David Rudnick. Lecture "Crisis of Graphic Practices: Challenges of the Next Decades"

hello stroker well there are so many people here tonight thank you so much for coming out kind of blown away by the

response I hope you find what I have to say worthwhile so let me get started by loading up my images here

okay so for this first part of the talk what you'll see on the screen comes from

my personal tumblr which is just the

tumblr micro blog which I use is let's go back which I use the space to publish my own work so everything you're going

to see on the screen in this first part of the talk comes from my work is from my practice so I'll explain a little bit more about these images in a little

moment but first I wanted to tell you a little bit about me and about the work that I do because I'm sure that not all of you are familiar with me my name is David I'm a graphic

designer I'm from London and my path into graphic design was I think somewhat

unconventional in that I didn't have a conventional design education that a lot of my practice is self-taught but I think also the decision to pursue

graphic design and become a graphic designer came about as a result of me starting from a place where I had a lot of questions about the medium about

design about how it operated as a social construct its industry practices and they're still ones which I'm figuring out the answers to and hopefully over

the course of this talk I'll talk a little bit about my practice the way that I work some of the things which might be strange or specific to me I'll talk a little bit about my views of

contemporary design practice how it works is at an industrial level but also at a smaller scale I'll talk about my ideas of how moving forward some of the

problems that design faces now and how we might find solutions to things which are intrinsic to it as a commercial practice but also as a personal practice too and then I'm going to talk a little

bit about other practices outside of design which might hold some answers or illuminates and potential strategies which design itself seems to have been

slow in adopting and I'm going to finish looking at some trends that have emerged in a completely different medium in cinema which I think illustrates some of the ways in which technological change

and the way in which technology portrays and presents reality to the viewer is changing our society and is changing individuals perceptions of what society

is of what reality is in ways that design should be at least consider ative of because I think it poses questions for the future of the medium and

potentially answers for how we shape our practices going forward so to start off a bit about me I grew up in London in Northwest London in the little village

called ledge Moorhead and long before I ever even encountered graphic design I it's fair to say that as a child it's not like I had ambitions of being a

graphic designer my first real encounter with design or the one that I think stands out to me which maybe illustrates the ways in which my relationship design

may have been [ __ ] up from the start is something that I remember from when I was a little boy around my 8th birthday was just before my birthday in fact I'm

born on January the 4th and this was around Christmastime I was travelling in the car with my parents and a song came on the radio and it was true faith by

new order and I loved it it just it was amazing to hear the song I hadn't heard the order before and it was I remember

it just having a really big impact on me a few days after that my parents asked me what I would like for my birthday which was coming up and I just said I want the new order album I didn't know

which album and they didn't know which album either so they got me the best of new order and the best of new order had just been released so it also came with a second disc called the rest of new

order so got these two albums and I don't know if anyone in here Nuland is a new order fan but these two albums are it's the newer album with the blue

squiggle on the front looks kind of like a question mark this is a strange squiggle and then the rest of is exactly the same

that has a pink squiggles on the front and I didn't know it as a kid with these two albums which are the only music I own just of these two CDs and a CD

player little CD player in my room and I used to sit on the floor just listening to this out just listening to the new order album on repeat on repeat and repeat and these two albums of course

are designed by Peter Savile there's a legendary English designer who did it'll work for factory records work with Joy Division and work with new order early in their careers throughout their

careers and so I'm sitting there and I'm listening to this album which is you know kind of blowing me away listening to the best of again and again again if

Blue Monday true Faye regret world all these amazing tracks and of course like you do when you're a kid and you've got nothing else to do like I'm reading the booklet obsessively back-to-front so

she's reading everything in there it's just like the who produced the song it was a session engineer but I'm just looking over it again and again again and of course I don't know it at the

time but it's a vol so it's in rotties this is like a weird choice of typeface for that moment he's printed it in a spot silver Pantone I remember hadn't seen silver ink before I'm just kind of fascinated the whole

thing was the synthesis of my love for the music and this this mysterious beautiful strange object that wasn't giving me any answers it was just it was

there and it felt I'm just being totally fascinated by it so that's that's one part of this encounter the second part though is that when I listened to the best of again again again again again and I heard all these songs that I liked

a million times that's when I opened up the rest of which is the remix album a barren mine of eight years old and I've definitely

never been to a club before and the only music I've ever heard is music I've heard on the radio or on commercials so you've got to imagine this eight-year-old kid in his bedroom listening to the new order album again

again again and he puts on the rest of and like flicking through the tracks I remember getting to track eight which is the pump panel remix of confusion those of you who have film fans might

remember this is a music that's played in the club scene in operation Blade the in blade sorry the Wesley Snipes vampire flick where they have the blood

raise this track is just like a classic hard house track it's it's ten minutes long and it's basically just a bass line in a kick drum and I'm sitting there on

my bedroom floor aged eight listening to this and I'm just like what is this song like where are the words what is this

person trying to say like why did they write this song what's it about I don't know what dancing is and another club music is but I'm just kind of I think that was my first experience of abstract

art it was like seeing Kandinsky for the first time there were no clues there were no lyrics there was no imagery it was just a feeling and it really stayed

with me this experience of this language which was so stripped down so pure and so powerful that I think that though would only emerge years later in my

