Twenty years ago, a group of designers, educators, and critics published a manifesto that questioned graphic design’s close relationship with the advertising industry. The First Things First Manifesto 2000 (FTF 2000) was the most recent in a series of internal critiques of the profession during the late twentieth century. In each case, these critiques drew inspiration from the ideas of the political left — and, in particular, from concepts associated with the social unrest of the late 1960s and 1970s. Critical design practices of the late twentieth century can thus be interpreted against the background of what German student militant Rudi Dutschke called “the long march through the institutions of power.”2 In Dutschke’s vision, the New Left would strategically retreat from overt confrontation, in order to seed the professions with its demands and thus ripen the conditions for revolution. However, like earlier attempts to understand and to contest design’s status as an “institution of power,” the manifesto’s critique was quickly rehabilitated into an apolitical affirmation of “the power of design.” Throughout this history, attempts to transform social consciousness through the medium of design have frequently given way to celebrations of professional excellence as an end in itself.

Contesting Modernism

During the midtwentieth century, modernism was becoming hegemonic in the design disciplines. Having evolved from a volatile mix of avant-garde experimentation and radical politics, modernism soon became the face of official culture in the capitalist west. Modern design’s abstract, minimalist approach imparted a sense of rationality and solidity to gigantic institutions of the modern economy and state — from IBM to the United Nations.3 In the background, however, a loose international cohort of graphic designers had begun to question the dominant standards of the profession. In the United States, figures like Herb Lubalin and Milton Glaser split time between countercultural publishing, corporate identity, and advertising — embracing a looser, more eclectic approach overall. At Switzerland’s Basel School of Design, which had been a key locus of modernist typography, Wolfgang Weingart creatively misused the letterpress and reproduction camera, producing fractured and repetitive pages. “Accelerated by the social unrest of our generation,” he later explained, “the force behind Swiss typography and its philosophy of reduction was losing its international hold.”4 Weingart’s American students — most centrally April Greiman — would go on to form the predominately Californian “New Wave” of the 1980s, which saw a similar spirit of experimentation applied to emerging digital tools. Using new software that facilitated effects like layering and distortion, postmodernist graphic designers attempted to expand the profession’s formal and emotional range.

By the mid-1980s, this current had grown more concentrated and self-conscious. In the orbit of graduate design programs like Michigan’s Cranbrook Academy of Art and experimental journals like the Silicon Valley upstart Emigre, graphic designers began to ground their formal innovations in more explicit political and philosophical positions. By the 1990s, Emigre was regularly publishing critical writing by practitioner-theorists who sought to expose the ideology lurking beneath corporate modernism’s smooth surfaces. Clarity and hierarchy in composition were attacked as alibis for social exclusion and domination. By contrast, the postmodernists celebrated the multiplicity, contingency, and disorder of everyday life.

For their part, the modernists often played into the expected stereotypes — loudly lamenting the destruction of “universal” cultural monuments at the hands of these new barbarians. Massimo Vignelli, for example, a designer of identity systems for the U.S. National Park Service and American Airlines, argued that designers have a duty “to fight and oppose trivia, kitsch and all norms of subculture that are visually polluting our world.”5 At a time of proliferating digital font production, he famously argued that only a handful of historical typefaces were worth using — half of which had been designed in a previous century.6 Vignelli thus made an ideal villain for designers who had been following the “canon wars”: a controversy over the dominance of the male, European subject in the academic humanities. Citing authoritative texts in cultural studies and poststructuralist theory, the postmodernists pledged to subvert established structures of communication and hierarchies of taste.7

Despite the academic language of the postmodernist critique, such positions were by no means confined to graduate programs. In 1994, for example, Emigre published a letter from Jan Erasmus, a white South African designer attempting to decolonize his own practice.8 Erasmus’s critique of modernist design emphasizes the latter’s rationalist roots in the intellectual traditions of Europe and of Christianity. He contrasts those traditions to what he characterizes as “more African” values: “intuitiveness,” “roughness,” and “holism.”9 The letter’s points of reference include everything from the legacy of apartheid to deconstructionist theory to unexplained categories like “quantum esthetics.” But despite the apparent incongruity of his inspirations, Erasmus would go on to apply many of these ideas in branding and advertising. Their influence can be felt, for example, in the loose, unsystematic typeface he designed for the Nando’s restaurant chain.10

