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Manifesto |
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by Jonathan Barnbrook, Andrew Blauvelt, Hans Bockting, Irma Boom, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Max Bruinsma, Sian Cook, Linda van Deursen, Chris Dixon, William Drenttel, Gert Dumbar, Simon Esterson, Vince Frost, Ken Garland, Milton Glaser, Jessica Helfand, Andrew Howard, Tibor Kalman, Ellen Lupton, Katherine McCoy, Rick Poynor, J. Abbott Miller, Lucienne Roberts, Jan van Toorn, Rudy VanderLans, Bob Wilkinson, Nick Bell, Jeffery Keedy, Zuzana Licko, Ellen Lupton, Katherine McCoy, Armand Mevis, Erik Spiekermann |
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First Things First Manifesto 2000
We, the undersigned, are graphic designers, art directors and visual communicators who have been raised in a world in which the techniques and apparatus of advertising have persistently been presented to us as the most lucrative, effective and desirable use of our talents. Many design teachers and mentors promote this belief; the market rewards it; a tide of books and publications reinforces it.
Encouraged in this direction, designers then apply their skill and imagination to sell dog biscuits, designer coffee, diamonds, detergents, hair gel, cigarettes, credit cards, sneakers, butt toners, light beer and heavy-duty recreational vehicles. Commercial work has always paid the bills, but many graphic designers have now let it become, in large measure, what graphic designers do. This, in turn, is how the world perceives design. The profession’s time and energy is used up manufacturing demand for things that are inessential at best.
Many of us have grown increasingly uncomfortable with this view of design. Designers who devote their efforts primarily to advertising, marketing and brand development are supporting, and implicitly endorsing, a mental environment so saturated with commercial messages that it is changing the very way citizen-consumers speak, think, feel, respond and interact. To some extent we are all helping draft a reductive and immeasurably harmful code of public discourse.
There are pursuits more worthy of our problem-solving skills. Unprecedented environmental, social and cultural crises demand our attention. Many cultural interventions, social marketing campaigns, books, magazines, exhibitions, educational tools, television programmes, films, charitable causes and other information design projects urgently require our expertise and help.
We propose a reversal of priorities in favour of more useful, lasting and democratic forms of communication – a mindshift
away from product marketing
and toward the exploration and production of a new kind of meaning. The scope of debate is shrinking; it must expand. Consumerism is running uncontested; it must be challenged by other perspectives expressed, in part, through the visual languages and resources of design.
In 1964, 22 visual communicators signed the original call for our skills to be put to worthwhile use. With the explosive growth of global commercial culture, their message has only grown more urgent. Today, we renew their manifesto in expectation that no more decades will pass before it is taken to heart.
Jonathan Barnbrook
Nick Bell
Andrew Blauvelt
Hans Bockting
Irma Boom
Sheila Levrant de Bretteville
Max Bruinsma
Siân Cook
Linda van Deursen
Chris Dixon
William Drenttel
Gert Dumbar
Simon Esterson
Vince Frost
Ken Garland
Milton Glaser
Jessica Helfand
Steven Heller
Andrew Howard
Tibor Kalman
Jeffery Keedy
Zuzana Licko
Ellen Lupton
Katherine McCoy
Armand Mevis
J. Abbott Miller
Rick Poynor
Lucienne Roberts
Erik Spiekermann
Jan van Toorn
Teal Triggs
Rudy VanderLans
Bob Wilkinson
Background
Last year the Canadian magazine Adbusters took the unusual step of reprinting a manifesto, ‘First Things First’, written 35 years ago in London by Ken Garland and signed by 21 other visual communicators. As it turned out, Garland knew nothing about this renewed interest in his call for a ‘reversal of priorities in favour of the more useful and more lasting forms of communication.’ Adbusters had come across the manifesto in a back issue of Eye (see ‘There is such a thing as society ‘ by Andrew Howard, no. 13 vol. 4) and felt that its sentiments had become ‘more, rather than less relevant’ today.
