A Possibility of New History of Graphic Design in New Normal
A review of the possibilities of the new history of graphic design in the New Normal through the reading of world-historical events and their relation to graphic design. This paper bases its reading on the book Indonesian Graphic Design in the Vortex of World Graphic Design (2015).
“The role of graphic design in activism can be deeper than just posters and T-shirts,” said design anthropologist Stanford Dori Tunstall. Graphic design is not only about tangible visuals, but also about the design of ‘social values’ which are mutually agreed upon by an activism movement without barring certain disciplines. In the social sphere, design professionals do intersect and combine with other fields and disciplines. And in its history, the professionalism of graphic design is also ‘present’ in world events, even to some extent it can have a real impact on the socio-cultural changes of people in various parts of the world.
This essay contemplates the influence of the Covid-19 pandemic as a global event in the discipline of graphic design more than tangibility or visual aspects, but its professionalism and its contact with social and cultural contexts. This event is the defining momentum of our history now that will be read later, as world events that have occurred throughout history. Then, in line with the spirit of Hanny Kardinata in his introduction in the Indonesian Graphic Design book in the World Graphic Design Vortex (2015), which is an effort to bring together young graphic designers with their history, then, let’s first trace back some of the world events and their relation to graphic design.
The ‘presence’ of the design we can trace since the Industrial Revolution in England towards the end of the 18th century. One of the triggers of this revolution was the refinement of the James Watt steam engine in 1769 which was used to accelerate the production of goods, which then boosted massive industrialization in various industrial sectors. This also led to the start of the era of mass communication and the refinement of the advertising industry since the discovery of the Gutenberg printing press in 1450. The typesetting linotype machine was born to handle demands in producing books and mass media with high quantities. In this era Didot and Bodoni fonts were created which were very typical of the mass media and we can trace their influence until now.
The next important event was the appearance of the Bauhaus design academy in Weimar, Germany, in 1919 after the end of World War 1 (WW1). Bauhaus’s artistic vision and practice are to combine the pragmatic aesthetics and functions of a design product to increase artistic value without compromising function. Its founder, architect Walter Gropius, put forward the combination of fine arts with craft without giving a partition, as established in the Bauhaus Manifesto written in the same year:
“… So let us, therefore, create a new guild of craftsmen, free of the divisive class pretensions that endeavored to raise a prideful barrier between craftsmen and artists! Let us strive for, conceive, and create the new building of the future that will unite every discipline. … “
The contribution of the thought and work of the Bauhaus was indeed related and triggered by PD1. Frances Ambler, the author of The Story of Bauhaus (2018) in an interview with The Local, said, “The impetus for Bauhaus arises from the horrors of the First World War and the desire to do things differently. They use art and design to try and respond to their time needs. Society always presents new needs, so that way [Bauhaus] is always relevant. “Then, according to John V. Maciuika in his book Before the Bauhaus: Architecture, Politics, and the German State, 1890–1920 (2005), the existence of Bauhaus, both as an institution and academia also took a role in the political movement at that time, especially during the era the start of World War 2 (WW2), when there was a sentiment about the differences in the artistic value of the Bauhaus that was at odds with the Nazi artistic view, namely Romanticism.
After years of depression, the world economy began to rise to its heyday. The 1950s became the beginning of a new world economic reconstruction led by the United States (US). US companies also take the leading position in many industries. The impact on the graphic design sector was the start of the golden era in the advertising industry. The 1960s was the coming of age of the advertising world, marked by perfecting communication formats on television content, the use of copywriting, and photography adjustments to increase product selling power and produce work with an unprecedented level of creativity. This era is influenced by changes in lifestyle, consumerism and socio-political views, therefore, the presence of advertising is considered important because it reflects the spirit of innovation, sophistication, and trends.
The advertising industry not only supports the prosperity of a country but also has an important role in its involvement in political events in the 1950–1970 era. Advertising can bring issues that are considered sensitive to the realm of community pop culture. A concrete example that is also interesting is the space travel competition of the US and the Soviet Union. In this case, the Soviet Union was actually superior and completely first: the first humans to go to space, the first satellites, and the first space station. But this is nothing when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. This is thanks to marketing strategies, public relations, media placement, and good advertising. In July 1969, 94% of American television was tuned to the Apollo 1 moon landing. This mission was widely covered by the press with more than 53 million people in the United States watching this show, and a total of 650 million viewers worldwide watched it. This event became a pop culture event in the 1970s.
