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ExperimentaDesign / Bienal de Lisboa 2005 Graphic design is an applied art: it serves well defined functions such as recognizability, legibility and economy of means in combination with subjective imagery to solve communication problems for clients. That is the core. But there’s more. As a profession graphic design is slightly over a century old, but in this century it has developed a visual language of its own, drawing on traditional visual arts, typography, illustration, photography and cinema. This visual language has become part of our culture — it is engraved into our lives. Whenever we open a book or magazine, whenever we look at a television or computer screen, whenever our eyes slide along a zillion advertisements in our streets, we see and read not just words and images, but the language of design. This exhibition is only in part about graphic design. More importantly, it is a visual essay about the ways design’s visual languages are used in our communication culture. It is a subjective view on visual culture by the curator, Max Bruinsma, and six invited designers. All communication — and thus all communication design — is based on an embedded script that on the surface wants to seduce you into believing the messages communicated. On a deeper level, it wants to inform you, and ultimately it wants to engage you into taking part in the message and in the contexts and causes it serves. This exhibition traces these underlying scripts in designs which both use and strengthen the visual languages of today’s communication culture. Mieke Gerritzen Theme: Introduction / the design of culture Designer: Ed Annink, Ontwerpwerk An average of 3000 public messages a day are thrown at the inhabitants of today’s modern cities. All of these advertisements, road signs, do and don’t notes, directions, corporate and public communications want one thing: that you believe what they say. In an open and democratic society, it is crucial that both designers and citizens remain critical. Rather than becoming sheepish followers or believers, they can act as mature and visually literate participants of communication culture. Designers become catalysts when they assist the public in taking a second critical look, beyond merely accepting or rejecting the messages that surround them. Communication equals seduction. A graphic design rarely communicates neutral information; it tries to seduce you into reading the message and positively respond to its contents. But seduction can be more than just saying ‘buy me, please!’ The designs in this section seduce by addressing the public as intelligent readers of cultural information. By triggering their audience’s social concerns, challenging their associative powers, counteracting mindless concepts, designers act as cultural catalysts. Beyond the message, the design seduces you to relate it to your own culture and society. Thus, it helps you to design a bridge between the message’s content and yourself. As soon as any information is designed, it becomes interpreted and thus subjective. Even the most ‘objective’ of signs, letters, can become cultural icons in their own right when designed with a specific cultural intention in mind. Similarly, such seemingly neutral imagery as street signage can ground itself visually in the cultural history and identity of its environment. This section will show a broad range of designs using the visual languages of information design: graphs, diagrams, pictograms, etceteras. The main message of these designs, however, is not necessarily the information, but the way it has been constructed as cultural expression. A good design is not a neutral answer to a brief; it is essentially a criticism of the contents for which it has been produced. In this section we show designs that act out this critical position. They comment on culture and society using the images and visual codes designers have collectively developed during a century of communication design. Popular culture, too, expresses itself more and more in these graphic codes. The most direct way of communicating your engagement with the world around you is to mobilize its native graphic languages — everyone can now design and publish their own messages. The visual languages of graphic and communication design have developed over slightly more than a century. During this period, some designers and movements have set off radical innovation, followed by others who have developed new uses and applications for existing forms. Change and establishment have taken turns, from the radical 1910s, through the maturing 1930s, the new élan of the 1960s, to the global style of the 1980s and 1990s. The four kiosks of our ‘historical timeline’ form an exhibition within the exhibition. They highlight the icons of design and visual culture that have shaped the thesaurus of communication design. It has been said that our information culture is becoming an information deluge (or in more recent terms, an info-tsunami). This massive reservoir of information and images forms the backdrop of any communication design - it is the visual environment from which each and every design originates and to which it will return - as part of the avalanche.
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