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Terry, On Sep 23, 2014, at 12:10 PM, Terence Love <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > Gunnar, you made a point 2 days ago about incommensurability that I'm still addressing. My apologies for the delay. Your point about the design/production differentiation in graphic design is somewhat similar to the conceptual design/ detail design difference in say mechanical engineering (and the term is drafts person!) . A question, from your comment in your last post, does this mean that typographers and typography should be excluded from graphic design as they are a production process? Along with perhaps, image and photography manipulation, layout, page setting. . . . where all these things were previously production skills rather than design skills?? An aside: I don't think draftsperson is a gender neutral term. Most xperson titles emphasize the recent ubiquity of xman s the title. In trying to escape the male assumption, they emphasize it. I probably shouldn't have used the term "typographer." I should have just used "typesetter" to avoid confusion. As a job description, "typographer" used to mean the same as "typesetter" or "highly skilled typesetter." For the most part, pre 1990s graphic designers didn't do much in the way of creation of type in any sense of the phrase. We ordered type to our specifications. I've heard "typographer" used on occasion to describe graphic designers who use type well and I've heard it often to describe people who create new typefaces (people I would call a typeface designer or a type designer.) Anyway, typesetters, photographers, production artists, printers, etc. were part of the design team. Maybe someone spent time saying what was design and what wasn't but most of us were just busy getting our work done. Those of us who called ourselves designers managed to flatter ourselves by thinking we were in charge and, as a result, we could get paid more. (Except good typesetters and photographers probably made more money than we did.) Although a few design firms had in-house typesetters, most of us didn't so I don't remember anyone worrying about whether typesetters were part of design or part of production. They were vendors. > Remember when graphic software enabled use of ellipses and suddenly every new corporate logo was elliptical for a decade. Ellipse guides for mechanical pens predated Illustrator and Freehand so there were plenty of those. Aesthetic technodeterminism is a real "yes, but" situation. You can make a case that things get ubiquitous when they get easy but we often associate aesthetic choices with technology that comes later. It's easy to look at April Greiman's CalArts poster (there's a bad reproduction at http://www.polano.eu/poisonorg/web/lezioni/25/255.htm) and think "Photoshop." When you realize that it was a decade before Photoshop, you might think Quantel Paintbox or Harry but even those were later. April and Jayme Odgers used essentially 19C collage/rephotography techniques for their very influential work. April almost fetishized ellipses before using computers very much. Her Design Quarterly issue (a bit of it is at http://www.aiga.org/uploadedImages/AIGA/Content/Inspiration/aiga_medalist/MD_GreimanA_DesQuartly_640.jpg) was influenced by the crude technology of the early Macintosh but it would be hard to make a case that her giant pixels or Zuzana Licko's pixel typefaces represented much of a real low-res movement. For the most part, computers caught on when they allowed us to do the same stuff we were doing before. Their influence was great but in more subtle and complicated ways than most descriptions indicate. > Remember when Photoshop supported the possibility to have text as masks and images showing through the text and that became the creative design output of the era. The it was having a stream of images as a brush stroke. . . . and suddenly that was the new creativity. Were these design outputs purely human agency or was the software involved in what was chosen to be created, i.e. the agency? Interesting questions but I think you're weighting things too much toward the technical. Images in text predate the 1940s tourist postcards many of us associate with them. Most features of design software are based on pre-software techniques. Making the results easier and cheaper then has a big effect on who adopts them and what they adapt with them. Trying to assign romantic originality to people or machines will always lead you to "but wasn't that copied from. . .?" > At the moment, GarageBand will take out of time and out of tune input and create very acceptable music. Is it just the individual using Garageband that is designing the music or is GarageBand involved? Garageband is involved but the people who created formulaic music that allowed the programmers of Garageband to create their contribution were also involved, as were a list of people making music going back millennia. It is interesting that you choose to emphasize the machine contributions to human creation more than the human precedents to those machines. Gunnar Gunnar Swanson East Carolina University graphic design program http://www.ecu.edu/cs-cfac/soad/graphic/index.cfm [log in to unmask] Gunnar Swanson Design Office 1901 East 6th Street Greenville NC 27858 USA http://www.gunnarswanson.com [log in to unmask] +1 252 258-7006 ----------------------------------------------------------------- PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]> Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design -----------------------------------------------------------------