By the 1990s, corporate modernism was under attack from two distinct directions, though in practice they often blurred into a single zeitgeist. On one side, designers turned to theory in an attempt to understand the ideological effects of their practices. Here, the skewering of modernist standards was understood as a radical project aimed at defamiliarizing language and subverting the authority of established interests. On the other side, however, “deconstructed” or “distressed” styles were becoming increasingly attractive to the advertising industry. Large capitalist enterprises were outgrowing their extant image as Fordist assembly lines of standardized common sense. As Thomas Frank noted in 1995, a sampling of then-current television slogans reflected a new ethos of intuitive rebellion against convention:

As French sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello have shown, this critique of capitalism’s modernist face went much deeper than marketing. During the 1990s, management theorists evangelized a new corporate reality of disruptive innovation, individual mobility, and flattened hierarchies. This was an uncanny echo, Boltanski and Chiapello note, of attitudes and demands associated with the global ruptures of 1968. This emphasis on individuality and flexibility — which they identify as the “artistic critique” of capitalist modernity — gained broad cultural appeal at the expense of a “social critique” that had emphasized collective action and labor solidarity.12 Conveniently, it was just at this time that neoliberal reforms were curtailing the power of unions and rolling back long-term job security.

In the mid- to late 1990s, then, there was a lot of money to be made in antimodernist styling. Visual practices that had once been discussed with dry citations of Barthes and Derrida became the face of “alternative” marketing. As designer and curator Andrew Blauvelt would later remark, it was likely not a coincidence that “the proliferation of design styles corresponded with the increase of the number of brands and the demand for product segmentation in the marketplace.”13 Experiments at the margins of the profession suddenly took → 7 center stage in “sneaker, soft drink, and bank ads.”14 Postmodernism, however, retained an aura of subversiveness in professional circles. As the design critic Rick Poynor argued, designers were still clinging to the idea that “formal innovations are somehow able to effect progressive change in the nature and content of the message communicated” — yet no one seemed able to explain how or why that was the case anymore.15

Though this provocation raised important questions about the agency of design and designers, no such explanation would be forthcoming. With the market success of the postmodern turn of the 1990s, the brief flowering of critical writing that had accompanied it slowed to halt. The design discourse, as Poynor lamented in 1999, now had little to offer “beyond the unremarkable news that design really can help to make your business more competitive.”16 To anyone outside the profession, Poynor’s puzzlement would likely have seemed puzzling. Graphic design is a primary means of differentiating and pushing commodities; what more needs to be said about it? But for the practitioners who had built the design discourse of the 1980s and 1990s, the market success of these graphic approaches called for a reevaluation of priorities. Though the profession had historically been produced part and parcel with the burgeoning advertising industry, critical energy would now be focused on breaking, or at least disavowing, that link.17

Returning to “First Things”

The attempt to distance graphic design from its commercial applications began with the First Things First Manifesto 2000 (FTF 2000), published in 1999 by Adbusters and a handful of design magazines in the U.S. and Europe.18 The manifesto carried the signatures of thirty-three prominent figures in the field, many of whom had made their reputations in the debates on postmodernism.19 Other signatories, like Ken Garland and Tibor Kalman, had long worked at the uneasy intersection of advertising and activism. Garland, for example, worked primarily for British nonprofits and socialist causes, including a career-long involvement with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. At a 1964 meeting of the Society of Industrial Artists in London, he had also hastily written the first “First Things First,” on which the 1999 manifesto is closely modeled.20 Kalman briefly studied journalism in the late 1960s before dropping out to join a delegation to Cuba with Students for a Democratic Society.21 Thereafter, he cultivated the image of a self-taught outsider to the U.S. design scene.22 From the mid-1980s, he began turning commercial projects into battlegrounds for the “culture wars” over the representation of race, gender, and sexuality. His “United Colors of Benetton” campaign (with Olivero Toscani) banked on vivid provocations: most notoriously, a full-bleed photograph of a dying AIDS patient.23

After Adbusters unearthed and republished the 1964 manifesto, Kalman encouraged the magazine’s editors to update it for the new century. However, he died a few months before FTF 2000 was published. The manifesto thus carried the moral authority of Kalman’s → 11 controversial but widely-respected career and the imprimatur of Garland’s original manifesto. But FTF 2000 also resonated because its timing overlapped with events originating well outside the professional discourse. A month after its publication, the manifesto seemed to find an echo in the civil disobedience and rioting that confronted the World Trade Organization in Seattle: a series of actions that rendered “globalization” a topic of mainstream discussion. On the heels of “The Battle in Seattle,” Naomi Klein published No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, a book that attempted to connect environmental degradation, employment crises, and skyrocketing inequality to consumerism and its image culture. Klein would later add her own signature to FTF 2000. A widening spotlight on the ravages of global capitalism lent the manifesto a sense of political urgency; the stage thus seemed to be set for a broad reconsideration of the kind of world that design participates in making.