practice when I start working with underground electronic musicians and I start getting into design more I am very very grateful to the fact that I had this album and it was designed by Sabol

and I didn't know this and that the baseline of everything I believed in about design and music came from something that meant a lot to me but

years past I grew up in Northwest London and then I become a teenager and I'm thinking of what I want to do with my life and I know that I like art I know

that I like drawing I know that I like making images and visual culture I think maybe I want to be an artist but I also feel strongly that I don't want to just

go to art school I thought maybe I'd try and study philosophy I wanted to have some kind of framework some kind of grounding in what it was that my visual

medium was in the context of some notion of social ideas or historical ideas this wasn't really very thought through but I felt that I wanted to try and do both

these at the same time and through a convoluted process of me continually trying to get into Oxford and failing to get into Oxford I eventually

ended up getting into Yale in America where very quickly I realized that I didn't want to study studio art I didn't think that I was really an artist and I also didn't really like studying philosophy

either and know what to do until I found art history history of art specifically one brilliant teacher at Yale a man

named Christopher Wood who had an absolutely extraordinary very singular this he's young he still still teaches today's at NYU now but he has books and

and for anyone who finds what I talked about today interesting or wonder where my perspectives come from I would say that Christopher wood is definitely someone who's worth looking into he has one fantastic book called replica

forgery in fiction but basically Christopher wood just teaches the theory of the Northern Renaissance so the kind of the period of the 14th century the

15th century kind of 1450 to 15 2015 30 and in northern Europe so Flanders Germany Belgium Holland this area that

it's when people talk about the Renaissance as a social construct as a kind of even as a philosophical construct what our society has kind of

landed on as that idea is really the Italian Renaissance which is the refinement of humanism into this what seems to be very clean enlightened form

where traditional structures of power the church economic structures social structures were augmented by philosophy by our which seemed to fit seamlessly

into this new world this wasn't the case in the north in the north everything was going kind of [ __ ] crazy and in in 1430s movable-type is invented they get

books for the first time and this just immediately starts [ __ ] [ __ ] up on a quite broad social level because now you have books being made that aren't even the Bible and so you have a Catholic

Christian society which is suddenly getting all these texts being revived from antiquity you're getting humanist stuff and this is happening in Italy too but the northern seems to have a singularly weird

interest in wanting to find stuff that previously was totally arcane and taboo and then in addition to movable type you get the invention of the refinement of

woodblock printing with people like juror albert durer who turns up in the 1490s and basically you get text and

more importantly images circulating outside of the traditional confines of the church and of religious centers for the first time which kind of starts to

put up like a pressure cooker under everything in society people are seeing images of non-religious subjects for the first time people are reading books about this stuff and it's starting to

create a radically emergent class of people who are literate who have a new sense of what the visual order of the world might be and politically it's clear that like this they've affairs is

becoming problematic similarly in fine art and refined are in the high arts in painting in the north the artists now a generation we move on into like the

early 1500s and these kids who've been raised on seeing prints that aren't just religious prints images of pornography of you know of social scenes of a kind

of a radically broad spectrum of content now they start making art and the second gen comes in and that's where stuff gets really really dangerous because they start putting images out into the religious sphere altarpiece paintings

etc which seems to question the very foundations of what the society was built on in its morality in 1512 gruenewald paints the isenheim

altarpiece which i write my dissertation on and very very very soon after this generation of incredibly talented totally heroic punks weirdos I mean like

don't take my word for it read Leo Sternberg the sexuality of Christ everything up to and including you know Christ on the cross with an erection the Virgin Mary explicitly sexually aroused

with the young Christ stuff that it's insane for me to say this really happened but it did in the north and then everyone knows about Martin Luther

and the Protestant Reformation what we don't learn as much about are some of the other people who lead to the religious Reformation at that moment which is Jacob's Bingley and so his contemporaries equally on the cusp

of Luther's reforms who comes in and says okay the church is economically and spiritually corrupt we need to reform it Bingley and his contemporaries come in

in 1516 and they say we have to ban art the [ __ ] is out of control it's got to stop like they are they're destroying everything with this crazy are these

crazy punks and we have to we have to end it and so that's why when the Protestant Reformation occurs yes the church reforms economically but also I kind of classically artist stripped out

of the churches and an attempt is made to strip art out Society spoiler warning it doesn't work but that's the pressure that the North is under and this is the background that

I'm getting my design education in I'm watching a world in which printing books and making images literally was the equivalent of like a terrorist attack that nearly destroyed society and then

that might help explain why when I came out of this art history and I start working with musicians and I start working with artists whose practices just really inspire me and I start

getting the chance to even you know make a poster for them or do stuff my fundamental attitude towards what design and visual communication is is that this

isn't necessarily something that has no stakes this isn't necessarily work that just is there to make the world beautiful making the world beautiful can

kind of [ __ ] up the world as well and I start looking as well and this time where I'm learning about this information revolution and this is you

know my early 20s and it becomes really really clear to me that we're also going through our own information revolution in our time is eerie similarities that

start to emerge you know I'm at Yale when Facebook's launched so I mean like the first people who are getting on this first gen of social media and it's very very clear that what the Internet is

becoming is similar to what printed books and printed images had been for that previous generation which is this was a radical up turning of the

