Katherine McCoy, 'Education in an Adolescent Profession', The Education of a Designer, Heller, Steven, ed., Allworth Press, New York, 1998, pp. 3-12.

A discussion of graphic design education necessarily expands include professional practice and theoretical research. These three components-- education, practice and theory-- are interactive and describe the scope of any profession.

But is graphic design a profession? The field did not exist at the beginning of this century, and still there is little agreement on the proper nomenclature. Are we graphic designers, graphic artists, commercial artists, visual communicators, communication designers or simply layout men and paste-up artists? These are just some of the English language possibilities, and every language shares a similar lack of agreement on terminology. Graphic designers themselves are not the only ones having difficulty defining their role. Graphic design's professional status is by no means universally accepted. For instance, the U.S. Immigration Service and Department of Labor remain uncertain if graphic design is a profession, although they clearly recognize the professional status of other design fields, including architecture and industrial design.

ADVERTISING AND THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
Graphic design was a spontaneous response to the communication needs of the Industrial Revolution in capitalist market-based economies, invented to sell the fruits of mass production in growing consumer societies. This has led to the unfortunate assumption that visual communications is a subset of advertising. Many schools in the U.S. persist in defining the whole field of activity as advertising design or commercial art. Yet all societies have far broader communication needs than strictly commercial ones. Marxist and socialist political and economic systems have not laboured under such a definition, as they have not had the same needs for market-based commercial messages. It seems that the more socialized a country, the more graphic design is associated with cultural and political roles on the side of either propaganda or resistance. In the past three decades many free market countries have gradually recognized that there are graphic needs beyond advertising, leading to a split between advertising art direction and "pure" graphic design.

EDUCATION THROUGH IMITATION
As the fledgling field of graphic communications developed, knowledge, mainly of graphic arts techniques, was assimilated on the job, through apprenticeships or trial and error. The new graphic artists used intuition and common sense to solve their communication problems for the first half of this century. Although art schools existed in this time period, the emphasis was fine art with little interest in applied design. It was professional practice, not education, that developed spontaneously as the first phase of graphic design's professional development.

The early luminaries of graphic design that today’s design history books venerate were nearly all self-taught visionaries who relied on their exceptional creative abilities to produce their design solutions-- landmarks of originality, power and inventiveness. In fact, this early reliance on the individual's brilliance remains a significant value among many designers today. Through the years, any education policy discussion at a graphic design professional organization board meeting usually includes forceful comments favouring the continuing tradition of the self-trained graphic designer as the best source of innovation and excellence. The concern seems to be that the establishment of educational standards would result in a bland homogeneity of practice-- that, in raising the bottom levels of education, we might lose the peaks of brilliance.

This distrust of structured education seems anachronistic to many of us who have seen the substantial growth of design education since World War II, and particularly in the last 25 years. Although until recently education has lagged behind the development of professional practice, it has produced some excellent models for basic standards and methods for undergraduate education, and is now well into exploring the possibilities of post-graduate education. At least, this is true in our more distinguished schools.

Art schools and university art departments have been slow to realize that design is not simply a commercial application of fine-arts ideas and processes. Acceptance of graphic design as a separate and distinct discipline-- with significantly different intentions, history, theory, methods and processes-- has been quite slow. Compounding the problem has been growing eagerness among university art departments to compensate for shrinking fine arts enrollments with graphic design programs, whether prepared or not. Entrenched fine arts faculty are teaching graphic design and many start-up graphic design programs rely on just one inexperienced MFA design graduate. As a result, the number of mediocre university level graphic design programs has grown drastically in recent years, diluting significant progress in the graphic design education community.

APPRENTICESHIPS, ABSTRACTION AND SIMULATED PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE
Graphic design education has had few models to follow. Before the twentieth century and the Industrial Revolution's division of labour that separated conception from production, the European type-founder and printshop apprenticeship were our only precedents. Architecture, the only design field to predate the century, provides us with the French Beaux-Arts model of architectural education. Although the atelier was often formalized into something close to a small scale "school" setting, students emulated the master and reiterated the classical orders. This could be interpreted as an imitation of the 'professional practice' of the time. Students repeatedly practiced on increasingly complex projects until they acquired the skills of the master. In some smaller ateliers, the students acted much like apprentices, contributing to the more mechanical and elementary portions of the master's professional projects.

