{ Design in search for Self-expression }

Below is the essay i wrote for my Design BA, hopefully my article will shed some lights on designers who are lost....

Many times the question of, “Design for self-expression or for my clients’ contentment?” keeps popping out in my mind. What is Design? Is it merely a “bread and butter” job or did it meant more? I truly believe that a designer’s duties aren’t just about problem-solving, there’s a lot more than what it seem in this communication design industry.

Like all designers, I started fresh in this trade with a passion in creativity. But somehow having to deal with clients’ unreasonable demands tore me out. There are times when I feel lost and wonder, “Does anyone appreciate my design?” During some days, when I have to deal with tones of deadlines and a rude client called asking me to change a design to something totally ridiculous. I always feel like telling the client off, but the fact that he or she is my paymaster holds me back. It had become extremely difficult trying to strike a balance between my self-satisfaction in design and still make money.

The implication of the word “professional” as we use it is indicative of the problem here. How often do we hear, “Act like a professional” or, “I’m a professional, I can handle it?” Being a professional means to put aside one’s personal reactions regardless of the situation and to carry on. Prostitutes, practitioners of the so-called oldest profession, must maintain an extreme of cool objectivity about this most intimate of human activities, highly disciplining their personal responses to deliver an impartial and consistent product to their clients. Is it really what we as a designer is suppose to do? What about all designers’ desire for self-expression? Or is problem-solving what true “professionals” do?

This takes us to the heart of one of the most important debates in design over recent years. On the one hand, we have those who believe that graphic design is a problem-solving business tool and that designers should suppress their desire for personal expression to ensure maximizing the effectiveness of the content. While on the other hand, we have those who believe that although design undoubtedly has a problem-solving function, it also has a cultural and aesthetic dimension, and its effectiveness is enhanced, and not diminished, by personal expression.

I felt that every design project has an operational objective: it is supposed to affect the knowledge, the attitudes or the behaviour of people in a way. But any object deployed in the public space, be it communicational or physical, has a cultural impact or side-effect. This cultural impact affects the way people operate with other people and with things, creates cultural consensus. More has to be done to understand this cultural impact so that designers can operate more responsibly in society. And it’s our duties, as designers to cultivate people, letting them know what we are trying to say. There is a need for designers to explore self-identity and to cultivate personalized design philosophies. If you read the design press you might think that the desire for creative freedom, or self-expression, was confined to superstar designers: it’s not, it’s actually universal. We become graphic designers because we want to say something. We want to make a visual statement for which we can stake a claim for authorship: in some cases it is a very modest claim, but it’s a claim nonetheless. And even for those designers who fervently subscribe to the notion that the designer’s contribution is always subservient to the client’s needs and wishes, these individuals still want to perform this function their way. Let me put it another way: I don’t think I’ve ever met a designer who didn’t have the instinct for self-expression. You can see it in the universal reluctance to have ideas rejected, tampered with or watered down. There’s a mule-like instinct in nearly every designer – even the most accommodating and service-minded – that bristles at the command ‘Oh, can you change that’ and the ‘Just do it like this’ attitude so frequently adopted by design’s paymasters – the clients. It’s an instinct, inherent in all designers, that says: a little bit of my soul has gone into this and it is not going to be removed without a fight.

Designers use fonts, colours, layouts and imagery because they like them: it would be an odd designer who used design elements that he or she didn’t like. Even when designers are being totally subservient to the brief, they still use styles and modes of expression that they personally like. It follows, therefore, that there is nothing wrong with doing things because you ‘like’ them. But there is something wrong with telling clients that this is what you’ve done; in fact, it’s the worst thing you can say to a client. You might get away with it if you are a star designer, or if you have a cheerful trusting rapport with your client. But if you are establishing a new working relationship you have to be able to articulate a genuine rationale for your work.

Is self-expression really the key in making good design? It may just be one of the few key factors. For Neville Brody, personal integrity in design is what differentiates the ‘good from the bad’. And he’s right. By standing up for yourself, by having beliefs (creative and ethical beliefs), and perhaps most importantly of all, by questioning what you are asked to do as a designer, you can acquire self-respect, which is the first step on the path to earning the respect of clients and other designers. You might also get the sack, but that’s integrity for you – there’s a price to be paid for it.

Among the myriad definitions of graphic design, one of the most illuminating is by the American designer and writer Jessica Helfand. According to Helfand, graphic design is a ‘visual language uniting harmony and balance, colour and light, scale and tension, form and content. But it is also an idiomatic language, a language of cues and puns and symbols and allusions, of cultural references and perceptual inferences that challenge both the intellect and the eye.' Her first sentence is conventional summary of graphic design: few would argue with it. But the second provides the key to producing meaningful and expressive graphic design: ‘cues and puns and symbols and allusions, of cultural references and perceptual inferences’ are the elements that give work authority and resonance.

Many designers might choose the easy way out by being “professional” only and nothing more. It saddens me to see this happening but I can totally understand it, everyone has families to feed and most of the time clients are their paymasters. It will only make their life easier by listening to what the clients want and design something merely to solve problems. But if we, designers, believe in nothing, then the clients will have no reason to believe in us. Sometimes in an industry of no principles, people often respect those who have some. As for me, struggling to reach for the ideal in design, balancing my role to be a “professional” yet “self-expressive” designer. It will definitely be a fight trying to keep my clients happy and yet express my values.