Though any contestation of unaccountable power would seem amenable to the mission of the postmodernists, FTF 2000 represented a sudden (but mostly unacknowledged) departure from the central debates of the 1990s. The earlier relativism of taste gave way to a clear cultural hierarchy in the manifesto — with authors, documentarians, and philanthropists clearly winning out over light beer and butt-toner salesmen. The earlier polemic against rationality and neutrality in communication also disappeared. In the manifesto, “the market” represents an irrational and corrosive element, while clients that represent “culture” or “society” promise a more unmediated relationship to truth — in other words, to “first things.” Finally, where the more theoretically rigorous aspects of postmodernism attempted → 12 to relativize the agency of the designer in view of larger systems and institutions, FTF 2000 positions design as a practice capable of outstripping such constraints.24

Indeed, despite the alarming context of a global crisis in which it is framed, FTF 2000 seems most anxious to intervene in “how the world perceives design.” A pair of essays on the manifesto by Rick Poynor make this anxiety explicit by reframing design as an almost elemental force, prior to commerce and outside of history.25 Design, he argues, is “a universal human life-skill” which could yet spark “new forms of social interaction” and give voice to repressed “values and ways of feeling.”26 Poynor even personifies the practice and gives it moral attributes: echoing Garland, he warns that design might neglect “its responsibility to struggle for a better life for all.”27 This inflation of design’s autonomy and power entails a corresponding inflation of the autonomy and power of its practitioners. For Poynor, it is “no exaggeration to say that designers are engaged in nothing less than the manufacture of contemporary reality.”28 This is that underspecified power which, in the words of FTF 2000, is capable of distorting “the very way citizen-consumers speak, think, feel, respond and interact.”

The manifesto met harsh criticism in the design press. One letter to Emigre called it “sneering and puritanical,”29 while an article in Design Week said FTF 2000 evoked “unimaginative Seventies college campus Marxism.”30 But the manifesto was also criticized from the left. Jan van Toorn — a Dutch designer well-versed in Marxist theory — signed it, but also acknowledged the naiveté it displayed toward design’s role in “the circulation of material and symbolic commodities.”31 → 13 The most sustained critique was a more personal one. Michael Bierut, then president of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, noted that the projects FTF 2000 put forth as “more worthy of our problem-solving skills” closely resembled the high-profile nonprofit work in which many signatories were already engaged. Hearing this particular group swear off dog biscuit packaging, Bierut jeered, was like “watching a group of eunuchs take a vow of chastity.”32

Despite such insults, the FTF 2000 debate was relatively short-lived. Because the manifesto eschewed structural demands in favor of a vague individual pledge, it left a great deal of room for interpretation. When Rick Poynor interviewed a number of the manifesto’s signatories two years after its publication, he noted a broad range of potential responses, many of which sound so subtle as to be imperceptible. Katherine McCoy, the former co-chair of the design program at Cranbrook, suggested that designers continue to do what they had always done — albeit with the addition of “self-authored content” that would lend commercial projects “cultural, social and humanistic connotations.”33 Milton Glaser advocated a reorientation away from corporate clients through a simple shift in decorum. An absence of social engagement, he argued, could gradually be made to seem “unprofessional.”34 Even Bierut came around and added his own signature; the very existence of a debate had changed his mind. By challenging designers to “think,” he said, the manifesto had “elevated the profession.”35 Much as the ostensibly subversive postmodern styles were quickly commodified in the 1990s, the impact of the manifesto had been absorbed into a narrative of professional excellence and uplift within a couple of years.

Motivated as they may have been by a desire for social change, both manifestos remain well within the horizon of the political status quo. The 1964 FTF, for example, attacked the advertising industry for “contribut[ing] little or nothing to our national prosperity” (a statement that is, in addition, likely inaccurate).36 To his credit, Poynor acknowledges that the original manifesto stopped short of questioning “the underlying political and economic system.”37 But FTF 2000 follows in its predecessor’s footsteps by sidestepping these same structural realities. The response of the profession — and to some extent the wording of the manifesto itself — attempts to squeeze a social critique into the limits of professional ethics. The potential for intervention essentially narrows to a designer’s choice of employers. The idea of design as a neutral — or even an inherently good — force in the world promises designers a reconciliation that can occur entirely at work, in the absence of broader struggle. At the same time, treating advertising as a perilous distortion of design’s otherwise unproblematic “power” allowed designers to acknowledge the catastrophes of global capitalism while neatly shifting the blame to an adjacent profession. Henceforth, advertising could provide a foil against which to define design as an autonomous discipline with a critical culture and a history of its own.