The Bauhaus, while it used the master/apprentice workshop method, was a revolutionary school model that contributed much to design education. The Bauhaus attempted to organize and codify the revolutionary ideas of the early twentieth-century "isms" and proto-modern experiments into an educational method for the new industrial era. The modernist imperative for abstraction and experimentation was applied to a system of design education fundamentals. The Bauhaus Basic Course was the first in design education to declare that basic design principles underlie all design disciplines; that primary design education should begin with abstract problems to introduce these universal elements before students proceed to tackle programmatic design problems applied to specific scales, needs and media. This emphasis on abstraction and experimentation, and the rejection of accepted traditional formulas, represented a radical new attitude in education.

After World War II, the Bauhaus idea had a major impact on design schools in the U.S. Many adopted the model in its pure form, requiring design students in all disciplines to begin with the system. Today, if one peels away the layers in any design program, the persistent residue of this movement is evident.

Yet the Bauhaus lessons of the 1920s took a surprisingly long time to be established in European and U.S. schools, largely due to the limited resources of the Depression years, German politics of the 1930s, and World War II. Before the war, the U.S. benefited from the arrival of a number of Bauhaus émigrés who introduced these revolutionary ideas to both established universities and new schools. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Herbert Bayer settled in Chicago, with Moholy beginning his New Bauhaus. After World War II, Mies' Armour Institute and Moholy's School of Design were soon integrated into the new Illinois Institute of Technology, where much of Mies' influence remains in the architecture program, but little beyond Moholy's memory remains in Institute of Design. Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer went to Harvard's school of architecture, and Josef Albers to Yale. Their influence today might come only from the momentum they gave to those institutions, enabling them to grow and prosper to the present.

Unfortunately, the Bauhaus idea that design fundamentals should precede applied design has been limited mainly to introductory art and design courses, after which design students rapidly move into their areas of specialization. Once in specialized graphic design courses, most schools immediately focus students on applied projects that simulate or imitate professional practice-- a modern version of the apprentice system-- rather than continuing an orderly sequence of fundamental design concepts and methods.

INTUITION AND INDIVIDUALISM
This lack of formalized method has been almost universal in our art schools and university art departments until recently. The typical approach has placed a premium on creativity, a flash of intuition, the "big idea", and educators have encouraged this, through exposure to "samples and examples", as one of our best U.S. educational thinkers has described it. Graphic design magazines and competition annuals have been most students' only resource. Emulating the work of renowned designers could be seen as a weak continuation of the master/apprentice system without the benefit of personal contact between student and master. The big idea's reliance on personal intuition and creativity makes it difficult to formalize a codified educational method; educational success is limited to the level of brilliance in both teacher and student.

Following the examples of the great pre-war and post-war graphic art pioneers, the big idea approach relies primarily on image associations. Drawing on surrealism, it employs unexpected combinations of images and/or contexts to create ambiguity and surprise-- the "picture is a thousand words." As this approach is essentially semantic, typographic expression becomes a consideration only when used semantically as an image element, with little attention to page structure or systematic message organization. This approach was brilliantly employed by the best of New York advertising in the 1950s and 1960s. But as advertising and "serious" graphic design diverged in the succeeding decades, this approach became associated with advertising's commercialism. (Polish, German and Japanese poster designers are notable, however, their continuing powerful use of this imagery-- and perhaps it is time for a re-appreciation of this rich form of imagery.)

THE NEW STRUCTURED EDUCATIONAL METHOD
Fortunately, the past twenty years have seen a number of American graphic design programs develop carefully structured curricula based on educational methods that go far beyond the superficial simulation of professional practice and the "aha" intuitive approach. This new development is another descendant of the Bauhaus as well, but by way of the "Swiss school" of graphic design. The great Swiss innovators of the 1950s and 1960s can be seen as representing the classic phase of modernism, the heirs to Bauhaus graphic design and other early modern European graphic designers. These Swiss innovators applied the Bauhaus functionalist ethic to a systematic graphic method that shared the Bauhaus values of minimalism, universality, rationality, abstraction and structural expressionism.