hierarchies and orders of how information knowledge truth the sacred the profane were ordered in our world and it was clear as well having known the way the previous one

turns out that it wasn't necessarily something that was just going to end out fine and everything would be the same as before whether or not we got there the potential was here for a crisis or reshaping that would be total would

change the way all of our lives would work in one generation Northern Europe went from one which was psyched about the possibilities of this emerging medium to one that was basically in a

civil war saying we need to shut this down right now and so the whole way through the emergence of my practice

there is this weight that is always in the room which is the sense that we don't know how this is going to end we don't know necessarily that things will

end up one way or the other but we are in a moment with the potential for it being part of a radical restructuring of how visual communication works how

graphic language works how we view ourselves how we view identity how we view politics now with your society and that the control factors in this moment might not be disseminated from the top

down that there may be movements that authorities might make or great institutions might make to control it but these might not be sufficient to keep the genie in the bottle in fact my

belief is as I will talk about when I articulate what I think this is a moment of crisis and of opportunity that whether we like it or not design and its

role has fundamentally changed and that we must find ways to adapt to the new models that are being propagated by things bigger than design new platforms

new modes of communication and new understandings ultimately of how we even view reality so let's get back to me I graduate from University and I start a

design practice working mostly with musicians and artists and basically this is just me kind of being I don't know like just

almost kind of an intervention in that like I would go to clubs and I would hear DJ's play that I loved and I would just ask them if I could do a poster or can I make a t-shirt for you there were

artists who I thought were doing really interesting work and I wanted to work with them I think that at the very beginnings of my practice it's not like I emerged with an ideology where I was like okay I wanna do graphic

design because it's going to be really important and I have to be there and have to do it I have to do a certain way everything I'm going to talk about now is something which has emerged over the course of time over the course of my

experiences doing work and it's something which is still changing and still evolving anyone among you who have a design practice will probably have

gone through some things that I described similar things yourself and similarly I don't think I'm at a position yet where I would say are I have the answer I have a theory what design is of what it will be but I

do think that being on the front lines so to speak our generation the young generation emergent generation people who are well there's two generations really as designers that are emergent

now one is my generation I'm 31 years old who grew up and had our formative design experiences without the internet so our first design objects are

intimacy's with the medium or probably physical things like the new order album I loved there's another generation out there now that will form the bulk of

what graphic design becomes in the next 10 years and that's really one of the things which like I want you to bear in mind as I go through this talk and that is the generation of graphic designers

whose formative design experiences took place online who don't necessarily have what most in this audience will have which is a fundamental reverence for the idea that a book is necessary or

important and LP is necessary or important we can make strong cases and I believe many of you do and I try to myself as to why we think these things

are important but let's be clear we should also prepare strategies or prepare ourselves looking forward to the future of design with the knowledge that it's not just a de facto obvious

necessary condition of design that it needs be physical or needs even recognize the physical world and I think that this has strong implications for

some of the ways in which perhaps design has taken for granted the way that the physical might need to be for in its future and that we as the

makers of objects or some makers of visual culture may need to start putting forward a case as to why this is important it's no longer necessarily just an assumption that your audience will agree with you so we should

consider this and I'll talk about some ways in which we might look to do this and how we structure our practices and structure our studios so I started doing

this work and after a couple of years I'm kind of actually in a kind of bad place by the time I get my mid-twenties and I'm doing this work and I'm kind of like working musicians I like but as anyone who's tried to start a practice

completely independently or work on music stuff will tell you it doesn't pay well at all you don't know where the work is coming from it's not easy and I'm kind of broke and I'm getting to this point where I'm

really feeling pretty low couple this with the fact that I'm not someone who wanted to ever call themselves a graphic designer and I was kind of ashamed to even say it because I had these

suspicions that the things I was trying to do in my work were totally odds with the way that the industry seemed to frame itself seem to consider itself as an entity

I have strong skepticism I still do about the current state of commercial design I believe my desire to work with

people who are expressive who are visual artists or musicians or writers and to express also myself and to create cultural content that I thought had

value and would be meaningful to viewers is a skill that I think you have to spend time as a designer consciously refining you can't just move from a

place of doing a lot of work that you don't care about to passionate work and then suddenly realize okay but how do i express that passion then what does it mean to me I'm going to talk a little

bit about the way now a designer might start to form that process for themselves those of you who have practices the

consideration of how does a designer create expression how does a designer embrace poetry or tend to do something that is striking whilst working in a

medium that fundamentally also is still going to be held to standards where it must deliver some kind of solution or concrete act it can't just

be like an artist to completely obtuse because if the viewer disregards it or rejects it then you really haven't helped out the person whose album cover

you're designing or whose book you were doing the cover of so I want to talk a

little bit about how design lives in the world I know a lot of people feel that like ultimately the agency of a designer

is very little and it's true on an individual level this these fantasies these notions that are always changing the world have to stop and that we are

not saving the world we're not changing from the top down as individuals but what we are doing all of us cumulatively in our work is we are creating and

cumulatively recreating the world of the now we build designers architects industrial designers the objects the typefaces the voices which become our

millia our midst our surroundings between us and we can no longer disregard the extent to which by

