Designers and critics alike reject style as shallow and meaningless. But they overlook the complex ways in which its codes are used by different social groups.
A surprising consensus about style is emerging within contemporary graphic design. Its proponents include cultural critics eager to expose consumerist trickery perpetrated in the name of style on an unsuspecting public, conservative critics who lambast entire genres for being mere followers of fashion and progressive critics who bemoan the popular dilution of innovative graphics and the commodification of ‘radical’ inventions. Although the agendas and targets are different, these factions share a distrust of style as false, shallow and meaningless.
The proliferation of design since the 1980s has been roundly blamed for transforming graphic design from a problem-solving process into a style-conscious cog in the fashion system. Recent work has been dismissed as ‘empty formalism’ whose excesses mask a poverty of content. Such opinions, however, are often predicated on a rejection of the work’s aesthetics, or more precisely on a ‘misfit’ between the aesthetic preferences of the critic and the values embodied in the work.
The idea that style is meaningless and empty goes back to Modern functionalism, a legacy which continues to set the terms for most discussions about style. The Modernist notion of deceptive forms (style) on the surface and essential contents (substance) at the core is outmoded for contemporary graphic design, which must respond to the increasing fragmentation of society and of audiences. Although the practice and presence of graphic design has changed, our understanding of form, style, function, content and taste has not. Dismissals of style ignore the complex ways in which style operates in society: how styles circulate as communicative codes that distinguish cultural groups and social classes.
Form versus content
Debates about style usually invoke dualisms such as form / content and style / substance. These artificial dichotomies divorce the terms from one another, giving the mistaken impression that there is form independent of content, or style in lieu of substance. In fact, since each term is married to the other, a relationship must be established and the terms negotiated. So form is legitimised on the basis of content – form is truthful or aesthetically valid when it faithfully represents content. This coupling is offered as a unified whole in which the ‘problem’ (content) is inseparable from the ‘solution’ (form). From the depths of the problem comes the essential truth of the solution, which bypasses style altogether. As Alvin Lustig wrote in his attempt to reconcile the counter claims of traditional and Modern design in the US during the 1940s and 1950s, ‘We will simply solve each problem within its own terms, without conscious thought concerning “styles,” modern or traditional.’
So form is legitimised on the basis of content – form is truthful or aesthetically valid when it faithfully represents content.
The twentieth century has been characterised by a near constant rejection of form which is empty or meaningless, gratuitous or extraneous. Often such form is dismissed as mere style – something that is added rather than being an integral part of the solution. Style has also been criticised as an appeal to popular tastes – a pandering to the masses which turned Modernism into the ‘modernistic’. The issues of style and taste are ignored in most theoretical accounts of Modern design; they are simply placed outside the brackets of the problem-solving equation.
The dismissal of style does not, however, do away with the question of aesthetics. In functionalist terms, proper visual solutions require a faithful representation of the content. The interpretation of this caveat of Modernist design varies across the fields of graphics, industrial design and architecture, but what is common is the appeal for a transparent reflection of content, whether a product’s function, a building’s construction or a client’s message. Historically, this way of thinking informs maxims such as Louis Sullivan’s ‘form follows function’ or the Bauhaus insistence on ‘truth in materials’. Swiss designer Max Bill, who designed buildings, industrial products and graphics, wrote in a 1955 essay: ‘Examining critically the shapes of objects in daily use, we invariably take as criterion the form of such an object, as a “harmonious expression of the sum of its functions”. This does not mean an artificial simplification or an anti-functional streamlining. What we specifically perceive as form, and therefore as beauty, is the natural, self-evident, and functional appearance.’ For Bill, beauty is not in the eye of the beholder but is derived from the ‘self-evident’ form of the object. This tidy set of substitutions (function = form = beauty) bypasses the question of taste, which is seen as extrinsic to the equation, no matter how germane it is to the reception of design by the ‘masses’.
Examining critically the shapes of objects in daily use, we invariably take as criterion the form of such an object, as a “harmonious expression of the sum of its functions”. This does not mean an artificial simplification or an anti-functional streamlining. What we specifically perceive as form, and therefore as beauty, is the natural, self-evident, and functional appearance.
Max Bill
The Modernist equation denies both the subjectivity of aesthetic judgement and the subjectivity of the designer’s expression. What is called for is an objective form language through which the designer can speak. In Josef Müller-Brockmann’s seminal text The Graphic Designer and His Design Problems, the subjectivity of the designer is eclipsed by the objectivity of forms: ‘By discarding the old free subjective manner of representation, [the designer] acquired freedom for a more highly charged organization of forms that were appropriate to the subject.’ Müller-Brockmann continues: ‘The more anonymous and objective these elements are the more suitable they prove as a vehicle for the thematic idea; the realisation of this idea in graphic form is the end to which all the elements of design must be directed.’
The idea to which Müller-Brockmann refers is, in fact, the concept or solution before its visual representation. In art, the form-content relationship is divided on the basis of techniques (form) and statements (content). But in graphic design, content exists both as the concept of a solution and as a pre-existing message statement supplied by the client. Form expresses not the designer’s subjectivity nor even the message statement, but the content of a designer’s conceptual solution. Form is fully dependent on this content for meaning or substance. Form not accountable to content is extraneous, as Leo Lionni’s distinction between decorative and expressive form indicates: ‘Design is form. Sometimes it is decorative form, and has no function other than to give pleasure to the eye. Often it is expressive form, related to conceptual content, to meaning. It is always abstract; but like a gesture or tone of voice it has the power to command and hold attention, to create symbols, to clarify ideas.’ But the pleasurable forms of style are also expressive, communicating ideas about taste and social status. The core is not the client message statement but the designer’s conceptual solution, which no matter how ‘transparent’ still gains expression through its visual translation and cannot simply be exchanged for the message statement.
The definitions of style, form and content which inform contemporary debates in graphic design were cast in a specific historical period, the Modern, against the background of the design profession’s modernisation. Their usage within a different period – the post-industrial, late capitalist post-modern – is problematic. Although the context has changed, the original definitions persist. The purity of the problem-solution equation leaves no room for issues such as form not attributable to an internal content, taste as an aesthetic value in society and designers who add their own ‘statements’.Though style is banished to the hinterlands of non-meaning, it can nevertheless be found in the work of most designers who reach not inward to the problem but outward to the ‘masses’.