This fresh and highly professional graphic design was first transmitted beyond Switzerland to the rest of Europe and the U.S. through Swiss design magazines and a few books, notably Graphis and the "Swiss" bibles by Muller-Brockmann, Gertsner, Hoffmann and Ruder. Then, in the late 1960s, several professional offices began to practice these ideas to solve the needs of large corporate clients in Holland, Great Britain, Canada and the U.S. The method, symbolized by the typeface Helvetica, was enthusiastically adopted by several corporate and institutional design groups, including Container Corporation, Ciba-Geigy, Herman Miller, IBM and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Montreal's Expo '67 was a feast of Helvetica and systematic environmental signage, as well as advanced architecture. Eventually, American corporate culture embraced "Swiss" school graphic design as the ideal corporate style.

Although "Swiss" graphic design was first adopted in U.S. by professionals in their design practices, soon several leading U.S. graphic design schools followed suit, going directly to the source. A number of Swiss teachers and their graduates, from Armin Hoffman's Basel school in particular, put down roots in schools including Philadelphia College of Art, University of Cincinnati and Yale. (The Swiss influence seems to have been particularly strong in U.S. and Canadian schools; Europeans have often expressed a certain mystification at this North American reverence for the Basel method.) Manfred Maier's book, Basic Principles of Design, on the Basel foundation program, was finally available in the U.S. in 1977, spreading this method farther. Under the influence of this highly structured educational method and its emphasis on the prolonged study of abstract design and typographic form, these American schools began to carefully structure their curricula. Based on objectivity and rationalism, this educational system produced a codified method that was easy to communicate to students, giving them a foundation for a visual design process and composition that went far beyond the superficial emulation of their heroes.

This classic modernist graphic aesthetic is distinctly different from the predominantly semantic imagery of the "big idea". It stresses the grammar of design and is rather neutral to content. Regrettably, this language of structural geometry has often resulted in a sameness of form that is more the look of function than truly communicative function-- an emphasis on formal purity rather than content. As this aesthetic spread, however, a number of Europeans, particularly in conjunction with the Ulm school in West Germany, began to apply semiotics to visual communications problems. Related explorations in the science of signs were taking place in structuralist philosophy, linguistics, literature and film theory. Other efforts to develop scientific design processes through communication theory and computer design method began in Great Britain and at the Illinois Institute of Technology during this period. Although the Swiss never embraced these communication theories, some of the sounder graphic design schools outside Switzerland have gradually begun to incorporate theory into their curricula, providing some foundation for their syntactic formal experiments.

DESIGN HISTORY
Soon after the advent of more structured curricula, design history entered the scene, becoming another major new influence in graphic design education in the 1980s. Until the past few years, U.S. students received only fine arts history-- a few were lucky enough to study some architectural history. Although today a number of U.S. schools have design history courses, most of these have only one survey course. And it is likely that the vast majority of graphic design programs still have none. Although the British seemed well into this new field when U.S. educators became aware of it, there were no virtually no texts available until the publication of Phillip Meggs' book in 1983. The first graphic design history conference, held also in 1983 at Rochester Institute of Technology, drew attention to the idea that graphic design had a history-- a revelation, and an unfortunate testimony to the adolescent state of our profession. A field without a formalized body of history and a community of academic historians could hardly be called a profession.

A concern is the impact that graphic history continues to have on graphic designers' formal vocabularies. From the outset of the discovery of our history, both students and professionals have avidly examined historical graphic styles. In fact, graphic design history too often seems like one big garden of juicy styles ripe for appropriation, resulting in a rather empty graphic eclecticism in the field. Too often, current history courses are taught as a superficial surveys of graphic style with no examinations of social, cultural and political contexts. This only furthers many graphic design students' tendency to stylistic imitation. On the other hand, the discovery of historical design forms was an important element in the development of a graphic post modernism in which the field shed its preoccupation with Modernism, an obsession with perpetual "newness," and expanded its vocabulary of forms beyond the strict minimalism of the Swiss school.

True academic graphic design historians in the U.S. today could probably be counted on one hand, perhaps two. For the first twenty years of graphic design history courses, any faculty given responsibility for a history course had to become instant self-educated experts, having never taken such a course themselves. Presently most faculty teaching history have had only one undergraduate course during their own educations. Sadly, it is still nearly impossible to pursue a graduate degree in graphic design history in the U.S.-- some Americans seek advanced degrees from British universities with well-developed design history programs.

