This section explores the Digital Revolution, the rejection of Corporate America, and the growth of the Social Responsibility Movement at the end of the 20th century.
The late 90s to early 2000s marked the transition from hand-crafted graphic design to digital design. The Internet boom at the dawn of the millennium welcomed millions of online users. Computer-aided design was no longer just an option, it became a necessity. The 2000s were a decade of great political and social change. Designers were called to respond to the excesses of capitalism and consumerism in design and focus on ‘pursuits more worthy of our problem-solving skills’.
Review the videos and text below to explore the digital revolution, the impacts of technology, and the push for social responsibility in the field of design.
As one millennium ended and another began, digital technology fundamentally transformed graphic design. Old avant-garde issues of authorship, universality, and social responsibility were reborn within society’s newly decentralized networked structure.
Helen Armstrong
The Digital Revolution – 1980s-1990s Design History
In 1984, Apple released the Macintosh computer. It would revolutionize the entire industry. I was in art school in the early 1990s and we used the first release of Photoshop 1.0. It was slow, clunky, and honestly painful to use (we would run a filter and go out for coffee!) but the results were nothing like we had ever seen before.
Let’s watch this video from Graphic Design History on LinkedIn Learning to gain an overview of the time period, the advent of the personal computer, and its effects on the design industry. Watch from 1:57:58 – 2:01:49 on LinkedIn Learning via your Library Card or the YouTube video below.
Activity: As you watch, take note of the dates and designers who experimented with these new tools. Also, note how once again changes in technology radically altered the field of design and the role of a designer.
The Internet
At the turn of the 20th Century, photography and printing revolutionalized communications. At the turn of the 21st Century, the new digital technologies of the computer and the internet change the field of communication design again.
In the early years of the internet, graphics were limited and the design standards that we know and use today were often ignored. It was the wild west. After many years, designers began to see the importance of user experience. A focus on universality, the grid, visual/information hierarchy, and minimalism drove much of the design aesthetic in web design because it allowed designers to put content and the user experience first. Today anyone anywhere can make a website and this has changed the role of the designer once again.
Activity: As you watch this video, note that it’s from 2012. What has happened to mobile/app development in the years since this video was produced? And looking at the effects of social media on society, how has the optimistic utopian vision of the internet changed?
The Digital Design Revolution – THE LONG VIEW
For a detailed background on the history of the digital age in design, take a look at this video from Prof. Ann Lemon of Kutztown University, as she takes you from the early 50s room-size computers to the present day digital technology.
Activity: Again, as you watch, take note of the dates and designers mentioned. Consider your own experience as a consumer and a creator. How has your use of the computer and the web changed in your lifetime? Do you have nostalgia for the “old days”?
Authorship & the Social Responsibility Movement of the New Millennium
…Designers who devote their efforts primarily to advertising, marketing and brand development are supporting, and implicitly endorsing a mental environment so saturated with commercial messages that it is changing the very way citizen-consumers speak, think, feel, respond and interact. To some extent we are all helping draft a reductive and immeasurably harmful code of public discourse.
There are pursuits more worthy of our problem-solving skills. Unprecedented environmental, social and cultural crises demand our attention. Many cultural interventions, social marketing campaigns, books, magazines, exhibitions, educational tools, television programmes, films, charitable causes and other information design projects urgently require our expertise and help…
First Things First Manifesto 2000
In a 1994 essay in Eye magazine, Andrew Howard reminded designers about the 1964 manifesto entitled ‘First Things First’ signed by British designer Ken Garland and a group of 21 colleagues. The manifesto’s aim was to “reject the ‘high pitched scream of consumer selling’ and omnipotent lure of the advertising industry in favour of what was defined as socially useful graphic design work.”
Several years later, thirty-three designers renewed the original call for a change of priorities and published ‘First Things First Manifesto 2000‘ in Adbusters, Emigre, Eye, Blueprint, Items in the Netherlands, and Form in Germany.
In 2014 – on the 50th anniversary of the manifesto – over 1600 designers across the world renewed their commitment to the manifesto.
In 2020 an updated version, FTF 2020, was published online and included a focus on the climate crisis and racial justice. “Our time and energy are increasingly used to manufacture demand, to exploit populations, to extract resources, to fill landfills, to pollute the air, to promote colonization, and to propel our planet’s sixth mass extinction.”
Check out this short 2:30 min video of David Berman, author of Do Good Design. Berman’s main thesis is: “Rather than sharing our cycles of style, consumption, and chemical addictions, designers can use their professional power, persuasive skills, and wisdom to help distribute ideas that the world really needs: health information, conflict resolution, tolerance, technology, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, human rights, democracy …”
Questions
- How have technology and graphic authorship influenced social responsibility in design?
- When you compare the original version of FTF from 1964 with the later versions in 2000, 2014, and 2020, is there a central message/call to designers that hasn’t changed?
- What are the authors of the manifesto rejecting in the design field?
- What stood out to you in the newest version of the First Things First manifesto, FTF 2020?
- How did technology affect the authorship of the ‘First Things First’ manifesto over the decades?
Readings and Other Media
Use Hypothesis to annotate as you read the texts. See Using Hypothesis for details.
- Lasn, Kalle. “Design Anarchy.“ Vancouver: Adbuster Media, 2006. in Armstrong, Helen. Graphic Design Theory: Readings From the Field, Princeton Architectural Press, 2009: 107 , ProQuest Ebook Central [City Tech Library Card Required]
- Barnbrook, Jonathon, et al. “First Things First Manifesto 2000.” First published in Eye no. 33 vol. 9, 1999
- First Things First 2020, First Things First 2014, First Things First 2000, First Things First 1964
- Poynor, Rick, The Evolving Legacy of Ken Garland’s First Things First Manifesto, AIGA Eye on Design, August 12th, 2021
- van Toorn, Jan. “Design and Reflexivity.” in Armstrong, Helen. Graphic Design Theory: Readings From the Field, Princeton Architectural Press, 2009: 102 , ProQuest Ebook Central [City Tech Library Card Required]
