The profession's official discourse has traditionally defined "design" as a socially enlightened, intellectually self-conscious practice elevated above a broader field of crass commercial production and naive folk art. The center of this official discourse is occupied by corporate identity, a field that has helped confer legitimacy on the broader practice of design.

Graphic designers began rationalizing the standard forms of the magazine, newspaper, shop sign, letterhead, and other commercial genres in the early twentieth century. Yet the distinctive product provided by the profession has not been so much the physical artifacts that it shapes as an elusive aura of visual authority. Graphic designers sell their clients such values as stylistic originality, planned rationality, and objective problem-solving, in contrast with the conventional, formulaic effects of "commercial art" and ready-made business ephemera. The history of design as a profession has been shaped by an ongoing struggle to define and defend this aura of visual authority.

"Design culture" consists of a network of schools, studios, magazines, museums, publishers, professional societies, paper companies, and so on. Although all communication takes a physical form, graphic designers, in the professional sense, have not always been part of the process. Designers have had to prove their relevance and find their place among editors, advertisers, printers, marketing specialists, software engineers, public relations experts, and other figures responsible for the look of communications.

While marks such as Paul Rand's logos for IBM and Westinghouse came to symbolize the ascendence of the profession, the values they represented came under attack from several fronts in the 1980s and 1990s. Prudential's retreat from abstraction to illustration in 1989 revealed the fragility of advanced design within corporate culture.

[back]

© Copyright 1996 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum