That's Entertainment

Graphic design culture at large has the potential to be intellectual and critical in nature, yet the individuals and groups that operate within the sphere of cultural production and assorted economies attached to graphic design consistently ignore intellectualism as operational methodology. This exhibition is the opposite—within, I attempt to suggest some of the difficulties that both the public and design practitioners are facing with the development of design in the Neoliberal Era.

This exhibition utilizes a more-or-less dead format: political posters, though almost unrecognizable as such, as the posters within do not have the aesthetic attributes of retro activist posters. Instead, the posters adopt a contemporary aesthetic—one free from the constraints of “the grid” and akin to “the cloud”, a whole other form of tyranny. The aesthetic is that described as “The Global Style” in Jeffery Keedy's eponymous 2013 essay:

“ The Global Style looks new, but still familiar… it radiates newness and very little else… it is obedient to the point of near transparency. On an emotional level it sublimates quotidian boredom into a contemporary expression of cool, ironic, quotidian boredom into a contemporary expression of cool, ironic ennui.”

Most of the formal and aesthetic attributes of the new Global Style are lifted directly from the International Style. White space backgrounds, sans serif typefaces, minimalist asymmetrically balanced compositions with limited color palette. No extraneous decoration, ornament or complex patters, A love of simple geometric shapes. The one notable exception is the grid.

It's not that the grid is no longer there—it's that the grid is no longer visible or even detectable. It is embedded in the 0's and 1's and x and y coordinates of digital space… just like the movie Tron, the digital environment is built on a grid (it just doesn't glow like neon). So it is understandable why designers would stop fussing with grids when it is the ground beneath us, the water we swim in and the air we breathe in our virtual/digital world. ”

Keedy's thoughts on the Global Style far transcend mere aesthetics—they function as stand-in for the designer as laborer in the Neoliberal economy, unmoored from economic structures and standards of the late Fordist policies of developed nations (e.g.: freelance/contract-to-contract-based designer and/or adjunct design faculty sans steady employment, health benefits, et al).

The political poster and general visual activism first devolved to Adbusters-esque 'culture jamming' in the 1990s, and then even further in the 2000s to just mere product—designers/artists/marketeers and their army of interns have drained political imagery from even being pastiche.

The political poster today is the semantic equivalent of a bloated corpse floating in an aquatic environment with face, genitals, and limbs nibbled off. There is a body, but there is little to distinguish it as unique, much less rebellious in nature. Beret-wearing 'visual revolutionaries' have drained the impact of historical reference in service of the Fall/Spring fashion season cycle.When the lessons, inherent meaning and visual impact of history are drained in vampiric service of the market, even at least on the surface level, what do we have left beyond visual freefall?

Beyond aesthetics, designers are currently besieged by a brave new world. The multi-member independent design studio model is currently in its death throes, and the individual designer (versus the world) is quickly becoming the new standard. Graphic design itself is increasingly fractured and graphic designers must be adept at more skills and specializations than ever before.

Simultaneously, graphic designer as 'hired gun' must operate as his/her own public relations representative/hype man, promoting post-studio output in the digital sphere as rapidly as it is made. If one's work does receive popular attention, it is most likely through non-remunerative channels (medium.com views/reads, Facebook likes, reTweets, Pins, Behance dingleberries) that serve to bolster one's self-worth in a way that is purely 'social'/network-based.

This is reified in Keedy's The Global Style, as well:

“ Feeding your blog, Instagram, Tumblr and Twitter account is self-promotion, but is it design? The fact that you are busy doing design doesn't mean you are a designer any more than the fact that you are busy cooking makes you a chef. ”

Social media-based promotion puts neither the non-proverbial 'food' on the table, nor pays the rent on one's co-working space as one has to now pay a premium for one's monthly/annual software-licensing/software-based storage-licensing. Fealty to an employer has been supplanted by 'independence', but at the cost of the snowball effect of exponentially increased and diversified labor for lesser returns and a simultaneous reliance on much-misunderstood PostFordist interdependence.Design is potentially at the edge of a precipice—one that is symbolic of culture at large. If design is one of the major vehicles for cultural expression and communication, then it may be bigger than we all think. Designers are more 'free' than ever, but simultaneously more tethered to their workstations than ever before.

The posters in this exhibition—printed in 2 spot colors on A3-size paper using Risograph printing (a form of on-demand printing that is highly fetishized amongst graphic designers today for its mimicry of coarse resolution offset printing and extremely low cost of production) explore these ideas as much as many of the other constituent parts of the contemporary culture of graphic design.

One of the outcomes of the First World's economic shift to Neoliberalism is that the Information Economy destroyed boredom by occupying citizens' time while simultaneously deskilling them. (Shorthand: That's entertainment!) This has continued unabated—a relatively few American technology companies (Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft) have created economic/commercial monopolies surrounding surveillance, e-commerce, hardware, software, telephony, data aggregation, social interaction, et al.

On a smaller scale, say that of technology surrounding graphic design, there are two corporations that supply today’s creative tools: namely, Adobe and Monotype. Each has a virtual monopoly on specific software—Adobe’s Creative Cloud suite for digital imagery and typographic form-giving and Monotype’s near-monopoly on digital typefaces (what the general public uses for the transmission of visual language). The stock value of both corporations for the past three years forms the outermost layer of this localized ‘cloud’—the real-time commercial worth of the digital mechanics of graphic design.

The article “That's entertainment” discusses the commoditization of design and its global homogenization, where aesthetic innovation in graphic design has been dominated by market forces rather than creative expression. The unstable working conditions, economic pressures, and corporate monopolies (such as Adobe) that designers face have led designers to follow standardized tools and aesthetics, reducing the space for true creativity and critical thinking.

This also reminds me of the Figma Ai function, which can quickly get a low fidelity interface of a web page by sending a few prompt words to AI; the market does not care about creativity, they just want someone who can imitate Apple's web design.

For the manifesto project redesign, I kept the original two-column design (h2 on the left, body text on the right), and added more visual elements that match the reading response.

Designers' creativity is "trapped" in a range dominated by market forces. So here I used an animation to let the border “trap” the text "that's entertainment". Then I used the hover state to "release" the creativity.

When designers brainstorm, it is a stage of creative explosion. At this stage, designers usually sketch on paper, so I used handwritten fonts. But to ensure readability, the body text is in “roboto”.