GRADUATE STUDY
A major increase in graduate programs and their enrollments is a healthy indication of our growth. In the past 25 years, graduate study has become recognized both by young designers and their potential employers as a valuable asset for professional practice. But the greater significance of graduate schools is their contribution of research and theoretical exploration. Whereas undergraduate schools must necessarily concentrate on a broad spectrum of fundamentals, graduate programs provide specialized focus and faculty resources. These graduate programs are developing much-needed theory which will in turn advance the level of graphic design's professional practice and produce far better educators with advanced degrees.

A number of promising programs are now offering graduate students opportunities to pursue in-depth research and experimentation in design theory, methodology, philosophy, history, criticism, technology and new design languages. Graduate study should never imitate professional practice; rather it should challenge students to look deeply into the discipline and themselves to connect design to its culture, its history, its users, its society and its technology. A problem yet to be corrected is the persistence of many small mediocre graduate programs attached to large (and equally mediocre) undergraduate university programs, in which graduate study is largely a remedial extension of insufficient undergraduate work.

Ironically, the increasing quality of undergraduate education is proving to limit somewhat the number of prospective graduate students. Many students now leave undergraduate school with impressive portfolios that demonstrate well-developed formal sensibilities, particularly in typography and computer skills. The downside of this success is a tendency for these graduates to regard education as a passive process, spoon fed from teacher to student and complete in four years, rather than lifelong self-initiated learning. This attitude can lead to a plateau of competence-- resulting in the predictably slick work we see around the world-- and discourages further growth in challenging graduate study.

ACADEMIC POST-MODERNISM
In the late 1970s, for the first time in the U.S., education began to lead rather than follow professional practice. No sooner had the rules of the "Swiss" method begun to be taught in the U.S. design programs, than they began to be broken by a movement that has been described by many terms, but most often as post-modernism or new wave. As professionals and their clients in the U.S. grew increasingly committed to "Swiss", certain educators-- often early proponents of the "Swiss" themselves-- began to experiment in their personal graphic design practices, questioning the rigidity and minimalism of graphic modernism.

Working from a modernist foundation, they began to dissect, to multiply or to ignore the grid, and to explore new spatial sensibilities, introducing layered complexity, pattern and frankly nonfunctional design elements with references to historical design forms. This post-modern (or late modern or decadent modern) wave began outside the corporate and professional mainstream, causing a great deal of debate in the graphic design press for a time. These educator/designers had the independence and experimental attitude necessary to move into new realms, as well as a new awareness of design history and contact with Switzerland's enfant terrible, Wolfgang Weingart, also primarily an educator. They also benefited from their tolerant cultural and educational clients who were willing to take risks with topics appropriate for experimental solutions. The professional design community began to look to art school publications for new ideas, as educators' work appeared in national design exhibitions with increasing frequency.

These experimentally inclined designer/educators applied their discoveries to their teaching, and their teaching experiments to their personal design work. With liaisons made with a few notable young professionals engaged in similar experiments, their academic post-modernism provided a model for a new generation of design students who are now in the mainstream of professional practice in the U.S., still filling the graphic magazines and annuals with examples of what (for better or worse) has become another accepted graphic style.

NEW THEORIES
New wave graphic design was an experiment in formal issues, often indulgent, frequently analogous to the post-modern movement in architecture, and equally controversial at its inception. Yet, even as post-modernism spread quickly throughout all the arts, including music, literature, fine arts and theatre, a new influence arrived in design education-- post-structuralist critical theories, including deconstruction, began to find its way out of literary criticism and into several of the more theoretical and experimental of U.S. graphic design programs. Coming largely out of French literary theory, the emphasis here is not on the author/ creator (as in new wave) or on the scientific construction of the design solution itself (as in functional modernism) but rather on the reader/ viewer and the possibility of multiple interpretations. Applications of these theories offer the opportunity for other more subjective and personal layers of meaning, in addition to the purely objective and the informational. These strategies encourage new wave graphic designers to work with layers of meaning and content, as well as layers of form. In addition, this new focus on audience interpretation challenges designers to tailor their visual messages to the special characteristics of each project's target audience.

The deconstruction of meaning holds important lessons about our audiences for visual communicators, but poses some problems as well. While these theories applaud the existence of unstable meaning because of audiences' varying cultural contexts and personal experiences, this can be at odds with the client's need for a single, clear interpretation of the message. Designers find themselves cast in an authoritarian role within this critique. And this focus on theoretical and critical language dynamics sometimes seems to diminish visual values in graphic design, leading to a predominantly verbal approach, as copywriting's dominance has done in advertising design.

