14.05.08
You say Tomarto…

tomato_400

The world of design is not a world of absolutes. You can write as many strategy slides as you like and build mood boards for months but eventually a design has to be shown to a client and they have to be persuaded of it’s a) magnificence b) suitability (hopefully both, sometimes one, sometimes the other).

Clients of course can feel a bit out of sorts at this moment – generally not trained in design, but often interested in the subject, they can sometimes offer up bizarre reactions to what they’ve just been shown. Most designers can dine out on their ‘great ideas the client didn’t understand’ stories, and we can blame clients all we like for the ones that got away, but designers themselves often can’t agree what constitutes good design. You can surround the creative process with plenty of bluff and bluster but no-one can say with absolute certainty when the ‘right’ solution has been reached.

The advertising community can somehow decide between themselves what is a great ad and what isn’t, albeit with a running public gallery of press and TV to help them assess and reassess as a year goes on. By the end of any given year, the advertising bible, Campaign, has pretty much reached a consensus of what was the ‘best ad of the year’. But, aside from its communal love of anything Apple-branded, nothing at all seems to hold the aesthetic judgement of designers together.

It was probably much simpler, once. Thirty or forty years ago it was a simple choice - between being a grid-systems ‘Swiss school’ graphic designer (armed with copies of Graphis magazine dedicated to Müller-Brockmann, Aicher and Max Bill), or a ‘New York School’ graphic designer who loved Chermayeff, Brownjohn and Geismar, admired those recent ads for the VW Beetle and liked the eclecticism of Pushpin. A simple, straightforward choice.

Here we are, 4 decades later, and things are a lot more complicated. In London alone you still have Müller-Brockmann devotees, but more for the ‘look’ of the Swiss style than anything else, a sort of Aesthetic Neo-Modernism rather than its more philosophical original form. Then you have another group of Closet Modernists who fall back on it in times of stress (or deadlines), dabble in ideas and might ‘play away’ from Univers and Helvetica every now and again (but only in an ironic way, you understand). There’s a whole group who wouldn’t know an ism from a schism but know a good grid when they see it – let’s call them the Gridnik Modernistas.

Then you have a whole school of thought once cruelly dubbed ‘Wit and Whimsy’ by one of Tomato’s founders - founded on 70’s and 80’s craft and ideas-based design. This in itself has spawned a whole sub-strain of disciples trained and dedicated to designing things that could have been created in the heady days of 1973 - let’s call them the Witty Young Fogeys. Talking of Tomato, there’s a strain that maintained that the way they worked and their destructive tendencies was everything, a sort of Process Deconstructivism, if you like. There’s a interesting strand of this that takes British whimsy, a dash of process, everyday junk and a bit of modernism, who we could call the Whimsical Process Vernacularites.

Then there are the designers who refuse to sit in any camp and resolutely flip-flop out of one dogma into another, the Pluralistas (often arguing brilliantly for whichever base camp they might be set up in at any one time as they prepare their ascent). Anyone who spends any time on the interweb will have noticed a recent avalanche of geometric, blocky designs in Nu-Rave colours, let’s call them the Counterless Geometricals. Then there’s a small group saying that bad is the new good (and the only way to truly stand-out), arguing that work should be more hand-made and appear as wrong as possible to be right, the Ugly Duckling Difference Devotionists.

Now obviously we’re overstating some of this to make a point, but not much. If it’s that easy to sub-divide graphic design into 10 different groups, imagine what happens when you ask them to agree about any given design. Most other disciplines could never accept this: mathematicians can spend whole careers looking for the perfect ‘proof’ of a theory – irrefutable evidence of something’s existence. Marketeers use profit, loss, sales and stats to show how something is absolutely right, or absolutely wrong.

The only thing that you can say with any certainty if you ask 10 different designers for their view on a piece of work is that absolutely nothing will be agreed.

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