Restart - New Systems in Graphic Design

176pp
The systems graphic designers use are of interest to practitioners across the creative industries and beyond. The book is grouped into three categories:

‘Code’ examines the innovative ways designers, tired of using computer applications analogous to conventional media, are becoming creative programmers, employing computer processing to discover new worlds of extreme beauty.

‘Generic’ confronts the ordinary, offering off-beat systems of signs, symbols and meanings that are still strangely familiar.

‘Disjunction’ considers work appropriating anything to advance its own aims, whether political, social, aesthetic or personal.

These approaches respond in different ways to problems facing graphic designers. None sets out a single systematic solution for design, but they suggest unexpected, original ways to communicate images and words. Through the adoption of systems, graphic designers have broken new conceptual ground.

The systems of graphic design in this book represent significant new moves in visual communication. Because the featured work foregrounds idea above form, one might describe this approach as ‘conceptual’, but, designers cannot completely evade the issue of form. Graphic ideas are visual ideas – ideas about word and image. Form is vital to their
execution. The illustrations in this book are an exploration of the effective use of
graphic form.

Most of the projects shown here are initiated by the studios themselves and those that are not are almost uniformly created for the marginal end of the graphic market, such as cultural institutions. This is graphic research and development; graphic ideas that over time will cause some kind of shift in general graphic sensibility.

The research has since been presented to a different audience and context altogether – The ‘Design Now – Graphics’ exhibition at The Design Museum in London (2002) used a selection of material from Restart as well as new material and enabled a closer examination of the selected work.