I Like the Vernacular... Not, by Jeffery Keedy

 

This essay by Jeffery Keedy explores the conflict and meeting points between 'high’ and 'low’, and how this might be levelled out into one bland 'pop’ culture.

1. In the opening paragraph Keedy talks about the use of nostalgia in typography and graphic design as a way of exploiting the past, or reworking it into something for the future. The idealism of designers to reproduce something that’s familiar but also new in order to attract the audience can be argued as being ignorant to history. But designer’s aren’t necessarily concerned with being true to the original material due to their desire to visually please- to  evoke feeling, not factual information and rigid authenticity. 

2. Appreciation of the past and  of other cultures, for example, is different to appropriation. I need to consider that if I ‘borrow’ from another culture that I must make reference or create a pastiche, as long as I make appropriate ethical considerations.

3. The idea of borrowing in graphic design is so pervasive that it is often done unconsciously. What is needed is an awareness of what crossing cultural and historical barriers actually means, as well as an understanding of the importance of context. The culture that is perceived to be the high or dominant is not the only one to be empowered, as it is already rehashing something previously deemed the original and therefore ‘empowering’. 

4. The idea of ‘timeless design’ is that you are constantly reinventing your own work- recycling old material in a newer sense. This can be a means to perfect your own style  as an artist or designer but lacks the challenge of trying something new and branching out from work you are familiar with. 

5. The past used to be considered a classic example or ideal for the present. It is a very different thing to recycle the past for the purposes of instant gratification than to reinvent the past as an ideal for the present.

6. Maybe we should either expand our notion of what constitutes graphic design or become even more specific and rigorous in our self-definition of graphic design practice. Reinventing the future by looking towards the future, instead of the past. 

7. Graphic designers should be responsive to and responsible for the development of their own style. Instead of just using the vernacular they are creating it, and it is that invention which defines the very notion of original and innovative graphic design. Instead of looking back to evoke nostalgia, perhaps try looking forwards to a future nostalgia and how it can be portrayed in this medium in a new way. 

article by Mare Treib, published in Looking Closer: Critical Writings on Graphic Design

edited by Michael Bierut et. al. (1994) Allworth Press: New York