Are all typographers pretentious?

Spotted over in the comments on Design Observer:

"If you use a typeface without knowing who designed it, it is like sleeping with someone and not knowing their name." (Robert Bringhurst)

Blimey - that could well be the most pretentious piece of crap I've ever heard. Who gives a flying fuck who designed a typeface? Get over yourself...

Someone's got to say it: typography is not the be all and end all. It is not the secret to the mystery of life. It will not save the starving and poor.

No one ever died from a bit of bad kerning or over-zealous leading.

It's. Just. Type.

Socks and slugs: proof that creationism is false

For me the whole creationism v evolution debate comes to a shuddering halt when I consider two things: socks and slugs. For me they are proof that evolution is the end of the story.

Let's take slugs. The only way that slugs could be said to be the result of a creator is if you suppose for a minute that the creator also had a child bugging him or her at the time. Let's face it, slugs are useless ugly little buggers that scare the bejeezus out of me (I don't know why, I'm just a wimp when it comes to slimy things that sit there and do nothing).

If creationism were a kitchen, then slugs are the equivalent of the things that kids make when their parents finally give in to their nagging and give them a bit of pastry to mess about with. If you're a parent you may have experienced this (I'm not so I haven't) but surely everyone who's ever been a kid knows what I'm saying. You're watching someone making jam tarts or a steak pie or something and you nag and nag until you get given a bit of pastry and some jam and what do you make? That's right: a big lump of pastry with some jam in the middle. And you insist it gets baked along with the rest of the stuff and, after it comes out of the oven and is cool enough (or not, as my scalded tongue reminds me) you insist on eating it or - worse - making your mum or dad eat it.

This is what I think slugs are. The creator was busy in the creative kitchen making all the lovely birds and the flowers and making the odd mistake (sharks, spiders, Republicans etc) because Junior was nagging to be allowed to play and make something too. And when given some material, what did Junior do? Rolled it in to a sausage, filled it with goo, and created the Slug, then insisted it was baked and let loose on the world.

Now I don't buy that. So clearly, the slug must be a product of evolution because only a stupid and slow process could come up with something so stupid and slow.

So where do socks come in to it?
Well I've just spent 20 minutes searching my drawers for a pair of socks that match and, despite my little flashes of genius ('I know, I'll buy only socks that have different coloured stripes on the top so I can identify them!', 'I know, I'll only buy black socks so it doesn't matter!') I couldn't. So here I am wearing odd socks, both black but slightly different shades of black, and both slightly different thicknesses so even if no one else notices they're odd, I certainly do.
You see, if we were the result of an all knowing creator, he or she would not have created us with body parts that needed covering and protecting by two different things. He or she would not have set us up for an existence where, over the course of a week, the best part of two hours would be wasted fumbling about in a drawer for nothing more substantial than a couple of tubes of wool or cotton.
Either he or she would have given us hooves or caterpillar tracks. Or, indeed, not bothered with legs of any sort and made us like... er, slugs.

And so there's an end to it. Creationism or evolution? Socks and slugs prove it: evolution is the answer.

iPhone gets a wag of the finger

A culture change is needed - but in industry or academia?

One of the issues that keeps coming up in my current research project is the complaint from certain sectors of the design industry that they are not seeing the same quality of graduates that existed before (in the mythical 'olden days' presumably). I posted last week about how I thought that was so much rubbish, and could even be argued against using basic maths.
The complaints are based on anecdotal evidence from employers but there are two real problems with this: firstly, it's anecdotal evidence. If things were really so bad then the British design industry would be in the pits, so there's no actual evidence of such a decline. Secondly, it's been said for years - in fact I can't remember a year when exam results in the UK weren't met with a press release from the Confederation of British Industry moaning about falling standards.
What we really mean by falling standards is that I can't believe kids these days don't know when the Battle of Hastings was, or who Edward Heath and Richard Nixon were. Whereas I remind myself that when I was sixteen I couldn't do half the things today's kids can, the 'suits' confuse trivia for knowledge. I suppose if you were recruiting on the basis of putting a winning pub quiz team together you could rightfully complain about 'falling standards', but otherwise, I'm not sure you can.

Anecdotal evidence has its value, mind you. I'm a big fan of it (especially when it supports my point of view!) and I think it's wrongly frowned upon in academia. My own anecdotal evidence, based on many conversations with students and graduates, suggests that contrary to what employers are saying, we are producing 'quality' graduates. And I agree that employers aren't seeing them. How can both sides of the story be true?

