The Designer as...: Author, Producer, Activist, Entrepeneur, Curator, and Collaborator: New Models for Communicating

by Steven McCarthy

The role of designers in communication and visual culture is evolving, from designers serving as commercial "hired guns" to assuming the more empowering roles of design authorship. It has become standard practice in design education to teach designers to develop their own voice and create self-initiated projects. In this book, Steven McCarthy, a professor of graphic design at the University of Minnesota and an expert on the subject, provides an overview of the phenomenon of design authorship and interviews many international designers who have taken on different roles as authors or producers of their own projects.

Genres: Design

248 pages, Paperback

First published June 11, 2013

Reviews

[zeyno · Rating 4 out of 5]

don't mistake legibility for communication -david carson

graphic designers should be chameleons, should erase themselves and be good service providers with no politics, no point of views. authorship provided a model for participation and a way to think about design as the production of meaning. the idea that you should be responsible for what you produce in the world -that each utterance has an ideology and is part of the cultural connective tissue- fundamentally changed my thinking of design. it isn't like there is a separate category for design that is 'social'. design is always already social and political -anne burdick

while most graphic design continues to be commissioned word within the typical client - designer market service model, designers as authors produce original content and give it appropriate form. design authorship may be self-initiated, lacking a conventional client, but that does not mean it lacks an audience.

the integration of content and form means that 'what it says' and 'why it says it' are considered as important as 'how it looks'

semantics (the meaning of worlds, phrases and sentences) is related not just to literal meaning, but to the expressive and functional aspect of typography. setting 'pro wrestler' in a flowery wedding script changes it's meaning. syntax (the ordering and arranging of words into sentences) is also impacted by graphic choices: font, color, size, placement and so on determine emphasis and can allow the reader to have multiple pathways through a text. semiotics (the systematic study of symbols and signs) consider the complex inter-relationships between meaning and form in language.

new messages demand new forms.

[Aziz Borashed · Rating 1 out of 5]

Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.

I'm truly sorry that your professor made you read this.