Dissertation - Let's get this straight...

I have spent the summer working my way through a pile of books in preparation for writing the dreaded dissertation. The full first draft is to be submitted on November 30th and thus far I have written nothing. This concerns me greatly. I don't want this to start getting in the way of my studio work, after all this is the final year and I want to make some work I am proud of, so I really need to make a start. The problem is I am not entirely sure what I am writing about any more.

The title of my essay is Have Graphic Designers Lost Their Sense of Humour? At least that hasn't changed. So, on the advice of my tutors, I am hereby going to vomit all I know on the subject onto this page, so I can start to figure out where to take it. Here we go...

There are many great examples of humour and wit in graphic design. Most of them can be found in the book A Smile in the Mind. The legends of witty design include Paul Rand, Saul Bass, Milton Glaser, Alan Fletcher and Bob Gill. I am a big fan of the work of Rand and Bass, while I am actually struggling to find much in Glaser's work that can truly be regarded as witty. Alan Fletcher had an irreverent approach to his work and some of his designs are very clever indeed, while not especially beautiful (in general - there are exceptions). Bob Gill seems to focus primarily on the idea, or solution to a design problem, yet fails to deliver in terms of aesthetics. He is the extreme case but I think all of these great designers can be classed as "ideas focused".

So why were all these designers consistently churning out witty or humorous work? I have plenty of useful quotes from Freud's The Joke and it's Relation to the Unconscious that explain how humour can be used to 'sugar-coat' a message, opening up the audience and making them more receptive. Let's not forget that graphic design used to be primarily about selling products and, to a lesser extent, ideas, so a receptive audience is precisely what the client would be after. There are also numerous studies that show how an audience likes to be given only part of the message, as they take pleasure from filling in the gaps themselves. This has been described as the designer 'throwing a ball for the viewer to catch'.

We have all seen adverts, either static or on TV, that have initially confused us. The bad ones leave you in that state, totally unfulfilled, whereby a well-designed advert will eventually be understood by the majority. At that moment, when you get the joke or second-meaning, your reaction is usually positive - you will most likely smile, acknowledge the wit of the designer (and the company making the product that is being plugged) and then tell your friends about it. Viral marketing before the term became commonplace. So there's no doubt that wit and humour can be used to great effect (I must also attempt to clarify once-and-for-all what I mean by the terms 'wit' and 'humour' in respect to graphic design).

In the 80s and 90s, good examples of real wit become harder to find. I personally think this is because graphic designers started to take themselves too seriously. Can I prove this or is it just my opinion (based on what?)? Well, I suppose the big names in witty design were old men (or dead) and so their brand of design, of which humour was a large part, was regarded as old fashioned and thus undesirable. Also, the 'First Things First' manifesto signalled a change in attitudes, whereby designers wanted to be more than just salesmen for products they either despised or couldn't care less about. I personally think that branding is a perfectly acceptable career path - I would love to redesign the McDonald's logo; it's the parents shoving this crap down their kids' throats that are the problem. And then of course there was the Apple Mac.

Obviously, this was a big, big problem for many designers as the tools of the trade were now available to all and sundry, regardless of their talent, education or technical training. This is of course a good thing in general and there are countless fantastic designers with no formal training - Behance and Deviant Art are testament to this. And let's not forget that these new tools were also of substantial benefit to the professionals. But obviously this was a tough time for designers as design had been democratised and they now had to justify charging proper money for their expertise. Perhaps this is why a lot of the work coming out in the 80s was so obviously informed by a solid grounding in art history. Think David Carson and Neville Brody.

Ooh, that nutter is about to jump out of a balloon at 120,000 feet! I need to see this live just in case his brain melts when he breaks the speed of sound...

Where was I? Okay so I will need to find a few really good examples of 80s and 90s design that really show how humour and wit were less prevalent at this time. These will need to be properly analysed so I can prove how designers were referencing other, more 'artsy' things in their work. Perhaps some of the postmodern 80s stuff would be good for this purpose, at least as a starting point. I think this section may well be a major part of my dissertation, as I think that it was during this period that design underwent the most significant changes. Adrian Shaugnessy's How to be a Graphic Designer, Without Losing Your Soul has a good section on this time. It also covers the problem of 'crowdsourcing'.

Finally I would like to take stock of the current trends in design, as I believe wit and humour are on the rise again. I will cite the work of James Victore and Stefan Sagmeister, among others (to be decided), while also exploring how the term 'graphic designer' is perhaps becoming redundant - it covers too many disciplines, such as illustration, typography, type design, photography, animation and web design.

I think that pretty much sums up my thinking thus far on the topic. I hope this little exercise has gone some way towards getting it straight in my head so I can actually get on and start writing! And that bloke still hasn't jumped out! Bet he is shitting himself...