Simple: the qualities, not the actual quality, are changing, and the things that mark out a high quality graduate these days, certainly in graphic design, are cynicism and scepticism, a healthy distrust and dislike of the way a lot of businesses work, and a growing preference for a job and lifestyle that contents them, rather than propels them on a glittering career and wealth. (I suspect those things may change as they get older, of course...)
In other words, the reason a lot of design firms in the UK are complaining that they are not seeing the same number of top quality graduates applying for jobs is not because the quality of teaching has dropped, but because those graduates are more choosy about who they go and work for. The tradition in the design industry of undertaking unpaid work placements, and then accepting poorly-paid 'trial periods' is something that today's cash-strapped and culturally-aware graduates are no longer willing to take part in, and a good design graduate would rather take a post in an independent coffee shop than work in a soulless office all the hours God sends for little or no pay (this is what the 'suits' call 'passion' incidentally).

And that's not a crazy comparison, as though working in a coffee shop is a really menial thing just one step above being a designer. As Richard Florida points out in The Rise Of The Creative Class, in today's cafe culture jobs like this are seen as fulfilling ones for the people you meet, the conversations you have and so on (we're talking about arty, independent cafes here, not your greasy spoons and chains). While 'suits' think having a workforce of waitresses and hairdressers with degrees in English Literature is a sign of educational oversupply, I think it's a sign of a society that values knowledge and creativity.
It seems odd that the body that represents the creative industries in the UK seems hell-bent on stamping out the very things it depends on, not just because designers use them, but because so do clients and consumers.

These thoughts were reinforced for me today by an entry over on Florida's blog. It's worth noting that Creative and Cultural Skills, the body I'm talking about, uses Florida to make their case about closing courses, building artificial communities of creative people servicing communities of bio-scientists, businessmen and so on. It's clear they've never actually read his book beyond the introduction, if that. In calling for things such as a more business-oriented approach to design education, less frivolous (i.e. no fun, I assume) and less interdisciplinary in social terms, they actually contradict a lot of what Rise suggests is needed to nurture creativity. He makes the points again today in response to an article in the New York Times:

Three things crossed my mindas I read the story and scanned its pictures, which interestingly enough appeared in the fashion and style section and not the business section.

• (1) You can't pump creative work out of people, assembly-line style.' Motivating this kind of mental work requires a new kind of' workplace, one that appears to be nurturing,' attuned to individuality, and 'fun'-' a trend I dubbed 'soft-control' in Rise.



• (2) It's a mistake to see this stuff as all frills and perks. Companies are doing it because it is increasingly required to attract top talent.' Offering a stimulating environment, flexible work hours, and the ability to be 'yourself' is an effective and relatively 'cheap' way of competing against, say, investment banks and hedge-funds.



• (3)' Scanning the photos, I was struck by the similarity between these new work-spaces and college dorm rooms, where so many of these high-tech companies come from, or even the play-spaces of middle age teenagers. Could it be that the demographic trends toward postponed marriage, extended single years and what Ethan Watters dubbed the 'urban tribe' are being projected into the work-place?

(Via The Creativity Exchange.)

Those graduates the industry say they are not seeing will not magically show up because you put a pool table in the studio or let people play music (something, incidentally, that drives me mad - I would never work anywhere I was subjected to other people's music!) but only when the entire culture of the employer changes. And yet there's a long way to go before unpaid placements, long hours, 'flexible contracts' and other strange practices are consigned to history. Will these things ever happen? Well it's telling that the industry bodies think it would be easier to force university courses to turn out exactly the type of graduates they want (i.e. willing to work for nothing, over long hours, and with little job security) than to change industry practice.

Another reason why the 'business' approach to design teaching is wrong

I think [design schools] have a good shot at helping the university turn out capable innovators. They are better positioned, for instance, than [business schools].

For one thing the design schools believe in consulting carefully with the consumer [...] the design field believes in ethnography, and this method flourished there well before its present popularity in business research circles.

For another thing, the design school believes in culture.

As it stands, the business school tends to think about the product or brand in terms of utilities, functions or benefits. Brands and products create value by doing work in the world.

From Grant McCracken via Richard Florida

How graphic design writing causes problems in student learning

Earlier I mentioned that there was a need for the design industry and press to ensure it reflects more closely the realities of how design is produced and consumed.
One example worth looking at is the book Dialogue: Relationships in Graphic Design by Shaun Cole. This book intrigues me because designer/client relationships is a particular research interest of mine. Unfortunately, none of the examples cited in the book matches up with my own experience of designer/client relationships, either as a designer myself, or as a researcher on the outside looking in.

That's because the book focuses exclusively on the 'prestigious' end of the market. All the clients and designers here are well known, or share certain cultural backgrounds, knowledge and tastes. It's an interesting book, and I heartily recommend it, but with the proviso that it is an accurate description of a tiny aspect of the graphic design profession and you don't have to move far outside that little world before you begin to encounter the sort of horror stories recounted on Graphic Design Rants.