creating the world we are also partially responsible for the political and social content of that world it is not a coincidence that if you make a social

network that aims to have a billion users and you use design solutions to make all the content appear friendly that when neo-nazis get on that Network

suddenly they appear way more friendly than before it's not a coincidence that if you spend your life as a designer proudly when a client comes to you and says hey people don't trust our company

can you make it so that they trust us but actually the company's still doing the same stuff they were doing before you just affect the voice of a trustworthy person that after a while people get wise to the fact that they're

still getting ripped off and scammed and they start whenever they see fresh new graphic design conflating it with being lied to as designers we all need to start

looking at the fundamentals of our interactions with design and what we put out there because ultimately thank you don't worry back from the screensaver

because ultimately if design sees itself as a service whose goal is to address the problems of the client then design

is ignoring what it really is which is design is an environment for its audience we need to reject the notion I

feel I do in my practice but I feel that this is something which is a bit of a taboo for designers to discuss that the people we work for our clients the

people we work with should be our clients the people we work for are our audience neglect that and you start to build dystopias because you start to

create systems of manipulation systems of control ways which your service is you make it easier for someone to lie for them to change their appearance so that they can take on the most

commercially profitable position but you lose the hard work the tough work which modernism rightly claim credit for which is the idea that design is a practice with serious stakes that involves

responsibilities and involves offering real meaningful change to its audience I'm going to use a term now and I hope it comes through in in Russian I hope

also what I'm saying is intelligible to those of you don't speak English I'll try and explain this as simply as possible there's a word I use and it may

be a long time before I finally get to the full end of philosophically what this means but there's a word I use when

I try and talk about how experience from design registers in the world in people and I use this word narrative in a way that's different to the conventional

idea of narrative as a story or a tale and it's it's a simple distinction but it's just something that I think it's worth designers thinking about

and and the way I use it is this if I say a word to you and let's say that word has a visual connotation like I say

a chair every one of you in your head will will have some chair that you

picture that image or that idea of what a chair is will be different for all of you because it will be it can necessarily only be built out of all of

your own individual experiences of what a chair is imagine you know that we're Google servers for example and all of us have an index of every chair we've ever seen or more particularly every chair

perhaps that we can remember and maybe for certain individuals some chairs the chair in your family's house the one in your bedroom you saw more than most and so maybe for some of you your chair

looks a bit more like that or maybe something terrible happened to you in a room with that chair and actually for some of you chair isn't a nice thing at all or you're now picturing something you don't want to think about this is

what I call the narrative which is that chair is a noun to term the narrative is an individual's unique experience of the

term what a designer does every time we put work in front of people is we are making a conscious intervention into their narratives we are becoming a

moment in their history of something and the opportunity is there if we choose to pursue it to try and make this perhaps a defining or useful moment in the history

of something which means for it to be useful it has to stand out it has to be remembered and it has to have some

connotations which are perhaps maybe indicative of something maybe they speak to something else maybe it's like okay this chair actually and we talk about

this when we talk about art oh okay this chair stands for murder or political corruption you don't have to go to the gallery to view the world like that we have the opportunity to do that in our

work when we make an album cover when we make a poster we also have the opportunity far away from the client to speak on a very direct level to

people and create their associations with things how in my practice did I feel I think it would like the revelation for me when I felt like I was

gaining some control over that process how might you as designers think about this as well came when I started to work more and more with type and type design

I'm I guess it's one of the defining aspects of my practice all of the type that you're seeing on this screen all of it even the boring typefaces that look

kind of like Helvetica are pretty much 99% of the ones I designed when I do my work and it's something that I don't like to try and foreground as I don't want the work to be showing off about

this this this component of it but it's important to me as part of my process that I make the type from the ground up why do I do this

firstly it means that everything I do will have something slightly off about it something slightly specific even in the basic typefaces even the one pure

there for example - typeface called ZOA that might make it more memorable might make it away in which whatever is specific about that work might find its

form within you and the second is it allows me to reach back into the thing that I love so much history and the past and this great wealth of experience and

cultures and my memories and feel like I'm able to pull them in to these objects to find a way to say if I want to talk about a chair but I also want to

talk about the hit the legacy of the Baroque for example in this poster maybe I can do that with type and maybe there's a way to highlight the unique synthesis between these two strange

things by coming up with a typeface which is the only place in the world it would ever need to exist which has both qualities of a chair and qualities of the Baroque it's the opposite of

Vignelli theorem which is a designer should just have like five good typefaces and throw the rest away and those the only ones you use because I think that that's actually a kind of honestly slightly fascist way of looking

at what culture is and what the world is every single person in this room has a history and experience which is made up of memories and made up of

narratives they are unique to you design should find ways to be more embracing of difference not less design should find ways to showcase the breadth of culture

and possibility in history and make individuals as well feel the design is something which could ultimately be a place that they could explore their own personal space rather than some kind of

unifying social factor that they need to pull towards if you feel you have a different space to go to design can actually be an opportunity potentially

to put that liberation on the table to suggest what other worlds might look like and if we don't find ways of stimulating people's imagination or dreams of what might be and the danger is that as a society we go more and more

and more clothes and design also becomes a practice which becomes relegated to bigger and bigger and bigger organizations because the individual doesn't matter your perspective is not what they're looking to communicate

they're looking to communicate this massive social homogeneity and that's why I think and I will go on to express I think the future of the design is finding ways to be radically autonomous

it's both individuals and small groups of individuals so you can celebrate your perspective your memories your narratives now a little aside before I

go into talking about how I think we can to go about doing that the first thing that I want to talk about just one more thing to do with type is a category of

language which because I was teaching myself this stuff became really important to me and then when I try to look into later in my career why you know what was the relationship and design no one really talks about this so I figure like I'm here I'm talking to

you guys maybe I should should mention this and that is a category of language that in English we call proper nouns a proper

noun is really simple everyone in this room has one it's your name for a start but it's also a specific date or a specific place Moscow as a proper noun

