Bring sketches showing your development but also show a conclusion. Don’t worry about the “style.” These can be sketches can be by hand or computer, but they should show testing ideas, options, configuration and what you feel needs to be part of this map. You should have one final sketch for a map from you process that you feel is “it.”
From Joe
In the late 20th Century, the advent of the internet and other rapidly emerging technologies translated into an explosion of information accessibility. The data had always existed, but now it streamed in exponential amounts from all directions. From email to the live running headlines on televisions, we live in a world that is surrounded by the promise of information.
But how does the birth of the Information Age actually play out in our daily lives? What am I, as the average person, meant to make of it all? How am I, as a designer, going to translate this inundation of data into meaningful information?
I decided that my map would track how designers, and individual projects, process data. The x-axis represents how many different types of data are presented in a design piece – for instance, a logo displays simply one message, or often even just a word, while a news magazine analyses numerous types of data from entertainment to stock quotes. The y-axis represents how far into the data you can reach, from a poster where you can only go as far as the name of the band, to a fansite where you can download songs, bio or press releases. Each project also indicates how many entry points exist for the project - a book cover really has only one way for a reader to access the information, while a blog has an infinite number.
From this map, I began to realize that most current and traditional graphic design processes data on a very superficial level, offering only a small set of information that does not reach very deeply. Some of the most common forms of design, such as broadcast motion or annual reports, hardly touched the middle of the chart. I began to realize that I myself was fascinated by this density of information that seemed to have few people charting it. Or if these projects existed, designing textbooks or GPS systems, they are getting little recognition in AIGA annuals and the like.
This version of the map has attempted to correct problems that have occurred with previous iterations - making the read of the map clearer, and adding enough data points to make the map meaningful. There are still many issues with really being able to quantify these ideas, and I still have not addressed how information is used - is it a meta site? Is the information connotative or denotative? But I hope that it contributes to understanding the current state of graphic design.
Linear & Axial Opposition
I began my exploration by plotting graphic design across a linear progression. Award competitions, practitioners, and even curricula sort our discipline into manageable genres: book design, exhibition design, interactive, promotional materials, etc. A single scale is simplistic—so I proposed a varibable set of axes—mapping the same genres with two shifting sets of opposing descriptions. In that model the genres would be re-plotted as oppositions were swapped in and out. I suggested an interactive interface that could express the ever slippaging quality of the discipline. Disciplines parallel to graphic design, but not graphic design were plotted for reference.
Poles of Attraction Model
The variable pairs were the wrong kinds of oppositions, and the genre method of categorization doesn't really capture the way graphic designers practice today. The same designers are working on books and motion, websites and exhibits. Designers have their practice aligned more by type of client and form-making strategies, rather than a design’s physical expression. My map became less about sliding scales and more about poles of attraction based on the ideological groupings of graphic designers.
The idea was expanded, and incorporated color coding, there were 6 poles in blue and established design entities in magenta. There were also historical references, emerging design entities, and schools on the map. The process was organic and magnetic. As new points were plotted I shifted and moved post-its as the logic of poles and entities began to have a conversation with each other.
A Personal, Internal Logic
A new distinctive set of poles developed, but this time they were informed by the logic of research: one between criticism and practice, and one between maximalism and minimalist formal expression as two pairs of notions that are opposed to each other. After all graphic design is concerned with the way things look. Though it’s only fair to point out the subjective nature of my selections—every map expresses the viewpoint of it's maker. I also gave names to the zones forming in the fissures between established ideologies. Coinages such as Humors Resonance and the Neo-Kitsch sit alongside already terms like Complex Simplicity and The Decorational.
Adding Grit
My first attempts at visualizing the map on the computer were very literal interpretations, and relied heavily on the act of stating rather than visualizing. They also lacked any real connections to the conventions of map making. They were brainy, not cerebral. Flat not nuanced. Lorraine and Louise made a call for a kind of grit or a Z-axis. At the time I said: huh? But I now realize it was not just a visual call, but a conceptual one as well.
Volumizing Language
This grit came in the way I brought volume to the newly minted language. The word-volumes became the ideological and formal structure that holds the map together. They define the territory and linkages between it’s inhabitants. I also find the grotesque extrusions oddly beautiful. Because forms have always been attached to how they look matters.
There are still many problematic things about the map (formally, its ability to function as a self-contained map, it’s number of data points, the way volumes are being represented), but it’s brought a kind of clarity in my mind and on the page to how I see the mutating landscape of graphic design. Where I want to locate myself with in a discipline who’s relationships are not just lateral and tangental, but spacial.
My map is intended to be an interative experience where the user can click through pages and make paths based on the connection of words and terms used in graphic design today. Ultimately there would be and infinate number of ways that someone could click thru the map to make a variety of simple to complex paths. Ideally, this map can play up the ways in which different areas of graphic design relate and give meaning to other areas.
Society Today is grappling with limits, soul-searching both towards and away from Sustainability. Graphic Design Today works as a commentator for all sides of the Ecological Debate, through the Production of Information Goods, and as part of the Social Construction of Information.
I challenged myself to illustrate that Graphic Design is 'greening' in two ways. In one direction, towards the perceived purity of 'Green' as in the environment; in the other, the perceived impurity of 'Green' as in Cash. To do this, I created a map which works as a loop, a cycle which flows as a "Full Circle," all photo and text blurbs connecting to one another.
I struggled most with trying to synthesize a large amount of research and tiny nuggets of information into a coherent whole. The form came to me late in the process. I essentially wanted to write a piece of design journalism, but to represent that article in a single image, not a designed article. To do both the writing and design so as to assist and evaluate both. The resulting single poster becomes an article of a sort, but through connecting solely images and their bylines together. I tried to balance the line between directing the reader in a more strict manner versus keeping it more open-ended. In my final design, you can begin and end anywhere you want, but with circling arrows between the blurbs making a strict lead between them. The reader is able to start anywhere on the circle and it will work so long as all blurbs are read eventually. As you read through the whole loop, you discover unexpected connections between so-called 'Purity' and 'Impurity.' What do these terms reveal? To prove my point, I own up to being a bit of hypocrite here. I used plenty of resources to comment on the environment that I didn't necessarily nead to. Things get fuzzy, and fast. Where do we draw the line?
To map Graphic Design today, I have decided to create a card game because I believe that every designer is the master of its work with his own technics and influences. I’m not eally interested in who made what but more about how and why. I like to compare graphic design to cooking, as cooks, each designers has its own secrets and favorite recipes and I like to play around with various technics and methodologies. I like the idea of mixing technics and being "the master of the game" with all the cards in my hands.
This is a map of the space that graphic designers occupy between design and other cultural disciplines (such as art, architecture, music, film, and writing). The translucent pages use individual designers or studios as examples, showing where they lie on the gradient between graphic design and their practice outside of design. Many of the designers are found between graphic design and more than one other cultural discipline. Graphic design, which is the center/spine of the book/map, is what ties their multiple practices together, because the design process is actually something that can be used to approach many different creative processes.