But this is a massive problem in graphic design - just about all the writing on the subject focuses on a tiny proportion of the industry. I would wager it's not even a classic 80:20 split (where 80% of writing about graphic design focuses on 20% of the industry), more 99:1.
This is what I meant when I mentioned the focus on 'the visual' and 'heroes' in my last post - pick up any design history book and the link between it and the truth of how design is produced is infinitesimal - which is probably why there's little market for it among most designers themselves, never mind the general public (pace Rick Poynor). It isn't quite fiction, but it's not far off when compared with the experiences of 99% of designers and their clients.

Take a look at the index of Dialogue and you'll see what I mean; it's a roll call of the great and the good: Jonathan Ive, Ken Garland, Bjork, Madonna, Steven Spielberg, Dream Works, Saul Bass... not one mention of the everyday realities of getting graphic design produced - finance, trademarks and copyright, spreadsheets, negotiations, chasing clients for copy and images etc etc.
But it's books like this that students read, and that give them their impression of what working in graphic design is all about. If employers think graduates lack a sense of realism they blame people like me, the teachers. But I, like so many of my colleagues, am constantly placing design in to a real world context, but we're fighting against this tide of publications that 'big up' design and attempt to make it sound sexy and arty and heroic. And the biggest culprits in this mis-selling of the job of graphic design? Industry. It is seeking to reposition itself, to give itself a legitimacy (academia has a big role to play in this too - the elevation of design to academic status means it has needed to develop a sense of history and it has done this by borrowing it from the art world). This legitimacy comes from ignoring the dirty little secret, that graphic design exists at a basic, fundamental level in society and commerce and instead focussing on prestigious jobs and clients.

It's no wonder that potential clients for design are turned off by what they perceive as irrelevant (a major threat to the future of the industry), but equally it's no wonder that employers complain that graduates have no understanding of the context in which they will work. They've been lied to for years, reading articles in Creative Review and Grafik that try to hide that dirty little secret. Yet it's those self-same employers who encourage this, by trading in prestige and taking part in profiles and case studies that contribute to the idea among students that 'business skills', of the sort CSS says should be taught, are irrelevant

Funny, though, how it's teachers who get the blame.

Why design students reject lessons on legal and business issues

Creative and Cultural Skills (CCS) claim that UK design courses are not teaching the right things and cite copyright and trademark issues, and accountancy and design management as examples.
Now let's ignore the obvious problem with this - that you can't on the one hand claim a big threat to the UK design industry is 'amateur designers' and then claim we should be producing designers who are also 'amateur lawyers' and 'amateur accountants' - I would imagine our colleagues in those disciplines would think it odd that we try to teach their specialisms in a few weeks).

On one course I taught, all level 2 (one year before their final year) design students were given a talk by a representative of a government-funded agency established to help people in the creative industries with copyright and trademarks. They also received a series of talks from a similar agency on issues such as finance, pricing jobs and setting up in business. The response from students was that the talks were 'interesting but irrelevant'. (Personally I found them to be highly relevant, but then I've got nearly 20 years of experience).

Clearly CCS are wrong in this instance - students are being taught the things they say are important and by specialists from outside academia (CCS claim, among other things, that academics shouldn't be teaching but that specialists and practitioners should - I'll come back to that bizarre argument another time).

But the problem is not, as CCS claim, with the teaching, but with the learning - and this is one of the reasons CCS's claims about education need to be questioned, because they demonstrate a fundamental lack of pedagogical understanding. The question that needs to be asked is why do students perceive these topics to be irrelevant?

I propose two reasons: the first is pedagogical - if you do not assess something, then you can 'teach' it all you want but the likelihood it will be 'learnt' is low. And other than setting examinations to test theoretical knowledge of these areas, the opportunities to assess practical knowledge are few - the only real way is to experience them, something that could be done on work placements (but rarely is as hosts tend to put placement students to work on menial jobs rather than shadowing graduate-level areas) or in an actual job. (The role of employment in 'completing' an education is ignored by CCS who seem to believe that a graduate should be 'ready baked').

The second explanation is important. Initial research for my paper suggests that the graphic design industry rarely, if ever, discusses aspects such as copyright or trademarks in its communications. Indeed, a study of a sample of Design Week, Creative Review, Grafik and Eye found no mention at all of any of the issues CCS identifies as 'threats' to the future of the industry (e.g. accountancy skills, design management, law etc). (My focus in the paper is the graphics industry - whether it applies to other areas of design remains to be seen).

