Fuck Content
Our deep-seated anxiety has motivated a movement in design that values origination of content over manipulation of content.
Design is linguistic-- a vibrant, evocative language. Designers and authors vs. designers AS authors. The misconception is that without deep content, design is reduced to pure style, a bag of dubious tricks. In graphic design circles, form follows function is reconfigured as form follows content. If content is the source of form, always preceding it and imbuing it with meaning, form without content is some kind of empty shell.
Paul Rand wrote " There is no such thing as bad content, only bad form." He meant that the designer's purview is to shape, not to write.
Designers are also storytellers. The elements we must master are not the content narratives but the devices of the telling: typography, line, form, color, contrast, scale, weight. We speak through our assignment, literally between the lines.
This deep connection to making also positions design in a modulating role between the user and the world. By manipulating form, design reshapes that essential relationship. Form is replaced by exchange. The things we make negotiate a relationship over which we have a profound control.
Our content is perpetually, design itself.
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