Graphic Design is Very Wimpy

As my tenure as a graphic designer draws to an end, it's time to reflect on why I have decided on a career change. This is an old piece I wrote back in 2006, when I had just started my job. I wonder how, after writing this, I managed to stay in the field for three and a half years.

J Mascis, in my opinion one of the greatest guitarists of the ‘90s, once said, “the guitar is a very wimpy instrument.” Well, I dare not even claim to be the greatest graphic designer of any timeframe to any standards, but I still feel the same way about my profession: “Graphic design is very wimpy.”

My friend once asked me what I wanted to do with graphic design. I replied, “I want to move to Guatemala, use my graphic design skills to create powerful, mesmerizing, brain-washing propaganda, gain popularity with the people and finally instigate a revolt and take over the country. I’ll become a King and live in luxury until I die, keeping my seat of power using only the wonderful combination of images and text.” She thought I was insane, but really, that’s the scale and grandeur that graphic design should amount to something.

We aspire to be artists, go to art school, chill at gallery openings, but the great divide comes at graduation – we end up as what we dreaded the most, office drones glued to the computer, working long ass hours, dealing mostly with businesspeople than the likes of our former friends from school. We gradually forget that we were once, long ago and far away, artists in our own right. How many graphic designers can remember the last time they expressed themselves through artistic means? How many graphic designers can remember the last time they even completed a drawing? Don’t even mention “designing for pleasure.” Who the fuck would even want to even glance at a computer after a long grueling workday? We have become essentially, if not externally, geeks: computer nerds, but with much lower paying salaries and much less respect. At least not that many people are able to write a killer program; everyone thinks they can do graphic design – and though most amateurs produce horrendously grotesque layouts, there are still buyers with a low aesthetic standard that will still happily lick up all the visual filth from the floor for a bargain price.

Graphic design is a business. It is by no means an “art.” Graphic designers would be so much better off if aspiring designers had to go to business school instead of art school. Instead of taking painting, drawing, sculpture classes, which they will never use again, they should be required to take much more practical classes such as “managing your business”, “the art of networking,” or “communication strategies.” When we were in school, busy honing our attention to every whim and fancy of our self-obsessed aesthetic, our professors, while letting us run amok in our fantasy world of self-gratifying design, did warn us: this is the only “fun design” you will ever do. But alas, the disparity is too great that they should’ve at least given us a twig to fend off wild animals when we entered the corporate jungle.

Not only are business skills much more useful than drawing skills, but by going to business school, graphic designers won’t be brought up with the wrong notion that they are artists. By all means, they are not. This also opens the window for many amateurs to receive proper training and stop producing rubbish. I’ve met a lot of so-called “designers” who I could tell simply lacked better training, tell me “I wish I’d gone to design school, but I can’t draw.” What kind of bullshit is that? I’ve never drawn at work. I probably never will.

I guess I have to suck it up and realize, in my whole art-loving life, after all the fights I had with my parents go to “art school,” I am now as far away from art as I could have ever imagined. I have become a starving cubicle dwelling office slave, and that’s the wimpiest thing I could ever imagine myself doing.

So, when they asked J Mascis: “So why do you do it?” he replied, “I dunno. Just because I can.” I have to agree with my ol’ buddy J. Just because we can and you can’t, the burden of ridding the world of bad kerning falls squarely on our shoulders. At the end of Spiderman, Peter Parker lamented, “with great power lies great responsibility.”

Well, it’s already 8:00 a.m., and once again, I’m off to the office to save the world.