karena sejarah desain yang baik justru bukan sejarah desain sama sekali

7/25/2016 04:42:00 PM

— melainkan sejarah gagasan, dan karenanya: sejarah kebudayaan. Hasil karya desainer dipergunakan bukan sebagai spot menyilaukan di tiap halaman catatan, melainkan sebagai contoh dari kondisi sosial, politik, dan ekonomi yang berlangsung pada waktu dan di lokasi ia diciptakan.

Demikian Tibor Kalman, Abbot Miller, dan Karrie Jacobs nyatakan dalam manifestonya, "Good History/Bad History" (1991). Saya ingin mencuplik sedikit saja: 

There are two problems with design history. The first is how design history is written, for how history is written affects how the past is seen and understood. How history is written also affects how  the past is used. And that's the second problem: Most design history is not written, it's shown. There's a lot to look at, but not much to thin k about. Maybe this is because designers don't read. That particular cliche (which, like most cliches, has a basis in truth) provides a good excuse for a lot of hack work in publishing: collections of trademarks,  matchbooks, labels, cigar boxes, you name it-volumes and volumes of historical stuff wi th no historical context. And since these artifacts are mostly in the public domain,  unprotected by copyright, such books are a bargain for the publishers  and a godsend  to designers who are starving for "inspiration."

We seem to be locked into a self-fulfilling prophecy: Designers don't read, so design writers don't  write. Lets amend that: They write captions. Sometime hey write really long captions, thousands of words that do nothing  but describe the pictures.

Books of design history that are packaged for a supposedly illiterate audience only engender further illiteracy. Visual literacy is important, but it isn't everything. It doesn't teach you how to think. And an enormous amount of graphic design is made by people who look at pictures but don't know how to think about them.



Manifesto garis keras. Menampar di setiap helaan napas. Biar mampus dikoyak-koyak kepongahan.

You Might Also Like

0 comments

followers

Subscribe