Most importantly, we now have a community of educators who not only teach but also practice experimentally, and initiate original theory and research in graduate studies. We seem finally to have reached a fair consensus that graphic design is not commercial art but a true professional discipline, encompassing practice, education and theory. But we hear a continuing debate as to whether this profession should lean towards art or towards science. The most recent influences add a third contender to the art/science debate. Literary and critical theorists see design as a language to be read-- that graphic design might be considered a form of visual literature.

Although all three orientations are preoccupied with communication and meaning, each stresses a different component of the sender- transmitter- receiver communication model. Design as "art" is concerned with personal content and expression; design as "science" is concerned with the systematic presentation of objective information; and design as "language" is concerned with the audience's reading or interpretation of text and content. It would seem that the answer to this debate is that all three components are valuable-- that nearly every communication problem requires an understanding of all three. In a mature profession, there is both the room and the need for specialized inquiry, and our schools can offer intensive investigations of the entire spectrum, each choosing its orientation based on its resources and potential. Certainly, graphic design will be the richer for the exploration of all three directions.

THE TECHNOLOGICAL FUTURE
As for the future, we must first look back to the past. The division of labour that separated the specialized graphic designer from the technologies of reproduction may come to an abrupt end, thanks to the computer revolution’s impact on design, reproduction processes, media and distribution channels. Professional boundaries are blurring between client, author, designer, reproduction specialist and audience. Writing, designing and publishing are converging; many designers are publishing, many clients are relying on nonprofessional "desktop publishing," and many audience members are building personal websites.

Just as graphic design has reached some consensus on the parameters of our profession, technology is transforming visual communications. A post-industrial information economy, the successor to the Industrial Revolution's belching smoke stacks, has new enlarged design requirements that go far beyond the print-based commercial communications of manufacturing-based economies. Interactive information and communication technologies require substantial new visual communication strategies and theory. The incredibly rapid technological advance in the past fifteen years of computer-related design is severely challenging educators to respond and to incorporate these new dimensions into graphic design curricula.

A profession specializing in visual communication would seem to be centrally located in this communications revolution. In the explosion of information breaking over us, there are tremendous quantities of data in need of processing. Computer technologies can fulfill the role of modernist "Swiss" objective systems design, as we have seen in desktop publishing. The question posed is how to turn all this data into information, and the information into communication and meaningful messages. How can design assist our audiences to turn knowledge into wisdom? It may be that within an environment of abstracted technologically generated data the designer's personal viewpoint and interpretive forms may be the humanizing element essential to make the vast quantities of abstract data meaningful, useful, comprehensible and compelling to our audiences.

But we need highly trained designers to apply visual communications expertise to the entire range of communications technologies, especially in time-based interactive media, computer interfaces and software that incorporate new dimensions of sound, motion, time and virtual space. We need graphic designers who are literate in computing science; and we need far more designers literate in cognitive theory and perceptual processes who can give comprehensible form to electronic virtual environments. Design for interactive communications may not be a subset of graphic design, but may in fact be a sister discipline. While design for new media originates in many of the same visual communications history, theory and method, it must also reach far beyond. This expanded knowledge base points to the possibility that four year degree programs may not provide a sufficient grounding for this incredibly wide and complex field. Educators are beginning to consider a new model based on a four year pre-design program followed by a two or three year professional degree, similar to law or medicine.

Our schools must contribute the training, theory and research required for this revolutionary dimension of design-- and very quickly too, because a number of other fields are moving into this domain very aggressively, in a number of other university programs including computer science, journalism, communications, technical writing, film and photography. As educators respond, we must retain and enhance graphic design's core value as a cultural activity. Designers can offer a compensating balance to the coolness and the abstractions of technology. Educators puzzle over the best relation of new media design curricula to current visual communications curricula.

Emotion, subjective interpretation and hand gestures are what humans can contribute that computers' expert systems cannot. Highly technological societies will likely put a premium on subjective human values. This suggests the possibility of a renewed appreciation and new applications of our earlier, intuitive, image-oriented, hand-generated design approaches. Design as a cultural activity, including aesthetic and personal expression, may be the essential source of values, emotions and play that we all need in the digital domain.

If you wish to distribute or reprint this essay, it must include the following credit line.
© 1998 High Ground Design. Reprinted from www.2011_highgrounddesign.com