto inform the public about goods, services, events, or ideas that someone believes will be important to them; but graphic design parts company with advertising when it comes to ultimate purpose. Once advertising informs its audience about some product or event, it cajoles the audience into spending money. Graphic design, however, simply seeks to clarify the message and craft it into an emotional experience. Granted, graphic design often is used by advertising as a tool to help sell goods and services; but the designing of messages is, at its core, its own endeavor altogether. This purpose is what differentiates graphic design from other disciplines in the visual artsa purpose defined by a client and manifested by a designer, rather than a purpose generated from within the designer. True, the fine arts patron historically was often a client to the great painters, but, up until the nineteenth century, artistic creation was understood to be intrinsically a service industry. It wasnt until the 1830s that the mystique of the bohemian painter as expresser of self arose and, even more recentlysince the mid 1970sthe idea of the graphic designer as author. In the fifty-odd years since the design industry began to ask business to take it seriously as a profession, the graphic designer has been touted as everything from visual strategist to cultural arbitershaping not only the corporate bottom line through clever visual manipulation of the brand-hungry public, but also the larger visual language of the post-modern environment. All these functions are important to graphic design... but, lest we forget the simplicity of the designers true nature, let us return to what a graphic designer does. A graphic designer assimilates verbal concepts and gives them form. A designer organizes the resulting form into a tangible, navigable experience. The quality of the experience is dependent on the designers skill and sensibility in creating or selecting forms with which to manifest concepts, or messages. A designer is responsible for the intellectual and emotional vitality of the experience he or she visits upon the audience for such messages. The designers task is to elevate the experience of the message above the banality of literal transmission and the confusing self-indulgent egoism of mere eye-candy or self-fulfillmentalthough these might be important to the designer. Beauty is a function, after all, of any relevant visual message. Just as prose can be dull and straightforward or well edited and lyrical, so too can a utilitarian object be designed to be more than just simply what it is. Some time around 1932, Adolf Loos, the noted Viennese architect, said, There is a great difference between an urn and a chamber pot, and in this difference there is leeway for culture. Thats a lot of leeway. Designing is a discipline that integrates an enormous amount of knowledge and skill with intuition, but its more than just the various aspects that go into it: understanding the fundamentals of form and composition; applying those fundamentals to evoke emotion and signify higher-order concepts; manipulating color messages; understanding semiotics and the relationship between different kinds of visual signs; controlling the pacing of material and informational hierarchy; integrating type and image for unified, coherent messaging; and planning the fabrication of the work and ensuring its physical quality as an object, whether its printed, animated on screen, or built.

Paul Rand Graphic designer.
From his book Design, Form, and Chaos,
Yale University Press, New Haven, 1993.