To a doctor, ethics are about keeping a patient alive. The modern Hippocratic oath that a doctor takes is the main example of this. A doctor must swear to "use treatments for the benefit of the ill in accordance with my ability and my judgement.” To a lawyer, the issue of ethics also relates primarily to treating clients well; although this is about ensuring that no conflicts of interest occur and that a lawyer keeps confidential any potentially damaging information they are told by a client. To a designer, at least a designer today, ethical issues are viewed as coming from the client. Rather than framing ethical questions in terms of how the designers themselves might behave professionally, designers frame these questions not around their own practice but around those of the client. What does the client do? Is this ethically acceptable or not? Indeed, is this politically acceptable or not?
This wasn’t always the case, and it is worth casting our minds back to work out why. The designer Milton Glaser presented a talk called Ten Things I have Learnedin London in 2001. In the text of this presentation Glaser says that when he began work in the 1950s he was interested in as being as professional as possible. By keeping his clients at arms length and doing a job for them, but then he says he made a realisation. Graphic design was intrinsically unprofessional. “What is required in our field, more than anything else, is continuous transgression. Professionalism does not allow for that because transgression has to encompass the possibility of failure,” he said.
Glaser’s argument is that graphic designers are engaged in risk and this is an unprofessional position. Designers can give something their best shot but they can’t guarantee their ideas will work, so they are in an unethical position to start off with when it comes to the client. It’s an important intellectual step that was made by Glaser and other designers of his generation. Glaser and his contemporaries began their careers in New York in the 1950s wanting to do the right thing by their hard-working immigrant parents and be professional themselves. However, of significance is that in the 1960s they came in to touch with the potentially conflicting values of personal freedom and social responsibility.
The ethical framework that we operate in today was defined at this time, so it’s worth considering it a little further. Herb Lubalin was an expert at applying typography in a sculptural way and a genius at employing heavily stylized typography to evoke a philosophy or a way of seeing the world. In Unit Editions’ monograph on him the publisher Adrian Shaughnessy describes why Lubalin quit as a partner in a successful agency to set up a design studio: “He didn’t like the idea of selling things to people they didn’t need. But he also did it for creative reasons because he couldn’t do what he wanted to.”
Lubalin did some of his best work for the anti-Vietnam war Democrat George McGovern. He was also nearly arrested for indecency for his work as art director on the erotic review Eros, although he escaped prosecution largely because the publisher Ralph Ginzburg fought the legal case personally. Lubalin’s contribution was a quieter one, creating layouts on interacial sexual relationships which at the time caused great controversy but which today seem innocent and tender. What Lubalin did is find a space around politics and high-end pornography where he could explore graphic design as a creative endeavor.
Brody though believes one of the reasons why political material is so attractive to graphic designers is because it offers them an opportunity to be open and expressive. The best designers today, Brody believes, are “conscious of issues reflecting the rest of the world, and aware of their role within that. They initiate information, inspire and create awareness. Their work is lively, fantastic, bold.” But this entire argument is surely questionable. Are designers making political statements simply because they allow a certain degree of creative freedom? Doesn’t that devalue what they are saying? Isn’t design school in danger of becoming a place in which one passes around slogans? If as Brody suggests aesthetics are less important, does it mean we simply judge design work on the quality of its sloganeering?
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