El Taller de Sagrario

Silent (except for the music) and with no explanatory text, but it’s a sweet video:

There are different branches in the field of graphic design, which can be understood as perspectives or as markets, it doesn’t matter which. If you like, we can make the distinction Bob and Maggie Gordon do in their “Complete Guide to Digital Graphic Design,” between what they call surface design and screen design (though it is a difference which is becoming less relevant, as the use of screens of different kinds becomes more common where once posters and other kind of media for printed images were used: think of motorway traffic signs, for example. And we had better consider e-books at another time).

With their surface design, the Gordon’s have a chapter on what I consider to be the traditional fields of graphic design (design for print and design for advertising) and a subchapter for less well know fields (which also overlap with each other: design for packaging, design for signage, for example, highway signs or signs in a department store, the design for exhibition). We don’t need to stop to consider the different fields they include within screen design, exept to note that they are design for the Internet (which I would have called web design), design for multimedia and design for games (but why do they not include the design of video clips, for example? I think it is because graphic design uses essentially static visual components, although there are so many exceptions, such as animated gifs on a web page, that this cannot be included in a definition carved in stone).

It may seem an unimportant detail, but as almost all graphic design products which do not appear  on screen are printed, rather than design for print, I personally prefer design for printing press. And within design for printing press we have editorial design, i.e., the design of books, magazines and newspapers, or anything else which is produced by a publisher (here we go again with circular definitions, sorry about that).

Now, unlike modern fields such as web design or signage design, editorial design has been done almost since the invention of the printing press. It has not, of course, always been called “design,” but “typesetting” or “layout” and its practitioners “typesetters.” It was a trade, quite a romantic trade, of great tradition and having a certain nobility, but when it came down to it it was a hard, dirty job, done (allow me a little poetic licence, here) by hard men who were dirty for much of the time, sweating away in dark factories and workshops, full of dust and the smells of paper, metal, and inks. Under conditions like that, over the course of time, a trade becomes secretive, arcane and incomprehensible to outsiders, with its own, opaque language, unlike that of ordinary people,  in which inches or centimetres are replaced by points and peaks and the rough versions of a book are disguised as galley proofs.

Even in the 21st century, there customary practices in the publishing sector’s workflow which have barely changed in decades or centuries. Proof correction, for example, is still often carried out by hand, using a code which the unenlightened would need a dictionary to decipher. In short, printing is a craft with a tremendous history and tradition, and so is editorial design.

But at the same time, computing has revolutionized the sector (like so many others), and the editorial designer (ex-typesetter) is necessarily an expert user of his computing tools – Quark Xpress, Indesign, Photoshop, and so on.

In short, editorial design is the oldest branch of graphic design and the one most closely linked to the printer’s craft, but that does not mean it is not modern. Quite the contrary.

To introduce the relaunch of this blog, I thought it would be a good idea to go right back to basics. What are graphic design and editorial design? And what are their main characteristics?

Of the two, it is actually harder to define graphic design, there being no single, standard definition. Merriam-Webster defines graphic design as como
: the art or profession of using design elements (as typography and images) to convey information or create an effect ; also : a product of this art, which is a circular definition: graphic design is what uses design elements, as if a surgeon were defined as someone who uses surgical instruments. Linguistically, this is a cop-out.

And it should be said that not everyone thinks a more precise definition is needed.  Precisely under the heading “What is Graphic Design” in his “Basic Design and Layout,” guru Alan says “A designer’s function consists of solving communication problems related with products, ideas, images and organizations, and doing it in a precise, original way.” Which is all very well, Alan, but you haven’t answered the question. But there is the suggestion of an answer there, in the word ‘communication.’ The phrase that always crops up when someone attempts a definition of graphic design is ‘visual communication.’ And to differentiate the graphic designer from an industrial designer or a fashion designer or an architect, I am going to add another idea – two dimensions. The graphic designer’s working medium is flat, be it paper or a computer screen (which does not exclude the misnamed 3-D graphics, which are only representations of three dimensions in two). Even the design of containers and packaging is essentially two-dimensional, and uses the same resources – typography, shape, colour, etc. – as any other kind of graphic design.

I’ll look at the different branches of graphic design  – editorial, advertising, web design, packaging… – in the next post. For now, here is my tentative definition (and I’ll be delighted if anyone wants to argue with it, especially if you can put forward a better one – that’s what comments are for):

Graphic design is the use of visual elements in two dimensions to facilitate communication.