Ode to Design
Ode to What We Love So Much
In many ways the following excerpt is an “Ode to Design”. These words so eloquently outline and explain the role of design in everyday life and ever so gracefully detail the very essence of why we so love & enjoy what we do everyday and why we are so appreciative for the ability to do it.
“Graphic design is the most ubiquitous of all the arts. It responds to needs at once personal and public, embraces concerns both economic and ergonomic, and is informed by numerous disciplines, including art and architecture, philosophy and ethics, literature and language, politics and performance.
Graphic design is everywhere, touching everything we do, everything we see, everything we buy: we see it on billboards and bibles, on taxi receipts and on websites, on birth certificates and on gift certificates, on the folded circulars tucked inside jars of aspirin and on the thick pages of children’s chubby board books.
Graphic design is the boldly directional arrows on street signs and the blurred, frenetic typography on the title sequence to “E.R.” It is the bright green logo for the New York Jets and the monochromatic front page of The Wall Street Journal. It is hang-tags in clothing stores, playbills in theaters, timetables in train stations, postage stamps and cereal box packaging, fascist propaganda posters, and junk mail. It is complex combinations of words and pictures, numbers and charts, photographs and illustrations that, in order to succeed, demand the clear thinking of a particularly thoughtful individual who can orchestrate these elements so that they all add up to something distinctive, or useful, or playful, or surprising, or subversive, or in some way truly memorable.
Graphic design is a popular art, a practical art, an applied art, and an ancient art.
Simply put, it is the visualization of ideas.”
— Jessica Helfand, from “Paul Rand: The Modern Designer,” an essay included in Screen: Essays on Graphic Design, New Media, and Visual Culture.
Graphics design has revolutionized the way we spread voices.