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                           The Future of Graphic Designers


Graphic design is one of the branches of design, this activity with a changing definition but of which we can recall that given by the AFD. Design is a creative, multidisciplinary and humanist intellectual process, whose the goal is to deal with and provide solutions to everyday problems, large and small, related to economic, social and environmental issues." (For the full definition)

Graphic design, as a design activity applied to communication and information, is directly shaped by the dominant ideology or the ideological movements that contest it, thus producing different "graphic" currents.

The layout of the media, the writing of the content, the graphic choices are intimately dependent on the objectives sought by the designers and their sponsors.

Should we deduce from this that graphic design is only a tool without its own soul? A zealous servant but without autonomy? And what to think then of its future at the dawn of this period of great upheaval which is coming?

This last question is the very subject of this article, we could rephrase it as follows: in a world to be reinvented for humanity far from consumerism, does graphic design have a place?

Note that in this article I often speak of graphic designer, that the many, even majority, professionals who exercise in this activity do not hold it against me, the French language is thus made, but it is addressed to all graphic designers without distinction of gender, age, religion, sexual orientation or typographical preference!

To conclude this introduction, I specify that this reflection was born from my confrontation with reality as a graphic designer and teacher in graphic design. It was fuelled by numerous discussions with graphic designers, graphic design teachers, and students wondering about the very meaning of their (future) activity. These questions essentially arise from four observations:

The accelerated exhaustion of creative people due to the conditions in which they carry out their activity;

The suffering of students torn between their quest for meaning in an anxiety-provoking society and the need to fit into a productivity mould;

The loss of credibility of our profession, confined more and more to the role of serving hatch;

The search by all for a new balance in life and a new meaning to give to our common adventure.

I. the Graphic Designer, a zealous servant?

Without entering into a debate of scholars, which others have fuelled with much more relevance than I could do, let us note all the same that graphic design, as an activity, has not always been confined to slavishly follow the dominant ideology. It conceals, in its very nature, a propensity to seek rupture and therefore the questioning of the established order, at least in its aesthetic dimension.

To take just one example, let's cite "Slow Design" which appeared in the early 2000s under the impetus of Alastair Fouad-Luke, an English academic, who advocates, like the slow movement of which he is a part, of to extract these activities from the constantly increasing acceleration of economic life in favour of a time of realization more in line with a rhythm favouring creativity, quality and fulfilment. This philosophy has been taken up by some graphic designers (in the broad sense).

It is clear, however, that this conception of the activity of design, while meeting with broad approval within the community of designers, has not been retained as a form of organization of our activity.

The problem being that insidiously a shift has taken place from content to form, the designer having mainly put himself at the service of the dominant ideology, ultra-liberal capitalism, not to mention it. Thus, the role of the graphic designer, in the service of the consumption of goods and pre-chewed ideas, is too often limited to visual bluster or slogans of convenience.

II. The current place of graphic design

One thing is clear, no offense to our egos, the graphic designer is now essentially a specialized worker responsible for selling while “making it look good”. A visual technician, a cog in the system who is now only sporadically a seeker of meaning through graphic invention.

Creativity, this word that we use until indigestion, is no more than a shadow of itself, glorifying to excess the slightest graphic flourish, the slightest motion design, the smallest colorimetric audacity. While it should be our bulwark against standardization, our spur to force us to be more demanding. The digitization of the economy has further reinforced this trend. Indeed, if we go beyond the semantic veil of digital newspeak, we objectively observe that the majority of great speeches are commercial verbiage calling on poorly mastered notions. Who does not talk about SEO, SMO, and AdWords in front of his clients above all to dress in the clothes of the expert when he fears having to implement them?

For the sake of appeasement, let's recognize that this is often less a question of intellectual dishonesty when the graphic designer puts on the trappings of a digital strategist, than a lack of time to train, ease or ridiculous budgets for produce with thought and intelligence. Because, in this drift of our practices, the responsibilities are shared and the sponsor always wanting more, faster for less is not exempt from reproach.

But the reality is there, always having to do faster for an ever-decreasing cost, the designer is often content to apply “graphic tricks” without being interested in the substance. It then becomes just a cog in the wheel of mass consumption. A cog undermined by resale sites at prices bordering on the indecency of preformatted graphic solutions produced at a loss by graphic designers in search of a few euros to survive.

Worse, after 7 decades of ideological structuring, the graphic designer has a whole panoply of semantic tools aimed at “dressing in virtue” what he promotes, without worrying about anchoring speeches and arguments in any factual reality. He shamelessly clears himself of his client's lies as he participates in their promotion. Going even further, the tools of marketing and data analysis, kings in the area of ​​Big Data, dissect the flaws of the "targets" to better use their credulities and their "weaknesses".

In this context, the graphic designer, accepting his role as a simple cog without critical sense, becomes an accomplice of a system that cannibalizes the planet and exploits mankind.

We could go further in this analysis in order to weight and clarify the arguments, this will perhaps be the subject of a future article. But for now, our purpose is elsewhere.

Because if we are at a turning point in our ultra-liberal capitalist societies which pushes us to imagine a new path of development for our societies, as all the indicators seem to indicate (climate emergency, social inequalities, etc.), moving towards more sobriety and less consumerism, the question is to know what place will be attributed to the graphic designer in a society of which we know nothing yet?


III. Tomorrow graphic designers

At. Reflection framework

Here we are, what will be the place

Of the graphic designer tomorrow,

Will he have one (many civilizations?

 Have prospered without this

Corporation

 And if so, which one?

Above all, let's try to be honest

And modest.




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