After that, things started to move. Kalle Lasn, editor of Adbusters, showed the issue with ‘First Things First’ to the late Tibor Kalman, who said: ‘We should do this now. ‘They met Ken Garland himself at their Vancouver HQ. Little by little the idea of a new version of ‘First Things First’, updated and rewritten for the twenty-first century, began to take shape. Garland gave the project his blessing, but left the writing and organisation of new signatories to Adbusters. Earlier this year [1999] the magazine’s art director, Chris Dixon, read out a preliminary draft during a packed lecture at the Royal College of Art.
As the new version and list came together, other magazines were approached to see whether they would act as co-sponsors of the initiative.
‘First Things First Manifesto 2000’ is being published in its entirety, with 33 signatories’ names, in Adbusters, Emigre and the AIGA Journal in North America, in Eye and Blueprint in Britain, in Items in the Netherlands, and Form in Germany. A poster version will be designed by Adbusters and dispatched to design schools around the world.
The aim is to stimulate discussion in all areas of visual communication – in education, in practice, in the organisations that represent design’s aspirations and aims – as well as outside design. The changing relationship of advertising, graphic design, commerce and culture poses some profound questions and dilemmas that have recently been overlooked. If anything, these developments are accepted as an unproblematic fait accompli.
In consequence, many young designers have little conception of the values, ideals and sense of responsibility that once shaped the growth and practice of design. The profession’s senior figures, who do, are for the most part quiet. Adbusters’ welcome initiative reasserts these considerations as fundamental to any sensitive interpretation of graphic design’s role and potential.
First published in Eye no. 33 vol. 9, 1999 |
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Links
http://www.adbusters.org
http://www.eyemagazine.com/feature.php?id=42&fid=53
Designers
Jean Widmer
Reputations | 34
A refreshing shock to the system [extract] | 48
Related Articles
Design is advertising, #1: The whispering intruder | 29
Design is advertising #2: Nomadic resistance | 30
There is such a thing as society | 13
Interview with Ken Garland | 66
Whose space? | 66
Political clout: Australian posters | 46
‘Femicide’ posters | 49
One man brand? | 76
Branding as mythology | 19
Dreams that money can buy | 20
Over the rainbow | 75
Advertising: mother of graphic design [extract] | 17
Concrete poems just are | 20
Looking for clues [in full] | 55
Remembrance of things past | 58
George Lois | 29
Fair trade? | 66
Sticks in the mind | 69
Mad about awards | 69
Excitable hexagonal | 69
Drawn into conversation | 72
Flight of the imagination | 73
Central Lettering Record | 15
Reading on brand (text in full) | 53
Form follows purpose: Inkahoots (extract) | 46
Do-it-yourself | 26
Typographic tango | 68
Other Articles by Jonathan Barnbrook
Other Articles by Andrew Blauvelt
Towards a complex simplicity | 35
Under the surface of style | 18
Raised on ideas | 35
Other Articles by Hans Bockting
Other Articles by Irma Boom
Other Articles by Sheila Levrant de Bretteville
Other Articles by Max Bruinsma
Serious doodling | 28
Keep it simple | 26
The diaphanous machine | 26
Commercial Art | 29
Design mirror | 29
What you see is how you think | 31
Reputations | 32
The aesthetics of transience | 25
Enigma variations | 19
Best before | 27
Other Articles by Sian Cook
General Idea: Infiltrate, infect and mutate | 30
Other Articles by Linda van Deursen
Other Articles by Chris Dixon
Other Articles by William Drenttel
Other Articles by Gert Dumbar
Other Articles by Simon Esterson
That’s art direction | 61
Kit of parts | 44
In few words / Manplan 1 | 54
Printing.com | 66
Head Trip | 78
Taking care of business | 80
Inspiration | 58
