Quotes I copied from CAPS LOCK: How Capitalism Took Hold of Graphic Design, and How to Escape from It (Ruben Pater)
Just notes to myself. Reading an interesting book about looking at Graphic Designers through different lenses. Beautiful, beautiful book. Here are some quotes I copied for myself.
By representing all human economic interaction in numbers, knowledge about the underlying cultural and social value is lost. Its scientific truth makes one almost forget that behind every stock quote, every number, and every interest rate is a person working, a family being fed, someone dying, or a rainforest being cut down. We simply don’t know because this is hidden behind meticulously designed and formatted tabulated numerals.
Every designer has to assume the role of engineer at some point. When design concepts have to be planned, organized, and executed on an industrial scale, creativity submits momentarily to strategies that solve technical problems. The objects produced by the designer as engineer are graphs, diagrams, maps, forms, manuals, and guidelines. Tools that are indispensable for governing economies and organizing industrial production. Tools that are often considered neutral, universal, and ubiquitous. Their aesthetics may be questioned, but rarely their reason for existence.
Registering citizens at an address can grant access to civil rights such as voting or receiving welfare, but it can also be used to persecute people. Census data about Japanese Americans was used in 1942 to imprison more than a hundred thousand in special camps, of which two-thirds were US nationals.
Drucker and McVarish explain that administrations relied on statistics and information design to show that scientific methods were successful in managing social and cultural relations, although ‘not always compatible with values of compassion’.
To fit the straitjacket of property measurement, land was flattened, redrawn, and standardized through the act of mapping. James C. Scott notes that drawing an outline of a piece of land and measur- ing it, says nothing about the soil, the flora, the fauna, the cultural meaning, and the many kinds of other forms of value it represents.
Capitalism has benefited greatly from standardization and simplification of the world order, which has made industrial production and trade more efficient. Professional standards within graphic design are highly uniform. Adobe, Javascript, Monotype, and Pantone are not only trademarks, they are also some of the neces- sary standards for efficient industrial production. As each item in industrial production needs to be identical to all the others, traces of labour, resource extraction, and human interaction are made in- visible. Global industry standards have allowed global production cycles and outsourcing to take place. This has depleted the planet and alienated workers, with exploitation of labour and a climate crisis as a result.
Through the dogma of branding, graphic designers are learning to commodify all forms of information. Just as what goods signify matters more these days than their basic utility, so it goes that first, information must signify ownership and only secondly does it informs.
But successful for whom? The city’s new image made New Yorkers proud of their city, but it also came at a tremendous cost. Government workers that were laid off were predominantly black and Puerto Rican. Healthcare and university education was no longer free, public transport deteriorated (many wealthy New Yorkers did not use the subway) and the layoffs in the police force led to rising crime rates until 1990. Social geographer David Harvey writes that the power of the New York working class was undone in a few years.
Branding began literally as a weapon of torture, intended to dehumanize people by subjugating them into becoming objects for sale. We are also reminded of the uneasiness of advertisers during the industrial revolution, who did not want to see the horrible circumstances under which products were made, as it would make it impossible to write the copy to sell them. In efforts to brand all aspects of society, city branding has become a powerful tool in the hands of lawmakers for the gentrification of cities and the commodification of housing, which benefits the wealthy.
The success of the scientific method had an adverse side-effect. Its rigid methods made advertising a conservative industry. Advertisements were ‘engineered’ based on focus group testing and psychological insights, following lists of requirements and findings. Advertiser David Ogilvy fervently believed in the scientific method. He even judged designs based on ‘eleven commandments’, and deducting points for sans-serif type, or the use of drawings instead of photographs. It gave rise to a corporate business culture that avoided risk and creativity for fear of losing clients, producing a culture of men in grey flannel suits keeping clients happy with afternoon cocktails. The largest advertising company in 1957 was also the first advertising agency in the US and had been founded in 1896.
In his book Against Creativity (2018), Oli Mould explains how creativity that only serves economic growth, can never be truly creative. Ideas that challenge the economic model are either ap- propriated for profit, or discarded if too radical. The push towards more creativity in society has simply meant more strain on people’s daily lives. We are expected ‘to be creative’ while serving coffee, or selling clothes for minimum wage. We are expected to see our home as our office, mixing work and free time, and change our life schedule at the whim of our bosses and clients. We are expected to always be available, on call, at a keyboard to answer e-mails or messages in a flexible creative economy. That is not creativity but an attempt to squeeze more and more value out of people without granting them the benefits of permanent contracts and higher wages.
The philosopher Mark Fisher pointed out that the rise in mental health issues is a result of capitalism’s demand for workers to continually self-improve. He observed ‘that only the affluent are winners and that access to the top is open to anyone willing to work hard enough’, and ‘if you do not succeed, there is only one person to blame’.
Sell yourself as if you’re a Rolls Royce even though you know you’re a Fiat Panda. MIGUEL DIAS, DESIGNER