Russia is a proper noun and when you think about the world in terms of narrative proper nouns are very special because in

the same way that your narrative extends only all the way back to you a proper now and also it's a weird moment where

it extends also to this single point and I was working as a designer and realizing that actually okay when as a

designer you get asked to work there's certain indexes of information and we talked about headline and body we talked about display and text but actually we don't talk about proper nouns and they're the place where the really crazy

[ __ ] potentially goes down the stuff where if we talk about like design potentially having a social footprint or having a great being able to change the meaning of something for hundreds of thousands or millions of people will

look at proper nouns if I say Joy Division or new order or you know an individual's name for example in your head I know that some of you for example

are picturing the cover of Unknown Pleasures by Peter Sabol the joy joy division album I can make you if I say chair I can't get close to what your

chairs look like but if I say Unknown Pleasures I can get pretty close and I can start to think about the ways in which now you've all got a pretty similar picture in your head because Unknown Pleasures is a proper now and as

a designer when you get asked to do an album or you get asked to do a monograph you actually get the moment where and this is unbelievable privilege and this is the thing which it doesn't matter if you're making 5 bucks a month you're

struggling on the bread line and believe me I was you get to be the person if you can find a way to work with a musician if you can find a way to work with artists if you can find a way to do these jobs where you get to define what

that proper noun looks like and that is a place in history from day one if that thing gets referenced you are controlling that space of the narrative so if you're listening to my earlier part they're talking they're like yes so

what I make a typeface that looks like a chair I'm not going to change the way anyone thinks about chair true probably correct but you can change the way that someone pictures Joy Division you can change the meaning of what that is and

if people keep acquainting themselves with that content that you touched in that way and typographically that's one of the best ways to do it you can design the word itself then you have an

enormous amount of agency that's where you can really do the the the magical work of designers poetry right in that space so I would say it's designer to looking at their own practices and how do I work how do i you

know how do I build a name for myself well you should one thing I would definitely advise you can do even when you're just starting out is be super receptive to the power of proper nouns like call us on that that album just

there for example because that is a place where if you can fix an idea that's unique to you unique to that thing in that place you'll always own the way it looks even if people rip you off they're ripping you off you're the source you were there

on day one you were there at the current for creation of the memory for that individual those words had no meaning before for them and now they're a thing you're top of the filing cabinet in their mind

okay so practices how do we build our practices going forward at this point I kind of want to make a bit of a swerve I want to show a video I want to show a

couple of clips from a show that's on Netflix don't know if any of your Netflix subscribers but a really wonderful fantastic show called chess

table if we can put those those clips on now these clips won't have sound so they'll just be a few clips but I'll kind of talk over and on the rate a

little bit we have the video so chef table is a Netflix show that follows the practice of for one hour one

individual chef a chef oh is the head creative persona of a fine-dining restaurant I think this term is important and that's I don't know what

the term is in Russian for fine dining because bear in mind that all these things I'm going to say about cooking and the kitchens and the way this global culture works I want us to consider in

the context of graphic design practice today imagine if the only restaurants existed

around the world were McDonald's or global chains huge mega conglomerates whose goal was just to feed the kind of everyday desires of the public to sate

their hunger but there was not necessarily a word like they have been cooking fine dining for someone whose job it is to refine their practice to

the highest level of a culinary art to express to entertain to create unique memories we don't have this term in graphic design I'm proud to call myself

a graphic designer because the worst thing you can do is say to that person okay you're an artist now alright you're trying to make this stuff meaningful you stopped doing graphic design the moment we start

saying that is the moment that we close ourselves off to the possibility the design can even be a terrain of expression so with the greatest of respect [ __ ] that I'm a graphic designer I want to call myself that even if that

was a term which previously I wasn't so comfortable with this show is amazing it's incredible beautifully edited incredibly shot I recommend that you know sound like a Netflix commercial for

a moment here but please if you can watch this show the clips I'm going to show you here won't do justice to the little things but I wanted you to see just a little bit so I didn't just want

it to be words in your mind this is an opportunity for me to put images to a chef's table time and time and time

again I watch this I suppose sauce a year ago at a time where I had graduated from