The Vignellis: a thoroughly Modernist marriage | 60
Monitor: End of default | 75
Other Articles by Vince Frost
Other Articles by Ken Garland
Herbert Spencer | 44
Tool-shop for a counterculture | 78
Agenda | 10
Other Articles by Milton Glaser
Other Articles by Jessica Helfand
Squaring the circle | 41
White space, silent thoughts | 33
Because they’re big | 36
Describe/draw a favourite memory | 35
Geometry is never wrong | 24
You are under our control | 28
I design, therefore I am | 23
The myth of real time | 22
Multiple choices | 30
Screen manifesto special | 38
Is the avant-garde lost in space? | 31
We know who you are . . . | 29
The univernacular rules | 34
The big reveal: theatrical typography | 40
Freedom in the graphic galaxy | 39
All the news that fits | 27
White space, silent thoughts | 33
Television did it first | 26
Sensory montage | 25
Other Articles by Andrew Howard
There is such a thing as society | 13
Design beyond commodification | 38
Other Articles by Tibor Kalman
Other Articles by Ellen Lupton
Cranbrook in close-up | 3
Underground matriarchy | 14
The academy of deconstructed design | 3
Words made flesh | 18
High and Low (a strange case of us and them?) | 7
Other Articles by Katherine McCoy
Other Articles by Rick Poynor
Pierre Bernard | 3
Reg Mombassa (text in full) | 46
Stephen Banham (extract) | 46
Form follows purpose: Inkahoots (extract) | 46
Look inward: graphic design in Australia | 46
Dark tools of desire | 63
A designer and a one-man band | 45
Crash covers | 52
Penguin crime (text in full) | 53
The celebrated Mr B | 35
Design is advertising #2: Nomadic resistance | 30
Design is advertising, #1: The whispering intruder | 29
23 Envelope: ambience and inner space | 37
Alan Fletcher | 2
Typotranslation | 38
Maps and dreams | 2
The World Made Visible | 62
Both ends burning | 11
Information sculpture | 13
Katherine McCoy | 16
Peter Saville [extract] | 17
Remove specifics and convert to ambiguities | 20
Rick Vermeulen | 21
Dan Fern | 22
This signifier is loaded | 22
Fellapages | 23
Knowing | 24
Other spaces | 25
Don't buy this | 27
Typographica | 31
The designer as architect | 32
Surface wreckage | 34
Malcolm, Peter . . . and Keith [EXTRACT] | 49
Looking for clues [in full] | 55
Documents of the marvellous | 65
Borderline | 71
Malcolm Garrett | 12
Jon Barnbrook, Virus | 15
One week in pictures | 73
Neville Brody | 6
Machine head | 75
Love of lexicons | 78
Robin Kinross | 80
Andrzej Klimowski: Theatre of dreams | 14
The shape of a pocket | 81
Type as entertainment | 7
Other Articles by J. Abbott Miller
Word Art | 11
Pictures for rent | 14
The idea is the machine | 10
Alchemy of layout | 51
Fabien Baron | 18
Through thick and think: fashion and type | 65
What did you do in the design studio today, daddy? | 22
Other Articles by Lucienne Roberts
Read me! Parts 1 and 2 | 37
Being good | 63
Being good | 62
Other Articles by Jan van Toorn
Other Articles by Rudy VanderLans
Other Articles by Bob Wilkinson
Do they know it’s communication? | 73
Other Articles by Nick Bell
Self-propelled, self-made | 38
Self-expression, self-promotion | 38
Self-explanatory | 38
Self-control. self-raising | 38
Self-evident, self-motivated, self-perpetuating | 38
Graphic Thought Facility | 39
The steamroller of branding (text in full) | 53
Unfurling artwords | 59
Iguana stew | 68
Other Articles by Jeffery Keedy
The rules of typography according to crackpots/exp | 11
Other Articles by Zuzana Licko
Other Articles by Ellen Lupton
Cranbrook in close-up | 3
Underground matriarchy | 14
The academy of deconstructed design | 3
Words made flesh | 18
High and Low (a strange case of us and them?) | 7
Other Articles by Katherine McCoy
Other Articles by Armand Mevis
Other Articles by Erik Spiekermann
KesselsKramer | 64
Issey Miyake | 64
Matthew Carter | 11
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Copyright eye magazine © 2001.
eyemagazine.com is sponsored by artificial
environments.
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