Extra credit, Hammer Museum
Does the exhibit convey the graphic design entity as us designers understand it?
-think about it as contemporary art
What is Graphic Design as we know it?
It is a commercial art. The intersection of art and commerce. Graphic design is a productive communication. A productive endeavor. It offers solutions that are functional yet distinctive, innovative, imaginative, inspired and new. Graphic design is a structured arrangement of type and images. Never one without the other. Graphic designers have the power to change the way people see the world. Designers produce mass market imagery that become part of our collective consciousness. Like TV shows, movies and pop music, graphic design is absorbed into the mainstream culture. As purveyors of pop culture, designers alter the landscape of what’s “cool” and what’s not.
The exhibit portrayed this translation of “graphic design” well. Graphic Design: Now in Production incorporated a conglomerate of printed works, digital works, motion, posters, bound books and magazines, 3-D sculptures, interactive material, visual as well as audio sensors and physical space. A highly refined curration of the highlights of what graphic designers can do to communicate a message of visual persuasion while at the same time incorporating aesthetics.
Alec Cheline 