Some excerpts from an interview with Johanna Drucker on design theory, from the 90s:
Does graphic design require a theoretical foundation?
Johanna Drucker: On one level, absolutely not. I don’t think theory is ever going to make somebody better at creating a printed page, a Web page, an object, or anything else. Now, I know there are a lot of people who disagree with me, who think theory is a useful creative tool. I don’t believe that. People who work from a theoretical perspective, whether it’s in design or the visual arts, often do very stilted, self-conscious work that ultimately is only an illustration of the theoretical position.
But should there be something working in design in addition to pure talent or intuition?
I don’t think that design needs theory, but I think designers need theory. Everybody should have a course in Ideology 101, beginning in kindergarten, then in sixth grade, then again in high school, and as a freshman in college-because I think we are so blind to ways in which we absorb the culture around us. We need to be given the tools for thinking through our relationship to the power structure – something for all those people who went to see Forrest Gump, didn’t know that it was a modern version of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, and thought, “Wow, what a great movie”.
Can theory tell us anything about graphic design that we don’t already know?
Theory is useful for analyzing historical and cultural codes, but also for tackling new design challenges. You may be familiar with a particular phenomenon, say, Hollywood cinema, but not be able to articulate the way it works as a narrative system. When you gain an insight into the formulas of such a system, you realize they mutate in relation to different expectations about morality, and that’s what I call a “theory moment.” You are able to identify the working of the codes (unfaithful wife must lose family versus unfaithful wife is allowed a second chance). Or you learn the distinction between discourse (which is the structural organization of a text, such as the distinction between an author and narrator) and narrative (the actual story). When you watch an episode of the television series My So-Called Life, you realize that the author of the show is giving you one side of the story while the young woman narrating the episode in first person is telling you another. These simple distinctions are powerful in talking about the structure of news, fiction, documentaries, and any other instance in which we tend to align whoever is speaking with what is being said.
Can theory have an adverse effect on graphic design?
I think too much theory can make you too sophisticated for your market. You can start to produce graphic design that’s interesting only to other designers. I saw that happen while teaching in an architecture department. Theory-doused architects designed some interesting things, but they had nothing to do with living. They might be compelling ideas, but when it really came down to it, I didn’t want to live in an uncomfortable environment in order to have my consciousness raised about how family structures are merely functions of the bourgeois mythology of the nation-state!
One of the current design tropes is multilayer design, which often verges on illegibility. Is this a visual manifestation of theory?
Somebody asked me this question in another interview and I was puzzled by it, and so I asked Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, the head of Yale University’s undergraduate design department, what she thinks. Does it have to do with a phenomenon of the illegible as a cultural notion, or what was this about? She said that, in her experience, students will do that kind of design when they’re working with somebody else’s text. When it’s their own text, they won’t make it illegible; they actually want it to be easy to read. The illegibility trope seems to signal, There’s so much stuff already out in the world that we’re not really trying to get you to read this; we’re just trying to get you to look at it long enough to see whatever logo is on it. This is an admission that most text produced at this point is just
noise.How would you analyze it?
As frustration on the part of the individual: Will anybody pay attention to anything I have to say? And then: Well, why should they? The culture we live in promotes a notion of the celebrity as the privileged object of attention, and people often think that if they’re not being perceived at a celebrity level, then they’re not being perceived at all. Since when has existence been about being perceived? It’s supposed to be about experience.
Who or what do you think exemplifies this noise factor?
David Carson’s work seems like visual noise and style for its own sake, part of this celebrity phenomenon. You do something that’s at the radical extreme of what people think is acceptable to produce yourself as a celebrity. Reasonableness, middle-of-the-road positions, and moderate analysis are never going to sell.
— (via Design Dialogues)