Rick Poynor, My Design Writing Hero

Since my very beginnings as a design student I have been a huge admirer of Rick Poynor. He began as a general visual arts journalist, working on Blueprint magazine in London. After founding Eye magazine, which he edited from 1990 to 1997, he focused increasingly on visual communication. He co-founded Design Observer (see the RSS feed on this blog), a weblog for design writing and discussion, with William Drenttel, Jessica Helfand and Michael Bierut. His writings document and analyse general movements in graphic design and typography and explore the cultural implications of visual communication, including advertising, photography, typography, branding and graphic design. Over the years I have found myself constantly in agreement or intrigued by his viewpoint. In short the man is a hero of mine, as a home printed T-shirt from college days testifies... "Rick Knows."

Below is just a comment from him on the EYE magazine blog.

In it he is commenting in response to the article entitled -
"Art bollocks is everywhere you look. Woolly ‘artspeak’ is nothing new, but who will stem the flow?"


RICK POYNOR SAYS:
Agree with this so far as it goes, but it’s an old story.

Matthew Collings, for instance, has built a writing career out of declining to write art bollocks. He’s so clear, so straightforward, so demotic, so assertively moral in his judgements that it’s almost shocking. He’s also committed to aesthetic values. And that’s one of contemporary art’s big problems. Once you demote beauty, deny the importance of the retinal, elevate the ‘idea’ to a position of untouchable pre-eminence and abandon the notion that criticism’s task is the evaluation of quality, how exactly are you going to demonstrate the importance of art? Especially now that art has been so thoroughly assimilated, institutionalised and domesticated, as a degree-awarding academic subject like any other.

But how does all this relate to design writing, which on the whole is much clearer, much more inclined to use plain English and is as a consequence – for the reasons David Thompson explains – much more exposed? By comparison with art writing, design writing can seem obvious, under-theorised and naive, especially to anyone reading from an art point of view who’s come to expect those superficially impressive trails of circumlocution as a sign of weighty content. (In truth, though, art writing is often highly sophisticated and at the same time perfectly intelligible to an educated reader – just pull down a copy of October.)

So is there a comparable form of design bollocks, David, and, if so, who’s doing it, where can we find it, and how is it a problem? Surely the main issue in design writing remains the comparative lack of the stuff, rather than a surfeit of bollocks. It will be interesting to see how the new design writing courses at SVA and LCC handle this issue. Who are their critical models and what kinds of writing do these courses seek to encourage?

Rick, I concur.