Yale and I felt very frustrated with the state of graphic design as a profession I couldn't necessarily see a way for me to move forward and find a way to

express myself in the way I wanted what would my practice that would I even call myself how would I structure it finding this show was amazing for me it really was it was a revelation because

here I saw individuals who are operating twenty years into graphic designs future so liberated creatively conceptually but

so aware and intelligent because of the nature of their practice about all of the possibilities these aren't casual artisans to run a fine dining restaurant you take on an

enormous economic burden you take on incredible stress there are 22 hours a day you have to basically go out on a limb or find investors to get a property and you need a space you can't run a

restaurant off the internet if you start running the restaurant you have to have a space and that means that that space needs to visually reflect as well the environment of what it is you're trying

to express because these chefs know in a way designers don't seem to have cottoned on to all about what I was describing when I talked about narrative which is the first moment you walk in through the door it matters the smell of

the room matters you hear them talk about it they talk about using ambient music they talk about the color of the walls they talk about the lighting they talk about the service interactions sorry but this makes design look like

kids stuff because we should be thinking about all this stuff but we don't talk about it we talk about typefaces and color schemes and doing a sick poster or doing the cover of the book but how many of us are talking about creating the

smell of the place that people first encounter the book now maybe in 20 years but they're they're already the chefs are there and they're talking about it and then learning from it and what

they're learning is amazing this stuff really really really is relevant to what we do as creative professionals because they have to think about where they get their ingredients from which is a local

thing so they need their ingredients so they think about the supply chain and think about their materials they get to know the ecological impact of their use of material they have to manage that as well as the

budgets they can't make too many sacrifices and they also know the way in which that then has knock-on effects on the local community well as a designer if you make a book you've got to find paper you've got to find a printer you

want to develop those relationships for these chefs that's a huge part of their creative practice for designers especially if you work in a firm that might be someone else's job but these

people are finding ways to differentiate themselves to further what they do by refining all of these elements then we get onto the creative side what they do

is that well if you have a restaurant you also need a kitchen this is super important we have one word in graphic design for the creative Atelier the

studio one word that's kind of equivalent to something something similar to the kitchen but not really not really the studio and graphic design is kind of where you take your phone

calls and a little bit the desk that you do your work on but these guys the kitchen or these girls as well these ladies and men because there's just as many incredible female chefs as there

are men have not just a space for making but a space for creating laboratories research labs they take time in their week to go off the floor they'll have days when the restaurant is closed and

they'll do pure R&D they talk about going on research trips pure research trips to further the development of the kitchen and then coming back to this tiny space and pushing things further there because you cannot survive as a

top-level michelin-starred chef unless you're doing something that is truly almost indescribable unique to you and it has to be brilliant every time everyone who walks in the

door that restaurant is expecting it to blow their minds imagine if as designers we had that kind of level that we were aiming for every single thing we put out

had to be a revelation had to be something that was just a world we hadn't imagined before and it should be meaningful to not just because there are people in the culinary profession for

whom it's a pure expression of ego but they can't rise to the top because ultimately it's unsatisfying for their audience for them to just show off about the cool techniques that they could pick up all the stuff they could bite from other chefs

no the synthesis really needs to be there day in day out for these stories to have meaning to the viewers and how do these chefs reach that point time and time and time again in chef's table and

it always may want to cry saying it was amazing independently these people who had no formal training they didn't go to a school they didn't study philosophy they identify through working at these

practices in this way that the most important tool that they have to work with as creative professionals is memory when people come in and they sit down

the way that the chef can provoke them or Surprise them is by playing off their memories or expectations of what food is and they can reward them by awakening nostalgia or forgotten paths but they

can also push them in the opposite direction push against their expectations too and similarly for the chef how do they keep coming up with ideas day in day out how do they push

forward again it is memory which is the foundation of these practices now what does it mean for us as designers well first off if we're going to have

labs and if we're going to have spaces where we're going to have practices that could be expressive what still being held to the highest technical standards

then similar to these chefs we're going to have to go out on a limb and try and build some idea for ourselves some discussion of what these environments look like what is the laboratory for

graphic design what is the restaurant equivalent in graphic design if the studio is the perfect kitchen how is it reaching its audience are we going to change the ways of design reaches audience even down to the idea of the

smell of the book or an environment of the retail space ultimately for me the excitement of what the next years of graphic design might hold is a move away

from a top-down enormous floated and frankly dying commercial model of mega industrial design every person who has

the internet now to a certain extent is a designer we will post images on our social media feeds or on Twitter if you're a kid you're using snapchat and Instagram every day to create stories they are editors they are coordinators

and we risk also running into a point where we will have billions of graphic designers and there are only so many jobs at the top firms and at the top firms there are only really five or six

people who are truly being creative when you come in through the door like you do a great kitchen they don't tell you in graphic designs that for the first three years you're going to be a dishwasher but here's the other thing about the

kitchen which graphic design doesn't do as well when you go and work for Alain Passard or you go and work for any of these great chefs you're being trained

to become a great chef yourself and in the current state of the industry I feel our generation has been somewhat tricked we are not being trained to run the companies we're not really being trained

to lead there's too many of us out there the marketplace is oversaturated with young designers we are being trained become the workforce this can and will

only change when we start establishing studios Italia's of our own that need to be smaller more flexible and to support one another so just as fine dining can exist in any city of the world in fact

in season three of the chef's table of Italian muffins white rabbit which is here in Moscow is featured and has a reason to exist in every city of the world because in every city of the world

people want to experience these moments of great excitement and provocation and every city as well has its unique

cultural geography its unique tastes every person in those cities has different memories your memories of food as Muscovites will be so different to my memories of London which means the great restaurant of Moscow should be very different to the great restaurants of

