Excerpts from Greasing the Wheels of Capitalism with Style and Taste by Mr. Keedy (1997):
“Motivated by greed and laziness, this crowd-pleasing attitude has infected design. Now exposure has become more important than what’s being exposed. The number of hits your web site gets, the number of fonts you sell, the number of design awards and magazine articles you can rack up, and how big your clients are, are what designers value most. Now bigger is better, particular in regard to clients and users. Just like music, film, clothing, and tobacco companies, now design companies are aiming lower for higher returns.”
———
“Since most designers today are college-educated and have at least a rudimentary understanding of design history, the eclectic approach to design today is mostly an affectation of willful ignorance. Although greater claims are sometimes made by the designers, the overall effect of today’s eclectic designer is mostly one of nostalgia and kitsch. Which is, as such, a very lucrative style. It is a lot easier to sell your clients on something familiar than to convince them to take a chance with something new. Although pandering to the tastes of the lowest common denominator is eclecticism’s greatest commercial asset, it has also become the greatest aesthetic and conceptual liability, the American designer’s albatross. There is something inherently cynical about exhibiting a naiveté that is not genuine, but as the saying goes, ‘No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.'”
———
“The real reason the eclectics were the losers in design history isn’t just because they were ideologically diverse and more difficult to assimilate (copy); it also has to do with their values or why and who they were working for. Although William Addison Dwiggins wrote one of the first good how-to books on design, Layout in Advertising (1929), he was very skeptical of advertising. So when he learned that he had diabetes, he decided to drop advertising work for good. ‘I am a happy invalid and it has revolutionized my whole attack. My back is turned on the more banal kind of advertising, and I have canceled all commissions and am resolutely set on starving. I shall undertake only the simple childish little things that call for compromise with the universal twelve-year-old mind of the purchasing public and I will produce art on paper and wood after my own heart with no heed to any market. Revolution, stark and brutal.’
Dwiggins also wrote rather critical essays about the poor quality of books, badly designed typefaces, and a satirical spoof the systematic theoretical approaches to design. He designed typefaces that were highly speculative and unique, and many considered his use of color bizarre. Dwiggins, perhaps one of the most underrated graphic designers of the twentieth century, represents an alternative model for design practice to that of all the overrated corporate tools, whose financial and self-promotional success have eclipsed all other concerns. The old eclectic designers were so absorbed in their work that they didn’t bother sucking up to big business and they weren’t afraid to bite the hand that fed them if the integrity of their designs was at stake. Hardly the kind of calculated crowd-pleasing gestures typical of designers today – it’s no wonder they are considered a bunch of losers.”
———
“In the beginning, everyone was a designer because everything was designed or made by hand. Later, in the Middle Ages, the ‘specialists in making things’ gained rank and were called ‘artisans.’ With increased urbanization and technological advancements, the artisans diversified and regulated their work through Medieval guilds, which instigated commerce or trade with others, then ‘The Renaissance introduced an intellectual separation of practical craft and fine art. Art came to be held in higher esteem. The transition took a long time, but slowly the word ‘artisan’ was co-opted to distinguish the skilled manual worker from the intellectual, imaginative, or creative artist, and artists emerged as a very special category of cultural workers, producing a rare marginal commodity: works of art. Meanwhile artisans often organized their labors to the point where their workshops became factory-like.'”
———
“Designers’ values today have been eroded by a commercialized pop-culture simulation of success that is too easily obtained. Does it really matter how many clients, design awards, web site hits, fonts, faxes, Ferraris, or fish, a designer has accumulated? At the end of the day, and at the end of your career, all that really matters is your body of work, your intellectual and aesthetic contribution, your skill, craftsmanship, and humanity.”
— (via Emgire #43)