Without doubting CCS's assessment of the problems it is clear that their proposed solution - to teach them more - is unlikely to succeed if it cannot first persuade the design industry and the design publications industry to change its public focus from 'the visual' and 'the heroic' to the 'nitty gritty'. If students' perceptions of the design industry are changed at this level then the job of courses will be made much easier. When we try to teach students about the realities of the practice of design, they reject it as irrelevant because that's not what they're hearing from the industry and, after all as CCS say, what would academics know about 'the real world'?

At the moment, many courses do teach these aspects, but with little success - not necessarily because the teaching is poor but because students understandably believe them to be irrelevant. Those courses that do not teach these areas are arguably making a wise choice as there is little point expending valuable resources with nothing to show for it.

CCS, instead of blaming design courses for a lack of awareness of these issues among graduates, needs to pressure the industry and design journals to be more reflective of the realities of the business of design before it can make claims about, or force changes on academia.

Academic and Vocational Qualifications - what's the difference?

One of the big problems we face in design education is the still popular notion that degrees in design are 'vocational'. They aren't. A degree is, by definition, 'distinctively academic', no matter what subject it is in.
Unfortunately, this is generally forgotten or even unknown to a large number of employers, students and - worryingly - teachers.
In the UK we have what's called a 'qualification framework' which is overseen by the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA). This lays out a range of qualifications and levels defining (admittedly in quite woolly terms) the difference between what a student on the first year of a degree course should be expected to know compared with, say, a final year student, or an MA student. (The fact that a first year undergraduate should not be expected to have the same level of understanding of a topic as the post-grad teaching them is sadly forgotten by a significant number of teachers).

There are two basic types of qualification: a vocational one, and an academic one. Neither is better than the other, they are simply different, intended for different purposes. I can't do the system justice by boiling it down like this, but essentially a vocational qualification should be your choice if you want to do something without necessarily understanding the bigger picture, while an academic qualification takes in the bigger picture but may still enable you to practice - though the possibility of you practicing the subject is just that: a possibility, and not a given.

So if you want to be a lawyer, you would choose a BA in Law, but if you want to work in one area of law, or advise people, or run a law firm, a vocational qualification might be the ideal choice (vocational qualifications are - or should be - designed to be studied while the student is working if necessary).
Similarly if you wanted to be a researcher in art or design history, a BA in the subject is ideal. But if you want to run a museum then a vocational qualification in museology might be better.

What I don't think many people get is that you can have an academic qualification in a vocational subject, and a vocational qualification in an academic subject. And this failure to 'get' it is why we have degrees in some subjects when they should be vocational qualifications (in the UK the two main types of vocational qualifications are the Higher National Diploma - HND - and the Foundation Degree - FdA - which is largely replacing the former).
Design educators who claim a design degree is 'vocational' are missing the point. There has to be a difference between a BA and an FdA, and the difference is the type of things studied and the depth to which they are studied. A BA in graphic design is not simply a two year FdA with a dissertation on top and a bit more time to work on your portfolio, which is exactly what a lot of design degrees are.

To give an example, there are many many design students on BAs who would be much happier on FdAs - and many design teachers who would be happier teaching on them too. Equally there are many design students and teachers who would love to study and work on academic design courses but find themselves trapped in poorly disguised and mis-labelled vocational courses which aim only to turn out designers.

The problem is that the industry recruits graduates for ground-floor jobs, then complains that the graduates are not 'right' for the job. That's because the job isn't graduate level. But instead of doing what the FdA was designed to do - giving employers a say in the creation of qualifications that suit their needs, and enable them to recruit someone from school and send them on a part-time FdA while giving them real-world experience - they continue to recruit graduates and seek to influence what is taught and how it is taught. In effect, the design industry appears to be trying to turn degree courses in to FdAs and HNDs instead of simply sponsoring new vocational courses.

There is enormous value in studying design at degree level, but there are too many students who simply want to work as designers without understanding the bigger picture, (and, conversely, not enough people who see design as a legitimate area for academic study). That's not their fault - it's ours, and industry's (for insisting on degrees for jobs that don't need them). Worryingly, there are many design degrees which do not actually meet the criteria for a degree, simply being vocational training courses stretched needlessly over three or four years.

I don't agree with Creative and Cultural Skills that there are too many design students - the more people who study design the better design will be understood by clients and consumers (Margaret Thatcher knew that, which is why she insisted that craft and design be part of the national curriculum in schools).
But there are too many people on the wrong courses, and too many courses of the wrong type. What CCS should be doing, instead of criticising academics and trying to shut down courses and prevent people from studying design at degree level, is telling its constituency to stop recruiting graduates to non-graduate positions, to begin recruiting people at a younger age and sponsoring them through a vocational qualification (instead of criticising school curricula as well as university courses), and respect the value that design studied in an academic environment brings to the industry and the world in general.