A new idea of modern graphic design

Where is graphic design today?

Since the research in the project had compared how graphic design had moved from being handcrafted artisans making early advertisements to a more technical industry in visual design . In general Graphic Design history and contemporary design is a large gray area. To understand Graphic Design is to accept that there are multiple influences that occur at the same time. In order to avoid being misdirected is to accept there are multiple influences.

Graphic Design has been the center critical debate about not only what is design, but how design differs from advertising or fine art or architecture. Most books begin with the disclaimer that graphic design fields, such as history, are evolving. They need further investigating or that there is all too much material for a singular design timeline. Ergo, studying design and related field is never straight forward, without a very specific interest, because the wealth and limit of knowledge. While some critics have attempted to define Graphic Design based on its movements, its place in larger encompassing Visual Design or against other related fields such as Advertising. Even more interesting is while there are principles that unite design, every designer is a different approach and or philosophy for how they produce their work.

The project examined various arguments, critics and tried to come to a general understanding of the opposing views of what design is, could be and was. It tried not to focus specifically on any one time, but rather how a design is often fluid in influence, trends and periods. Since the project was not historical, it did not focus either on where one critic was writing from in perspective, but rather how their views tend to either still relevant in the same way.

In the essay “ The Grand Unified Theory of Nothing” by Randy Nakamura, the idea is that to begin to define the experience that accompanies design is what limits its potential impact. Nakamura draws from other critical essays in the matter, but better summarized in his statement that

“ Ideas have to be useful…yes, design is about analysis and problem solving, but its fundamental impacts on the world (for better or worse) is in the artifacts and forms it produces.”

Nakamura highlights that this point that design serves a purpose, sometimes it does not always have a measured outcome or even have an impact on the audience. Therefore, when planning a research project having this understanding of how to approach earlier research, aids in keeping both a focus and relief, that design is not always groundbreaking. In most cases, many designers will not have their work featured and those who originally employed the design replaced by the next generation. The entire culture as it shifts come from small interactions within the unseen day-to-day, while the focus of a designer is always first to the design itself.

2. The audience are the receivers of the information encoded in a design. While some communication models suggest that the audience are passive participants who are only reacting to the information to be informed. The idea that if the audience will react on an emotional level to a design, also suggests that the designer while designing is encoding emotion into the design. This is a suggestion that the methodical approach to design, may help to explain how to better use emotions during the process to for new approaches.

Therefore understanding the arguments behind how the audience helps shapes a design is also important for research. The audience is of course part of all communication, but there are many theories to the extent the audience has in the process of design. There are other arguments that say that the design is a passive form of the experience and that the audience are the ones who are doing the action. In Design Studies, which examines approaches to how to analytical research with graphic design, it highlights are argument of grammatical, semiotic, and rhetorical analysis of design with the goals of the approach to persuade/inform/or influence the audience in some way. The overall goal of the designer is to introduce a new idea to the audience and how the audience reacts either accepting/rejecting doesn’t matter, since in either case they are discussing (tyler, 37-49, design theory).