Just Designers? Questioning Power, Identity, and Boundaries in Graphic Design

2024

Graphic designers today take on identities like researchers, publishers, entrepreneurs, and activists, blending disciplines and challenging conventional notions of what design is and what it can achieve. This reflects not just a broadening of the profession but also a response to more profound questions about power, identity, and the survival of designers in a complex cultural and economic landscape.

Themes of power, identity, and the boundaries of the field reveal how graphic design continues to evolve and the challenges designers face in defining their roles and asserting their value within an increasingly complex world.

Power through Authorship and Capital

The designer's role has often been negatively defined — more by what it excludes than encompasses. Designers who transcend their discipline, incorporating other roles and practices, are often celebrated for giving design greater meaning. (Velden , 2011) However, does this imply that design is undervalued as an intrinsic practice unless it extends beyond its boundaries? Velden questions whether design must always justify itself through external validation, calling instead for a practice where proposing and hypothesising through design is considered valuable in its own right.

In his 1996 essay The Designer as Author, Michael Rock (1996) highlighted the growing popularity of the term "authorship" in graphic design circles. This has emerged in response to a profession traditionally defined by its service-based roots, where client demands and market forces often dictated the designer's creative agency. Advocates of authorship viewed it as a means for designers to reclaim power and assert greater control over their work, positioning themselves as originators of ideas rather than mere executors of others' visions.

The concept of authorship is inherently tied to notions of power and authority. It often signifies a single figure of artistic achievement and value, connecting closely to Pierre Bourdieu's cultural capital theory. Bourdieu argued that cultural capital — defined as familiarity with the legitimate culture within a society, often associated with those considered high culture — plays a critical role in transferring power and reinforcing social class. (Cairns, 2024) Families perpetuate this cycle by exposing their children to art, cultural events, and other markers of high culture.

For graphic designers, a profession historically rooted in working-class and labour-based origins (Pater, 2021), authorship became a tool to elevate their status. (Rock, 1996) By embracing artistic value and leveraging cultural capital, designers sought to transform their identity from service providers to auteurs. This shift paralleled the rise of graphic design as a distinct profession, granting designers greater social status and financial rewards. In this way, authorship allowed graphic designers to position themselves as contributors to culture rather than mere facilitators of commerce.

However, while claiming authorship has empowered many designers, it has also been accused of creating exclusivity within the field. FitzGerald (2015) critiques the notion of the designer-auteurs, arguing that it often fosters an "obsession with elite consumption" and fetishises design in ways that alienate broader audiences.

This points to an expanding tension: uplifting the status of designers through authorship risks reinforcing hierarchies within the profession. Those who successfully leverage authorship may achieve elite status, but this exclusivity can marginalise designers who lack access to the same cultural or economic resources. The focus on authorship can also shift attention away from graphic design's practical, collaborative, and service-oriented roots, creating a disconnection between design and the communities it serves.

This tension highlights a broader issue: survival within the profession. For many designers, authorship represents not just a pathway to recognition but a strategy for navigating an increasingly competitive and precarious industry. However, as the field continues to evolve, does the pursuit of authorship and power create sustainable opportunities for most designers, or does it benefit only an elite few?

Identity as a Label and its Fluidity

Who is a designer, and how does this label influence their power and survival in an increasingly complex field? The term "designer" suggests a professional identity rooted in expertise and creative agency. Yet, as Ruben Pater (2021) critiques, this identity is also shaped by systems of "tastes", where "good taste" often reflects the values of the ruling class. Vernacular or amateur practices created outside institutional norms are frequently marginalised, only to be appropriated and commodified by capitalism. Michael Rock (1994) critiques the professionalisation of design — manifested as the sense of authority organisations like The AGI (Alliance Graphique International) have — advocating for a more fluid approach that blurs boundaries between creator and audience, amateur and professional. This perspective highlights the tension within the identity of a designer: does rejecting professional norms democratise the field, or does it undermine the value and recognition of design as a profession?

The designer's role is shifting in ways that reflect broader societal changes. Increasingly, designers are adopting multiple roles — researcher, activist, entrepreneur. Silvio Lorusso (2024) critiques this phenomenon by describing how politics and "multifacetedness" have become survival strategies for designers. Framing global crises as "design opportunities" positions design as a superior problem-solving discipline. However, this often reduces political engagement to a portfolio checkbox or personal branding tool or even risks trivialising complex societal issues into aesthetic or market-driven solutions.

