For a Design Periphery / Ideas

I began thinking seriously about graphic design and the margins in 2011 when a group of my typography students invited designers from around the world to speak at a three-day conference in Brisbane. It was an ambitious event organized entirely by the students (probably compensating for the deficiencies in their typography education). Over the course of the conference, I got to catch up with speakers I knew, and listen to some I’d never met. One of the speakers made a comment that has stayed with me—about a designer’s proximity to power. Their theory was that designers on the periphery were impotent, and that what every designer secretly wanted was a seat at the boardroom table. I guess this is a fairly common industry assumption, and yet it was the first time I had heard it argued so directly; unless you’re sitting down with captains of commerce, then your designing is ineffectual delusion. It was the first time I heard the claim, but not the last. More recently, Neville Brody insisted:

How do you make an impact by standing on the fringe? … you can’t stand on the fringe and have impact. You either have to move society to where you are at the center, or you have to move to the center of society. If you’re on the outside, you will never change anything.¹

In the ‘change from within’ versus ‘change from without’ debate I’m always with the latter, assuming the former to be just another way of sustaining the status quo. What exactly did Neville hope to achieve by straight-talking with Dom Pérignon or Dunkin’ Donuts executives? For me, like many others, Neville Brody was one of the biggest influences on my formative practice: the raw urgency of his Fetish Records album covers; identities for left-wing groups like Red Wedge; and the experimental digital typography of the Fuse project. Though for a 20-year-old designer, it wasn’t just the work, it was the idea that design could avoid the choking conventions of commercial design, that a more human and personal language could respond, not just to a commercial client’s agenda, but to real social or cultural need.

Contrary to his later endorsement of the center, the Neville Brody of my formative years stood on the fringe and made a real impact there. It’s hard though to do this kind of work and remain viable inside the market economy “without also working as a barista”, as Neville put it in the same interview. Harder than taking big pay checks from big corporates, for sure. But isn’t claiming that it can’t be done—or that all the paths to alternative or oppositional practice have been exhausted—just an admission of defeat? Or, as if for most people, marginality is even a choice. Interestingly, those who most loudly make these claims aren’t the straight-up uncritical corporate designers, but designers who have migrated stealthily across this treacherous ideological terrain, arriving at a place foreign and hostile to their humble origins.

Definitions of success are subjective. For my studio, Inkahoots, success is avoiding corporate commissions as much as possible. For others, listing Nike, Google, Apple, and the rest as clients is the ultimate measure of accomplishment. Inkahoots’s stance might get dismissed as contrary, as naive, utopian, or even as some kind of misplaced moral superiority. But doesn’t that verdict require an assumption that the margins are good for nothing, least of all for catalyzing change? That the fringe is a barren and unproductive pipe dream? Are socially focused designers really wasting their talent and effort on the periphery?

In some ways it’s harder to measure impact in the margins. Often, Inkahoots isn’t selling anything you can count. Sometimes there are no units to shift, no growth to boost, no profits to raise. But because it’s harder to quantify (especially without the resources for collecting data and analyzing outcomes) that doesn’t mean we can’t observe change. Change in people—in what they feel and understand, how they find and connect with each other—is real enough. We’re: staging exhibitions and interventions; protesting with our creative labour and our bodies; connecting cash-strapped community organizations to their audience; helping environmental groups avoid visualizing the logic that they exist to resist; amplifying activists’ stature, credibility, and clarity; working with artists on hybrid creative systems; supporting local businesses for whom profitability is merely a means to an end; designing platforms for public discourse; defending the weird and the vulnerable; imagining better alternatives… succeeding and failing… So many important relationships, communities, and cultures that are dismissed or attacked by the center can be nurtured by the margins.

In the margins you need to be active. The center, however, has an irresistible momentum. It’s the magnetic, mesmeric logic of the market. It’s a current that carries you along. A gravity that pulls you in and holds you down. You don’t need to do anything at all. The center breeds and feeds off passivity. It substitutes real change with the hectic energy of market dynamics. The margins are breathing space—not a romanticized space free from danger, but a space to actively resist hegemonic harassment. Designers often talk about experimentation and creative risk, but when we’re inside the dominant culture (and a culture of domination),² we’re not even aware of the nature and limits of the borders. In the margins, the boundaries can be more clearly recognized and therefore ruptured.

Neville Brody’s ‘center’ is obvious and desirable. Calling something ‘marginal’ is a dismissive put-down. It’s framed as an avoidable deficiency. Marginality, however, is always relative. It’s always measured in reference to a contested center. And inevitably they define each other. To claim that social or cultural change only happens from the top down (or the center outwards) is to shrug off history and underestimate the power of both individual agency and collective struggle.

Graphic Design goes where the money is. But when it doesn’t, when it draws on counter-capital resources, like community, criticality, mutual aid, solidarity, and love, graphic design can go anywhere. A—Z, a home for graphic design misfits, conceived by Anja Lutz as a way to platform and encourage the discipline’s diversity, has expanded the established definition and possibilities of design. Formal, institutional spaces—like the classroom, the conference hall, or the museum—for gathering in person and talking about graphic design are relatively rare. Even rarer are independent spaces that bypass the canon and champion neglected alternatives. A—Z’s compact streetfront gallery space on Berlin-Mitte’s busy Torstraße has hosted a rich variety of exhibitions and events, celebrating the unconventional and experimental side of graphic design.

Graphic design is online, even when it’s not. It’s disseminated, discussed, and physically detached, in ways that are both valuable and devaluing. A downside of the decentralizing bias in digital media is physical disconnection; the decline of local, intimate socialization; the loss of spaces for collective and personal engagement. Douglas Rushkoff talks about how the net is useful for reinforcing real-world relationships when those relationships already exist, but because it’s a decentralized, networked technology controlled by a central authority, its tendency is always to replace real-world interactions with distant, simulated digital connection.³ As a kind of congregation of alternative practice, A—Z makes space for physical immediacy, imagination, and productive confrontation.

In bell hooks's essay, Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness, she writes:

We are transformed, individually, collectively, as we make radical creative space which affirms and sustains our subjectivity, which gives us a new location from which to articulate our sense of the world.⁴

It has never really been a professional designer’s priority to “articulate our sense of the world”. Here is where the line between design and art has long been poorly drawn. But if ‘marginal’ can be redeemed as a position worth occupying, generally, and for design particularly, its frontiers of difference can be a fertile space worth fighting for and from. After all, aren’t the real visionaries the outsiders who don’t wait around politely for a seat at the boardroom table? Is real independence more likely inside or outside routine systems of coercion and control?

As design takes an ever-increasing role in anti-human extractive cultures, counter-hegemonic design practice offers solidarity with the oppressed and strength for the struggle. The margins bear disadvantage and suffering, yet both in spite of and because of this, they’re also a site of radical defiance and possibility. But, as bell hooks put it: “one can only say no, speak the voice of resistance, because there exists a counter language.”⁵ Whether by imposition or by choice, dissenting designers are making a radical creative space, reaching for a new visual language, extending the scope of human expression, catalyzing real connection and common interest—and it’s all happening far from the center, in the good-for-nothing margins.