Rand’s view expands on Massimo Vignelli’s description of a designer’s social engagement as a fight against ugliness. Having donned that mantel of authority, designers can then dictate the terms of design and the experience of design:Įven if it is true that the average man seems most comfortable with the commonplace and familiar, it is equally true that catering to bad taste, which we so readily attribute to the average reader, merely perpetuates the mediocrity and denies the reader one of the most easily accessible means for esthetic development and eventual enjoyment. Ignoring the social context that informs aesthetic choices, and the political role of art and culture, exemplifies a privilege of whiteness - a privilege that enables the white person as the voice of authority. When Paul Rand declared that design and social issues be kept separate, his statement implied that aesthetic judgements were akin to universal truths that form in a vacuum. More than that, as an arm of Western cultural development, it is implicitly a function of neocolonialism and all that it has engendered. Graphic design is no more neutral than any other product of society. Only rarely does the form of a message become a signal of meaning in and of itself.” Although design contributes to the culture it perpetuates and reflects upon, it is seen as the stage for the message, not as part of the message itself. Often - perhaps even nearly always - this process is a cosmetic exercise. Michael Bierut writes, “The graphic designer’s role is largely one of giving form to content. Designers see their work as a process and practice separate from the outcome and message it conveys. design is not philosophy, design is not a revolution, design is not a cause, design is neutral.” Designers, as service providers, are conceived as neutral actors in the process of creating visual and experiential solutions. Countering self-congratulatory rhetoric in the design community, Daniel summarized: “Design is not good unto itself. This notion was highlighted in a San Francisco Creative Morning Talk by New York Times design editor Jennifer Daniel. Yet design continues to raise neutrality up as the goal of its practitioners without any real examination of what that means. In reality, of course, true neutrality is about as real as unicorns.
Within the design community, design is projected and generally understood as being neutral and universal, able to communicate any message and embody all human experiences. How can a profession hope to attract people of color when the requirements are to assimilate, internalize, and perpetuate white hegemony? Combined with validating its design aesthetic through theory, this results in a visual language that can exclude and invalidate the perspectives of non-whites. By isolating creative movements and individual creators, design pedagogy supports the myth of individual exceptionalism, while the Western-centric approach implies racial essentialism. Design history, as it is taught in those settings, renders racial whiteness invisible through an erasure of social context. At design schools, foundation courses teach a clearly Western European approach rooted in Modernism. The lack of racial diversity in graphic design is tied to the pedagogy of design itself. What value does design, as it exists and is taught now, have to communities of color, and how does it represent them? But that inclusion is contingent on the aesthetic parameters of design itself being inclusive. The topic has been revived lately, but the discussion seems to revolve around issues of inclusion. While there are now more women in the profession, design remains overwhelmingly white, and decidedly not reflective of the racial demographics in the United States.
In 1991, Brenda Mitchell-Powell published an article in AIGA’s Journal titled, “ Why is Design 93% White?” Since then, little has changed in the racial makeup of the design industry. “Well, white supremacy’s greatest trick is that it has convinced people that, if it exists at all, it exists always in other people, never in us.” “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.”
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