In the 1970s, advances in advertising also occurred in Indonesia. At that time the New Order had just been established, changed the political order, and revived economic sectors that had collapsed. One impact is the increase in the lifestyle of the people whose axis moves to follow global trends. Advertising agency offices in Indonesia began to be opened as new policies in the field of Foreign Investment brought multinational companies into Indonesia so that the competitiveness of products and daily needs increased.
InterVista and Matari became Indonesian advertising agencies who were also markers of their time. InterVista became the first advertising company affiliated with a foreign advertising company, Ogilvy, and pioneered the entry of commercial advertising on TVRI. The founder of InterVista, Wicaksono Nuradi, was lined up as a pioneer of modern Indonesian advertising. Meanwhile, Matari became the first advertising agency to bring the Clio Award to Indonesia through the direction of Cahyono Abdi’s artistic layout. Matari also later constructed the separation of the performance of the advertising studio (Above The Line service form) and graphic design studio (Below The Line service form). At that time Studio Decenta also appeared in Bandung (1973), which contained disciplined love artists: A.D. Pirous (painting), G. Sidharta (sculpture), Adrian Palar (interior design), Sunaryo (sculpture), T. Sutanto, and Priyanto Sunarto (graphic art). Decenta gave birth to a diverse portfolio such as addressing graphic design needs for exhibitions at Pekan Raya Jakarta, to product designs that handle the architectural decoration of the Convention Hall.
In the 1980s, a digital revolution emerged that was marked by a shift in mechanical-analog technology to digital technology. This era brings people closer to everyday technology, as well as popular culture. One of them is the presence of MTV which has become a form of global popular culture. MTV cannot be separated from the visuals presented, because the style resembles Pop Art and then close to young people. MTV also became one of the media covering the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) which was a symbol of the end of the Cold War. Its presence in one of the most seminal events in modern European history has also been the impact of evolution that has been experienced by the media.
MTV which is of global interest also bridged the world community into globalization in the 1990s. Globalization enables the acceleration of marketing worldwide because it is supported by the presence of the internet. Then the involvement of graphic design itself with the existence of the internet substantially facilitates direct contact with potential cross-spatial clients. This has led to a visual trend that is also global (although at the same time shrinking its visual variety) and increasing the intensity of communication among the people of the world.
The media in the 1990s also covered world events at the time where the context of human rights, terrorism, freedom, and technology became great narratives and were widely discussed in forums based on the World Wide Web. Therefore this decade has given birth to critical thinking in tackling or responding to social issues. The rise of the use of computer graphics by designers has also developed a variety of visual styles that appear in the media. In Indonesia alone, this can be found with the many practices in magazines, print ad, and design books (or books that are seriously done by designers) that are circulating in the community, for example, the development of visual variety and the use of print advertisements that won the Citra Pariwara award in the range 1988–1996 time.
The development of visual styles on the book cover of Yogyakarta’s alternative publisher faces became diverse. Like the face skin of the Homeless book in Kampung Sendiri (1995) by the writer Cak Nun who collaborated with the painter Dede Eri Supria in the design of the layout of his face skin.
Along with this, printing is also experiencing developments marked by the rise of full-color book printing by publishers such as Gramedia and Elex Media Komputindo. The publication of a magazine with environmental headlines on the basis of graphic design in 1994 by designer Enrico Halim became one of the signs of the development and fulfillment of scientific practices and designer professions. It is also marked by the evolution of design tools, Adobe Photoshop 1.0, which was released in 1990.
The era of the internet gave birth to influential world designers. One of them is Stefan Sagmeister whose works are labeled as unorthodox and provocative by the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA). Siegmeister proves that internet culture can be manifested again by designers by blending the value of production and design activism into one demand.
