Design Literacy summary

Design Literacy: Understanding Graphic Design. By Steven Heller.

Steven Heller, (born 1950), American art director, journalist, critic, author, and editor who specializes on topics related to graphic design. This article appeared in his book Design Literacy: Understanding Graphic Design and the intended audience is graphic design students, practitioners and subversive activist groups.

Heller deals with themes like racism, race riots and how television can misconstrue racism to a voyeuristic public.

He highlights the work of New York graphic designer, James Victore and his contribution towards contemporary visual iconography. The most memorable being what he called the Dead Indian and Racism both posters using irony to reflect social misunderstanding of racism and American history in his opinion.

Heller outlines various antiestablishment campaigns that Victore has been associated with through his career and links them to a postmodern theoretical dialect.

The article then moves on to,The Education of a Graphic Designer. by Steven Heller; Searching for a Black Aesthetic in American Graphic Design by Sylvia Harris.

This part of the article is designed to inform the reader of an African American Aesthetic and Sylvia Harris gives an account of her experience as an African American student within the design community. Her style is subjective and she seeks to link performance with self-esteem, indicating that she believes self confidence may be the single most important influence in the lives of African Americans.

To underpin this theory Harris uses as an example the spectacular success of black musicians and the relationship between confidence,

leadership and success. Harris asks whether there maybe a potential design influence that can fuel black designers in a similar way.

She also warns against (through discussion with educators) focusing too much on blackness and so inviting discrimination.

Harris then quotes excerpts from her ongoing search for black influences in American design. Heller uses exstracts from A History of Graphic design by Philip Meggs to link The New Negro movement with Cubisism and Futurist poetry in the 1920’s. The expression of jazz and its motifs being influencial. Ironically he notes the influence of African art on Cubism. In conclusion Heller notes the continuing of black visual traditions through for instance new black media and YSB which continue to give graphic form to contemporary black culture.

By Anthony Wheeldon

Word count: 379