This critique contrasts with Tara Winters's exploration of design as a form of practice-based research. Winters (2012) highlights how designers use their practice as a method of inquiry, reflecting on the nature of their profession and the contexts in which they work. Stuart Bailey, for instance, describes graphic design as a "grey area" that exists only in relation to other disciplines, making it a unique meeting point for critical engagement. Alice Twemlow (2016) emphasises the capacity of practice-led research to share insights in ways other disciplines cannot. Graphic designers, she argues, are uniquely positioned to visually interpret, frame, and even "seduce" audiences into engaging with complex ideas.

The coexistence of these opposing perspectives — design as ornamental politics versus design as a meaningful tool for research and engagement — reveals the complexity of the designer's identity. While the former critiques the commodification of politics within design, the latter emphasises the potential of design to contribute to critical discourse and societal understanding. This tension underscores the challenges contemporary designers face, who must balance survival within capitalist systems with their aspirations to redefine the role and value of design.

Boundaries as Constructs and Reiterations

The boundaries of graphic design have always been flexible, but its intersection with other fields has grown in recent years. These developments signal an expansion of the field and a redefinition of what it means to practice graphic design.

While these evolving practices open new doors, they blur the lines between graphic design and other disciplines. This fluidity creates a dual challenge: designers must develop broader skill sets while ensuring their work remains relevant to the field's and industry's standards. Silvio Lorusso's critique of social and political multifacetedness as a survival strategy underscores the precariousness of this position. (Lorusso, p. 220) The expectation for designers to be creators, researchers, and entrepreneurs simultaneously risks overwhelming individuals, especially those without access to the resources or networks that enable such versatility.

At the same time, this fluidity raises existential questions: if graphic design can be anything, does it risk becoming nothing? Twemlow (2016) highlights how practice-led research allows designers to navigate these tensions, uniquely positioning
them to actively investigate issues, visualise,
and share insights.

The article Typographic Speciation (Lam and Park, p. 9) offers an example of how designers can navigate these tensions. Chinese type design has always been laborious, expensive, and time-consuming because of the enormous number of glyphs that must be designed. The text suggested a new model where the practice can be more sustainable. Software development version controls inspire the new model — by embracing the notion that the designs are never complete and there would be alterations and revivals with each new generation, it potentially makes Chinese type design a collective practice that’s open-source, grows and evolves.

This approach reimagines traditional type design while staying connected to its roots by adopting collaborative, iterative processes inspired by open-source principles. Such models suggest that expanding the field without losing its identity is possible only through intentional practice that resists dilution and appropriation.

Graphic design exists in a state of flux, its identity shaped by the interplay of power, identity, and boundaries. Authorship has elevated the designer's role but risks reinforcing exclusivity. The label "designer" is empowering and limiting, caught between professional expectations and the search for greater fluidity. Meanwhile, the field's boundaries are expanding, creating opportunities for interdisciplinary practices and raising questions about individual survival and potential new
working models.

These shifts reflect the dual nature of graphic design: it is a profession rooted in visual and cultural practices, yet it must constantly adapt to remain relevant. For designers, survival means navigating these tensions while resisting the commodification of their roles and values.

For practitioners, we should thereby question: How do we ensure that expansion does not lead to fragmentation? How can the profession avoid exclusivity while pushing its boundaries? And what responsibilities do designers bear as we redefine our roles in an ever-changing world?

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Velden, D. ‘Research and Destroy’. In Graphic Design: Now in Production, edited by Andrew Blauvelt, Ellen Lupton, and Åbäke (Design studio), 16–18. Minneapolis, Minn: Walker Art Center, 2011.
Lam, C, and Park, Y. ‘Typographic Speciation’. In Ming Romantic: Collected and Bound, 1:8–15, n.d.
Lorusso, S. (2024) ‘Kritikaoke: On Ornamental Politics and Identity as a Skill’, in What Design Can’t Do. Essays on Design and Disillusion. Set Margins, pp. 208–243.

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Twemlow, A. (2016) Exploding Footnotes: The Role of Research In and About Graphic Design. Available at: https://drive.google.com/file/d/15DDvZx02w6XrhFE6DvxvcXWZ1BHVsN8y/view (Downloaded: 2 October 2024).
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