The decade of 2010 that was still yesterday afternoon was the first time we could cross spatial space. We also pay attention to the presence of intelligent technology that is fully accessed by the public, increasing understanding of digital visual literacy, the emergence of virtual technology, augmented reality to social media. The graphic design entered into this order by constructing and navigating its visuals, and therefore symptoms of shifting norms and human daily activities arose. We begin to shift from surface (product) trends and are more attached to activism that we find in many visual platforms called Instagram.
Instagram continues to expand its features since its use is increasingly widespread. Graphic design moves in tandem with the uniqueness of favorable social media, but also, on the one hand, the physical space of the retail industry. This era also boosted the creative industries and graphic designer is a profession that works in this construction. I think the contribution of graphic design in this era is no longer a product, or a movement, or a particular designer figure, but rather solving the questions that are essential to life as technology shifts the norms of society’s values.
We arrived in 2020. Now, we are at the crossroads of events threatening human civilization. The Covid-19 pandemic brought about changes to the various forms of life, some of which may be temporary, but others may be new situations. It’s important to be able to understand this situation as new challenges and opportunities, and how they can help each other, adapt, mitigate, and accept that the world, as we know it, is changing. With the existence of social distancing and quarantine regulations, people are increasingly turning to the internet. What can then be utilized from this change is to look at all possibilities and be critical about promoting digital activities and outdoor activities as a form of application afterward. For one thing, as with previous world events, we are now seeing new changes and in this respect for graphic design.
What are the possibilities of ‘new graphic design’ in ‘new normal’? We still can only speculate. One thing that is clear is that we can re-read the social needs that have an impact on the value of a product, especially because now emerging operations of new technologies are being pursued more efficiently and effectively.
In the realm of work practices, there will be surges in remote work. This is based on Work from Home (WFH) activities that have been undertaken by Indonesians since mid-March. The impact of this long-distance work itself is that there is an ease in the work contract which certainly must be mutually agreed upon.
The digital work base will be more practical with remote systems. We can expect that layout design projects, illustrations, interface designs and so on will increase, but the quality control of practices and design projects whose product implementation will not change, such as packaging design, branding or printing. This is because there is still a lot of passion for people to move out of their homes, or buy things to conventional shops, or the desire to go see exhibitions, seminars, and other events whose experience cannot be provided by virtual space.
This momentum also seems to increase the production and assessment of ‘experience’ based content such as daily vlogging, reaction, unboxing and tasting; a culture that had emerged in the late 2010s. Going forward, the shape of the content of this reaction will continue to develop both in terms of extended duration and improvement in physical quality. But also before that there must be a convention or at least a national scale discussion related to how graphic design faces digital-based disruption as the impact of the 4.0 industrial revolution, and even this pandemic. It also does not merely rely on and wait for stakeholders in the graphic design industry because the resolution of this disruption is only one thing, there are still many other things such as bureaucracy, implementation, until community service.
However, I also see that sociocultural changes that prioritize digital at this time will not kill industries or individuals in the realm of publishing or printing. It might even be the opposite, people will be embarrassed by the progress and convenience of digital and virtual technology and will again need physical experience, or as we are familiar with ‘material desires’ and ‘ownership’ that we cannot fully have in digital-based products.
So, at this end, we can think for a moment that the momentum of design-that-present is also accompanied by changes and upheaval of the times. Through the events of the times that are in harmony with the development of design, I want to frame the unfolding of this history so that again we can remember that graphic design can solve problems through a humanitarian approach. Thus, graphic design does not produce mere objects, but can also solve more essential questions or problems. One way is to apply new values to graphic design by building design practices and thoughts that tend to prioritize empathy before becoming an idea.
If we design to solve the problems of our fellow human beings, especially in this epidemic, we must also design solutions that involve empathy as a basic principle. This will present solutions that are not only manufactured and seemingly cold but also create our intimacy as social beings. Thus, it seems that technology will never really replace the role of graphic designers in terms of production or thinking that have implications for real life. As long as we still value that social interaction, the history of new graphic design will be in every new normal.
Originally published at (Bahasa Indonesia) Desain Grafis Indonesia https://dgi.or.id/read/nilai-yang-harus-diperjuangkan-mahasiswa-desain-grafis.html