Dreams of Autonomy

Just as graphic design’s intellectual leadership was attempting to seal the profession off from the excesses of advertising, art critic Hal Foster was writing a series of “diatribes” on consumerism and the erosion of critical culture. Foster’s 2002 book Design and Crime, however, is only partially concerned with what FTF 2000 narrowly characterizes as “product marketing” — instead, the book positions design itself as the more insidious underlying principle of contemporary spectacle. Foster argues that the rise of design has stripped aesthetic experience of its oppositional content, rendering it a bitterly ironic realization of the postmodern critique of “autonomous” art. But because the concept of autonomy can no longer be taken as a given, it is not easily reclaimed. Foster thus draws on the work of early modernist critics like Adolf Loos and Karl Kraus to argue for autonomy as a “strategy”: a continuous fight against the “seamless circuit of production and consumption” that increasingly characterizes post-Fordist capitalism.39

Despite the flare of interest in the FTF 2000 debate (yet perhaps due to its inconclusiveness), critical writing on graphic design had → 16 meanwhile dwindled.40 Design and Crime, however, struck a nerve with postmodernist graphic designers — many of whom had relied on Foster’s edited volume, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (1983), as a roadmap to the theoretical turns of the 1980s. In closing, I will examine responses by two graphic designers, Andrew Blauvelt and Jeffery Keedy. Blauvelt and Keedy were both graduate students in the mid-1980s, during a particularly acute period of theoretical and technological experimentation. Both were also frequent Emigre contributors and FTF 2000 signatories. Taken together, their responses capture the contradictory impulses of the historical current I have traced here. While both writers defend, in very different ways, the critical potential of design practice, both maintain substantial agreement with Foster’s elision of design and capitalism.

Blauvelt’s “Towards Critical Autonomy, or, Can Graphic Design Save Itself?” opens with an image of the profession as “a vast formless body able to absorb any blows delivered to it.”41 The disruptive styles of the 1990s, he argues, became unmoored from their original “convictions” at about the same time that the field was outgrowing its erstwhile basis in print.42 In the resulting state of plurality and fragmentation, graphic design has been “reduced to its commodity form”: simply the packaging of a magazine, website, or video.43 Against this flattening perception, Blauvelt calls for a project of “disciplinary autonomy” buttressed by practices that locate coherency and continuity in the history of the field.44 “Critical autonomy” for graphic design — in contradistinction to the modernist tradition to which Foster returns — cannot attain “the kind of freedoms the fine arts claim.”45 However, Blauvelt believes that the profession can separate → 17 itself “from the social demands that limit graphic design to its most marketable features” and set alternative “conditions and terms” for its work.46 Designers, in this view, can “save” their profession — and perhaps even render it an independent “discipline.” Critical design practice, then, stages a confrontation between the “commodity form” of graphic design and what FTF 2000 vaguely describes as the practice of constructing “a new kind of meaning.”47

While Blauvelt’s response only briefly acknowledges Foster, Keedy’s “Style is Not a Four-Letter Word” launches a frontal attack.48 According to the latter essay, art critics like Foster cannot be trusted to evaluate the efforts of designers in good faith. However, in contrast to Blauvelt’s call for deepened critical engagement, Keedy argues that designers only need to “capitalize” on a cultural transformation destined to occur with or without them. The essay derives much of its force from an oddly modernist historical narrative which culminates in the toppling of art as an elite sphere of aesthetic meaning.49 Keedy writes of the demise of art’s autonomy in a triumphalist mode and even adopts some of Design and Crime’s dystopian images as a positive program. He relishes the thought, for example, of the withering of art viewership as it is eclipsed by the accessible pleasures of museum gift shops. To Keedy, the rise of design signals the final defeat of twentieth-century attachments and hierarchies.50 He finds a more promising appraisal of the coming “Age of Aesthetics” in the work of libertarian economist Virginia Postrel.51

