Designers are cultural catalysts

By Max Bruinsma

Ji Lee

The visual language of graphic design has become part of our culture — it is engraved into our lives. Whenever we open a book or magazine, whenever we look at a television or computer screen, whenever our eyes slide along a zillion advertisements in our streets, we see and read not just words and images, but the language of design.

As a profession, graphic design is slightly over a century old, but in this century it has developed a visual language of its own, drawing on traditional visual arts, typography, illustration, photography and cinema. This magazine, like the exhibition it accompanies, looks at the ways design’s visual languages have ingrained themselves in our communication culture. It presents a collection of subjective views on visual culture by the authors and invited designers, triggered by the themes we have identified as driving forces behind communication in the public realm.
All communication — and thus all communication design — is based on embedded scripts that on the surface want to seduce you into believing the messages communicated. On a deeper level, they want to inform you, and ultimately to engage you into taking part in the message and in the contexts and causes it serves.
Our basic premise is that designers act as catalysts in this culture which ‘writes’ in images. By designing both the ‘words’ and what one could call by now a ‘literature of visual language’, communication designers play a pivotal role in today’s mediated cultures: they trigger viewers to become readers of visual messages.