Dear Terry, Chris, Gunnar, Katherine,

Thanks for the discussion about graphic design practice and graphic
design education.

Graphic design - as a practice - encompasses an enormous variety of
activities. (In a study in Breda, a city of 140.000 people in the
Netherlands, I found around 700 professional graphic designers. They
work either for themselves , within a graphic design agency, for an
advertising agency or within companies who's first aim is not related
to visual communication). I don't know if this figure of '1 in 200
citizens is a graphic designer' is applicable to other cities, but it
is an indication.

The activities of all these graphic designers vary substantially:
I've listed around 30 activities ranging from 'typography' to 'visual
management'. After interviewing around 45 designers, it seems that
they work on three levels. Chris mentioned two, but in practice there
seem to be three:

1. Creating visual elements and combining them. On this level, text
and images are created, selected, modified and integrated.
2. Achieving visual aims. Graphic designers select visual elements to
achieve a specific communication goal: to support people to
understand, to identify organizations, to influence emotions and
behaviour. On this level, a visual strategy is considered that
encompasses all visual opportunities within a specific
project/timeframe.
3. Negotiations and interpretations. On this third level, graphic
designers negotiate with commissioners and in a dialogue find a
concensus which suggested visual strategies could achieve the aims of
the commissioner. A second dialogue is the interpretation of the
visual artifacts by people. This is the moment of truth where all
decisions (visual elements & their combinations, the visual strategy,
and the commissioners aims) are put to the test.

The levels do not indicate 'a hierarchy' (one is better than the
other), but groups of activities. They are recognizable in every
graphic design project. (Is this true?): sometimes they are all
executed by a single person. In other projects, many different
graphic designers are involved. Design thinking is required on all
three levels ...

In practice, graphic designers select an area within these three
levels that suits their personality, skills and interests. In my
sample of 700 graphic designers, there are graphic designers who
mainly focus on a particular style of illustration in combination
with text. Other graphic designers are very good in developing visual
strategies for cultural institutes and some graphic designers spend a
substantial amount of time on talking to commissioners. [Personal
note: very few graphic designers spend time to talk to people who
look at visual artifacts. Most graphic designers talk about
'audiences' or 'people' without any more detail.]

So, in practice there is a whole range of computer-operators,
finished artists, visual consultants, photography-typographers,
strategists, project managers who all call themselves 'graphic
designer'. Graphic designers are selected by commissioners for a
specific combination of activities. All graphic designers/agencies
have a particular combination of activities: none covers the whole
field. They are all commercially viable at the moment. [Another
personal note: graphic design as a profession is not very good in
representing this variation. It's all "graphic design", without
further differentiation.]

If this description of professional practice is compared to current
graphic design education, a few things become clearer.
- Three or four years is very short to teach the required variety of
activities on these three levels.
- Yes, business theory needs to be taught, and its relations to
visual strategies and visual elements clarified.
- There is also a clear need to involve
people/readers/observers/beholders in graphic design education.
(This list can be easily expanded to a few hundred items.)

I have the impression that graphic design education is aware of the
situation but misses a clear starting point on which decisions can be
based:
- Yes, we know that professional practice encompasses more activities
than we could possibly teach in four years. How do we select the most
appropriate ones? - Yes, we know that graphic designers individually
combine interests, skills and personality. How do you educate
increasingly large groups of students to develop their individual
interests?

Apart from Terry's suggestion to include 'business theory and
practice', I would also like to include:
- User testing and observation. (ethnography, usability studies,
contextual inquiries, ...)
- Image analysis (interpretation of illustrations and photographs,
relation to contexts of use, relation to production)
- Applied linguistics and philosophy. Especially argumantation theory
(dialectics, rhetoric, logic) seems to be applicable to visual
arguments (visual dialectics, visual rhetoric, visual logic).

(Let's leave specialism like data visualizers, infographic makers,
graphic design journalists, visual instructional designers, graphic
design curators, graphic design historians, graphic design
researchers and visual wayfinders to develop their own interest
without specialist graphic design education ...).

Kind regards,
Karel.
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>Hello,
>
>I'd be interested to know how many and which graphic design courses contain
>a significant element of business theory and practice that would be
>sufficient for graphic designers to have sufficient business and commercial
>knowledge to be able to design brands and strategize business development.
>
>Most business schools have difficulty in a 3 year degree in providing
>sufficient knowledge for business students to competently undertake
>business strategy planning and designing the underlying organisaitonal
>aspects necessary for a brand identity to be coherent.
>
>It would be useful information if graphic design schools are able to teach
>this knowledge in less time.
>
>Terry