London and actually there's enough of you in this room with different enough memories there should be 50 great restaurants in Moscow it's the same with design Studios there should be 50 great design studios in Moscow drawing on your

local heritage drawing on your culture finding ways to change that voice into visual form and there should be in London and Birmingham and Ghent and Leone and all over the world we don't need 5,000 people working it

into brand we shouldn't be looking at that future it's not sustainable anyway when the snapchat generation hit the market I can I can tell you those companies are in huge trouble but what those people

will need in the same way that food has been around for since humans have been around we've always needed to eat is that level beyond mere sustenance that level which exists as pure expression or

communication and if you think this sounds maybe okay this is a very elitist vision for graphic design let me say the following you're right it's crazy elitist to point to a meal that costs

200 euros and say that's the future of graphic design but here's the most magical wonderful thing I can't afford to go and have a 200 euro meal any night

of the week once a month maybe tops like maybe once a year for a birthday but I can afford to buy an album once a month and that cost a lot less than 200 years and my parents gave me a CD for my

birthday and it changed my life so as designers we actually have much more open and broadly source points of contact to the public that don't need to

be ultra rarefied luxury objects the onus is on us to work with those parameters to make them extraordinary let me go back to this but maybe it's

time for me to move on to the final section of my talk which is similar to

looking at chefs and fine dining and cooking I want to look at another area outside of graphic design an area which

I think illustrates some of the ways in which when I talk about society changing radically maybe it doesn't feel so apparent or there'll be people in the room who've worked at companies it's like me and whatever man like actually

you alarmist or it's not so much of a change although increasingly as time goes on and you look at the political situation of the world more and more those people are starting to have to say

okay you know what maybe something is changing but I want to talk about cinema because I'm fascinated by cinema I love cinema but cinema is about as

mass-market and global a medium for popular expression as there is that exists in the world today here in Russia a Hollywood blockbuster I know that even in this audience of you know hundreds of

people if I mention the Avengers or I mentioned Batman or I mentioned Superman there's a very good chance a lot of you have seen it which is there's very little other cultural property that I can say in that way and

feel confident that you'll be familiar with the thing about cinema is it's an incredibly powerful visual medium that

has the potential for creating in its audience a reflection of a worldview or a portrayal of a world that actually design can struggle to keep up with

these incremental changes of legacy media are very slow in our profession compared to the way that cinema has operated and what I want to talk about is something which I'm not making a

claim that this is how all cinema is now but what I think is interesting is that a visual form has emerged in filmmaking in the last decade or so which I think

better than anything in design I'm really better than anything in literature or better than anything in music seems to visually represent the

nature of how our reality works now and probably bears paying further attention to as it seems to suggest as well the direction that things are heading in I want to talk about a kind of filmmaking

or set of filmmaking tropes that I call ultra reality and if you can pop the video on I'll try and explain a little bit of what I mean by that

so this is what I mean by cinema being very recognizable I think probably a lot of you in the audience are familiar with the scene from the matrix by the

Wachowski Disqus from 1999 this is maybe not the first instance in cinema but for me the best origin point in popular culture for the emergence of what would

become mature opus of cinematic ultra reality I would define ultra reality as a set of filmmaking decisions that is generally

typifies by five things the first of them is well illustrated by the sequence from The Matrix which is an end or

gradual ending of the idea of linear time as the dominant mode by which story making or narrative is presented so in this sequence here which was referred to

as bullet time in the popular press when this came out there's a variety of cameras to create the sense that the cameras moving impossibly fast in this

slow-motion shot around near the end of linear time or the end of a chronology that just starts at a and moves at the same speed to be it's something which

actually on a broader social sense it's starting to become the phenomenon of also how we experience our social reality in social media more and more

new speeds news organizations of social contact groups are being structured by order of interest rather than necessarily a pure chronological sense it used to be when you start on Facebook

you could scroll down and it was basically like you were following time but now time is starting to fracture and be out of order on the internet time may jump forward or backward to you

depending on what it's deemed to be most interesting or relevant and similarly in filmmaking the special effects sequence was always slow motion was used at the most dramatic moment at the heightened

moment but now increasingly slow motion filmmakers are finding ways to make the world appear entirely in slow motion or fast motion or move seemingly at will between slow and fast motion forwards

and reverse the idea that stories just take place at one speed in one direction ending in certain parts of the cinema and the audience isn't rejecting this in

fact it's kind of becoming part of the way that we see time in a popular sense there and it's being reflected online as well this footage is from carousel by Adam Berg from 2009 this was a

commercial that was made for Philips for the LCD widescreen televisions and this was highly lauded the time was actually released online not in cinemas what Berg

does here is he creates the impression of a single unbroken shot that runs from start to finish and that end in the place it began so what we see here is the emergence of the second principle of

alt reality which is the movement towards the infinite scroll the perfect loop the world that's not interrupted by cuts because if you've grown up on the Internet you'd

know that cuts are unsophisticated and infinity is the digital property that the world can't keep up with so if you have infinite space why not use it why not envision a world that never

stops and if you get used to that what does it mean to experience something which is edited or cut the traditional art of cinema or directing was the art of editing it was of taking life as we

