Design is D&AD

On 23rd October 2008 St. George's Hall hosted the first ever Liverpool Design Symposium, a day that promised "a winning combination of design heroes and insightful events in a venue to die for". But did it deliver? They certainly got it right about the venue.

I've been to a few D&AD events now, and my impression of this organisation whose main straplines read "For Excellence, For Education, For Enterprise, and not for profit" is one in which they are never confident of their position and always overcharge you for the beer; always striving to be the authority and never quite managing it. As a result their seminars and lectures are always laced with propaganda, urging us to join them, enter their awards contests, and respect their authoritah. No doubt they are a massively respectable organisation in the grown-up design world, the trick for them is to persuade a load of naturally rebellious students of their position.

Unfortunately the integrity of this "educational charity" were somewhat let down by their production standards. It is terribly difficult to take anybody seriously when they are lecturing you about "how to present your work" and "make sure you pay attention to detail" in your portfolio when their own Keynote presentation is so poorly set and includes videos that freeze half-way through.

Having an amount of experience with microphones and PA systems in the past I know how complicated and pedantic radio microphones and mixer systems can be. Does this excuse the annoying cut-outs during Nick Bell's lecture in Manchester earlier this year? Perhaps I'm being too critical.

In any case I think the message is the same: look after the pennies and the pounds will follow. Check that your Keynote presentation runs smoothly before the lecture, test the microphones throroughly, make sure your guest lecturer has all his fonts loaded (well maybe that's taking it a bit far, we all expected the Creative Director of Elmwood to be able to use FontBook) and perhaps then people will begin to take your word more seriously, more people will covet the fabled yellow or black pencil, and more people will get involved with your organisation.

A major current zeitgeist in the design media is that "Design is Dead". Rick Poynor recently wrote an article "It's the end of graphic design as we know it" (http://blog.eyemagazine.com/?p=73) in which he states the following:

From educators, industry commentators, and even students, we constantly hear that graphic design as we know it is somehow over, as though it were no longer possible for designers to do what they once did. My first response to such apocalyptic talk is always simply to look around, and my senses invariably tell me the opposite.

The article is a report from the New Views 2 conference in which a selection of people who are most likely to know what graphic design is, locked themselves in a room for two whole days and read the tea leaves at the bottom of their polystyrene cups. "What is the future of our practice?" would be considered after somebody could work out the answer to "What is our practice?".

Back in August Nick Bell contributed the following article to the Eye blog: http://blog.eyemagazine.com/?p=34 in which he also expressed concern with awards and the identity of British Graphic Design.

We Brits are a contrary lot. Too often we define ourselves through what we don’t like rather than what we do. With what isn’t matching our exacting standards. But if we can’t recognise the best stuff, where are we going as a profession? No graphic design organisation needs to have awards at its core.

However the quarrel over what we don’t like is a red herring, because it hides the fact that we don’t know what graphic design is for any more. We seem to have lost sight of its purpose. Is it because there are now so many different ways to practise it?

The current issue of Eye contains two full-thength articles about Design Competitions.

The "Design is Dead" concept didn't pop up at the Liverpool Design Symposium, which leads me to believe that either design isn't dead at all, or that designers are blissfully unaware of the whole problem, which begs the question: if the designers don't care about the death of their practice, why should anybody?

I have a feeling that perhaps it's not the place of the commentators and the educators and the professors to worry about the issue, and I believe that it is the designer on the studio floor working his little black and yellow socks off that will quite easily overcome whatever problem this turns out to be.

Trackback...LDS. Luckily for D&AD they managed to pull two brilliant guest lecturers out of the bag. Bruno Maag was enthusiastic, passionate, informative and nutritional, a breath of fresh air. Matt Pyke was also brilliant. His "modular studio" shed philosophy is surely a glimpse into the future of studio set-ups. I have to say I think I installed my very own design shed at the bottom of my garden in Yorkshire before Pyke the Tyke stole the idea.