Written Component 2
With reference to a text or someone’s creative practice, explore the development of a position in relation to iteration. Explain how this helps you approach your own emerging position.
Maybe “manipulation” was not the single word I should have gone for; it would rather have been “Morality”. The project should shed more lights on exploring the ethics of being a designer, rather than simply insinuating design as manipulation, as the term would rather seem prejudiced. In addition to that, the sculping of information by designer is also undeniable. Even said so, critical graphic design seems to be what my position is clinging to becoming. As my project shows an extent of criticality towards modern day online publication of news.
In Francisco Laranjo’s “Critical Graphic Design: Critical of What?” (2014), the writer introduced ad discussed what the not-so-emergent term Critical Graphic Design, in the discipline of graphic design, by then.
Laranjo cited Ramia Mazé, suggesting there are three scopes in what graphic design could be critical of:
1) Designers’ own practices
2) The Graphic design disciplinary
3) Issues in society
In comparison to my project, I started with looking at news articles circulating online. Though it seems I was on the third category defined Mazé, I feel like was awkwardly positioned in between 2 & 3. For example I was not settled on a particular social issue. I rather jumped from different articles, grabbing their images and news titles. It was not a single issue-focused, yet it was somewhat “targeted at social and political phenomena.” I am exploring, how visual images on news publications, interact with the news title, the lexical content and hence, sculp the information, intentionally or unintentionally. To explore this interaction, I created a random generator. The generator would simply pick a quote and a picture from a list assign it to and create a juxtaposition of the two pieces of information. The first time was to iterate the 100 screengrabs but with automated combinations. For the second time of running the generator, I narrowed down my library into a bundle of news all gathered from the BBC news website, so that I could examine the idea with a focused scope. Instead of using my own generated non-sense images, I simply used the images on the news itself. To put it the other way, I was reshuffling the news I gathered and created new random combination of the news-titles and provided images. This is in an extent exploring the connections or disconnection between the news and its image captions.
Apart from giving prominent examples like Metahaven, Laranjo also acknowledged the existence of a meme blog on Tumblr regarding “Critical Graphic Design”. The online blog behaved rather like mocking Critical Graphic Design, Yale Institution, and an exhibition called “All Possible Future”. However, Laranjo also recognised such meme culture was “reveal an ironic suspicion”, even if it did not “construct a coherent argument”. It somewhat raised the skeptics about critical graphic design. Compare to my practice now, I feel more related to the memes as the mean of being satirical. Like Laranjo has mentioned, the argument is not well articulated. The next step I took was to reverse the caption and images, as a mean to explore their interactions and relationship.
I cannot deny that there is a tendency that I am constructing some meme generator. The word “morality” still has not been addressed in the practice.
Reference
Laranjo, F. (2014) ‘Critical Graphic Design: Critical of What?’, Modes of Criticism. Available at: https://modesofcriticism.org/critical-graphic-design/(Accessed: 30 April 2021).