experienced it and ordering it in a series of vignettes to tell a story but that's not necessarily the case anymore in filmmaking and that's certainly not the case anymore on the internet what are the implications for

graphic design well editing was actually a part of how we saw a medium as well and when we made books it was about taking pride in the structured pagination and order the way in which we

showed a system unfolding and iterating over a series of media but what if a generation is emerging that sees these things as violent interruptions that break down the way in which they want to

explore the medium in all directions at once they don't want to read your book from front to cover they don't want to read it from page 1 to page 20 and they certainly don't want to turn the page it's ugly it's wrong shouldn't information always be moving

around and shouldn't you be able to be free which brings me to the third principle of alt reality which is freedom of movement increasingly in

these shots we move through the scene we're moving through time but we're moving through space in a way where is clear that the defining principle of what governs our movement

and what governs the time is not the physical laws of the space that you're in but the will of the filmmaker and by extension the will of the camera these

shots where the camera moves completely free creates a radical sense as well in the eyes of the viewer of what cinema is because previously cinema was always

this parallax view this perspective that was a representation of a possible observer the idea that you might be a voyeur standing in the room whilst the two protagonists for witnessing the

murder or being present at the court case but now a different type of witnessing is taking place where it is more about the exhilaration in the thrill of flying through the space than

necessarily observing it you are no longer a static point or a moving point that's hypothetically a single standing human being but as I'll show through these clips actually more and more the camera is indifferent to the idea that

it might be a forcibly human perspective actually the camera begins to take form a new form which is a character in and of itself this perspective is one which

viewers time and again when they watch cinema when they go to watch Superman or Batman whether Superman survives or dies in the end actually when they go in the next week

and watch Wonder Woman they're returning to the same myth the same super story that's being told all across cinema which is the story of an indestructible camera a story of a camera that can

transcend time and space a character that people are getting to know very well because when they navigate the internet now and they navigate virtual space and they dream of their future in AR or they dream of the way in which

they may interact with the book of the future that is their perspective they are this camera that has been freed from the conventions of what came before a modernity and modernism which was the

system of the grid which is the system of horizontal and parallel lines is irrelevant it's a way that these people now view their universe and so these

unfamiliar scenes where once architecture framed the vignette where once the grid was how we can structured the book now characters are being thrown through them and so we move

from a generation that may be bored with the idea of a book with pages to a generation that might be bored with the idea of a book that isn't already on fire or being blown into smithereens or

be able to be cast aside into shards and shrapnel so we moved from the fourth principle which is 360 movement ending

the horizontal ending the primacy of the horizon as the orienting ground plane on which we construct the world and therefore all modernist grid based

systems that will go with it anyone who's designing AR will tell you the potential overlay of that stuff on the physical world it's no longer parallel and horizontal to the frame to pitch it into virtual space you're now

moving into curved planes you're moving into perspective - they're constantly shifting it's not like a book layout where the layout is grid based anymore we move graphic design and this is one of the defining features that

ultra-reality will leave for the future our medium is a movement from from a system of grids to a system of overlays and these films are showing it better

than the design of our age the final the final point which I want to make about this about alt reality as a medium the fifth element is okay so you get rid of the world you get rid of the ground

plane you get rid of architecture where are we we're not in some void actually we're in a world that is populated by

something I'd like to call this mode of viewing camera intifada which is a pun on camera obscura the first imaging technology which is a world composed

entirely without gravity without planes of shrapnel of atoms of shards it's the ruins of the old world flying all around you at all times

rushing past the viewers eyes through the frame into the frame around to be determined and played with like debris like detritus no longer interesting in their original form but only interesting

to the extent to which they can actually be pushed played penetrated or surrounding anyone who's done a VR demo will tell you this is literally the first and only thing VR designers want

to do when they make a VR game they don't know that they're doing it but they're following from the principles that cinema is already established this is alt reality but as graphic designers we should pay serious attention to this because it has

big implications for how we view the construction of legacy media like print like posters like books we should not move under the assumption that these things these formats will make sense to the view of the future who

spends more time on the internet and in the cinema in ultra reality than in the modernity from which our profession emerged and so this leads me to my very final point and afterwards then happy to

take your questions and thank you for bearing with me for such a long time you guys have really been very great and patient which is what does it mean to live in a universe of alter reality

if we move from modernity to this new paradigm how do we consider our audience as designers if my plea to you as designers is to consider the audience and not the client it is the following

and I'm not saying this is a good thing or necessarily a bad thing it is the crisis of graphic design which we will have to address and that is the notion

that when this is your world you move from a reality where under modernity the viewer is an observer of reality to the

new paradigm where you are the protagonist of reality you are the camera that can move in any direction you are the one who speeds up or slows down time you select the content you want to see you scatter the architecture

of the world if it's no longer relevant to you that's how we'll use the Internet but that's also how increasingly we're viewing on normative modes of reality as well and so as designers we need to work together to find solutions to how we

build off studios that can operate in this paradigm but also towards one that still privileges an audience who view themselves as protagonists with wonders worth seeing and dreams worth aspiring

to and not give up to the notion that this is now a world in which graphic design has been written out of the picture anyway thank you so much for your time and for bearing with me thank you thank you you