Unbound

INTENT

Graphic design is visual communication. From the printing press and the camera to desktop publishing and the internet, each new creative tool has promised to “revolutionize“ the world and the designer’s practice. While it’s true that these “revolutions” have been destabilizing both for the creative industries and for individual practitioners of the craft, each new tool stands at the service of the designer’s fundamental task—communicating visually.

As seismic as the arrival of artificial intelligence has been, AI is only the most recent in a long history of creative tools offered to graphic designers. For all the utopian and dystopian projections about artificial intelligence, graphic design and other creative practices will incorporate these new technologies and settle into a stable equilibrium.

Creative vertigo

At the same time, many people using generative AI tools feel a sense of creative vertigo. The pace of generation and ease of iteration using AI can feel like slipping from the driver’s seat to the passenger seat in the creative process. As compelling as the end product may be, there is still a sense of loss—a feeling that that some important part of the self is being bypassed. Many creative professionals are uneasy about losing creative agency to our increasingly powerful tools, but there’s no inherent value in choosing an arbitrary moment in history and refusing to use any technology developed after that date. This tension between a tool’s outcome and the user’s intention is felt in our interactions with artificial intelligence now, but the tension has always been present with our creative tools.

Let the meaning lead the making

A designer’s task is to make sure our intentions direct our tools and not the other way around. Tools are intended to amplify and extend our capabilities, but as they become more complex and capable, it becomes easier to surrender our agency to them. The fundamental pressure on our intentions doesn’t come from artificial intelligence or from technology—it comes from our tendency to use our tools passively, letting them shape the direction of our work. We have to explore ways to use the powerful tools that facilitate our lives without letting them do the living for us.

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Letterpress printing has been tied to the development of graphic design for hundreds of years. Why then does the practice and pedagogy of letterpress by contemporary graphic designers lag behind the rest of the design field? As graphic designers wrestle with large social, political, and cultural issues much of the letterpress work they produce remains distanced from these concerns. And as graphic designers explore and expand new visual vocabularies design practitioners of letterpress often seem content to recycle old visual forms.

In this paper I examine aspects of the history and theory of letterpress printing to unpack the root causes underlying the current situation. In a series of three essays, I present thoughts on ways in which printers and scholars can begin to problematize the teaching and practice of letterpress with the hope of constructing a more complex and contemporary approach to the field. It is my belief that a contemporary letterpress practice rooted in critical theory can in turn contribute to a fuller graphic design practice more broadly.

The Perfect

Those who seek to learn a craft such as graphic design or art may be familiar with the idea of perfectionism. It’s not uncommon for people in these fields to strive for the perfect in their work.

On one hand, this can breed diligence, and help a person master the fundamentals. On the other hand, reaching for flawlessness in one’s work can feed uncertainty and discourage the useful experimentation that comes from experiencing failure.

The Flawed

Embracing imperfection in art, design can be enriching for a person’s growth as a maker and as an individual. Seeking out imperfections in the world around us and using them in our own creation can make our practices richer.

I seek to explore the imperfect through story and image, partially through collage and through sketches. The stories I tell are allegorical and use metaphor throughout. In this way, the genre is like that of magical realism (a type of story that could take place in our world but has at least one bizarre element to separate it).

This thesis is meant to embrace the uneven and to be skeptical of the pristine.

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