Postrel’s book, The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness, covers many of the same phenomena that Foster’s essays do — but this time as → 18 a celebration of postmodern capitalism’s inherent creativity.52 If one reads beyond the sections cited by Keedy, it in fact quickly becomes apparent that the book is not really about designers at all. For Postrel, the ambiguity of conflicts over taste — for example, a controversial Frank Gehry building’s effect on nearby property values — provides cover for smuggling in doubts about regulation and taxation as such.53 She at one point defends a celebrity hotelier for a brand makeover that involved firing a mostly nonwhite staff and hiring all-white replacements.54 Here, Postrel could have made the usual libertarian argument that the resulting lawsuit violated the owner’s right to hire and fire at will. But she proceeds much more slyly, arguing instead that the case exposed the “form follows function” ideology of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission — a lumbering federal bureau incapable of discerning “an aesthetic imperative.”55

Keedy admits to feeling some disorientation in siding with an advocate of what he calls “Darwinian free-market commercial populism.”56 He moves on to a frustrated rehearsal of the postmodernists’ historical mission: “pluralistic” and “decentered” strategies were supposed to have replaced a “top-down hierarchy of rules” with a “dynamic self-organizing set of possibilities.”57 But where these words might once have evoked youth revolt or — further on in the “Long March” — disruptive reading practices in the academy, they could now easily be mistaken for a description of neoliberal governance.58 Where Keedy finally breaks company with Postrel, it is because she assumes too much pluralism and too much decentralization; her account, he writes, has left no room for “design experts.”59 Keedy closes the discussion of The Substance of Style bemoaning the aesthetic ignorance of → 19 non-professionals — and warning against “mob rule.”60

It is on the question of autonomy that the contradictions of the postmodern project become most apparent. Autonomy could either mean freedom from the social constraints of capitalism or enhanced professional authority in the given state of things. Social criticism always sat uncomfortably with an unwillingness to treat design as itself a product of antagonistic social conditions. In the worst cases, this ambiguity allowed designers to shore up their own status using the language of liberation. As Keedy himself once bombastically declared: “the marginalization of design has been an essential component in the advancement of western culture.”61

The critical design discourse was built by full-time designers, many of whom balanced their work responsibilities with academic careers and publishing projects. Designers have attempted, through sheer will, to reinvent themselves as theorists and critics. But as long as they are at work, they are constrained by social forces over which they have little control — and which they have, unfortunately, shown little interest in grasping. In a curious (and no doubt accidental) fidelity to Marx, designers have struggled to change their practice without first understanding it, treating graphic design’s commodity condition as “an extremely obvious, trivial thing.”62 As a result, critical practice continually posits new ground without being able to measure its distance from what already exists. It is always running away from itself, only to find that the social role it hoped to evade has adjusted, amoeba-like, to reabsorb it.

The durability of this state of affairs will be impossible to understand without an attempt to grasp the conditions of contemporary → 20 capitalism. Such an attempt must go much deeper than anticonsumerism, which was already an anachronistic critique in the 1990s, amid widespread job insecurity and stagnating wages. FTF 2000 treated the “explosion” of “global commercial culture” as a result of simple greed, of bad habits on the part of producers and consumers alike. Yet, as the intervening decades of financial collapse have illustrated, the commodity condition is more than a “culture” — that is, a set of conventions that one could, with some effort, adopt or discard. Rather, capitalist accumulation forms a global context in which we are implicated simply by being productive subjects whose labor defines our lives.

Of course, the crises that frame FTF 2000’s intervention have taken an even bleaker turn since 1999. Economic ruin and ecological collapse feel closer and more tangible by the day, and morbid political symptoms are proliferating. In such a context, the manifesto merits a careful rereading. This time, however, our approach should be one of reinterpretation, not renewal. Rather than pinning our hopes on bootstrapping ourselves out of design’s social function, we should ask why certain possibilities have consistently been foreclosed in the history of the practice. Rather than attempting to separate ourselves from the tacky excesses of commodity production, we should try to understand why such spectacles of overproduction confront us in the first place. We should, overall, cultivate a genuine curiosity about what is happening to us, rather than relying on a flattering conventional wisdom that casts us as fabricators of reality. Such an approach would push us to develop a critical understanding of the social forces that continue to form (and deform) our working lives. → 21 This would also force us to be conversant with analyses and approaches beyond the provincial agenda of the profession.

Graphic design has long been haunted by dreams of autonomy. But across its history, ruptures of resistant practice, independent critique, or political contestation have routinely been domesticated. Often in the very name of autonomy, critical efforts are annexed to a project of professional respectability. The sense of autonomy for which I am arguing is both more modest and more ambitious: it “frees” the critical designer from the needs of the profession just long enough that a glimpse of wider conditions of heteronomy, of unfreedom, becomes possible. The critical project, as I see it, does not rely on autonomy for the profession, but autonomy from it.