By Tibor Kalman for Restaurant Florent
When I was a kid, we had the internet. We had TV and cell phones were relatively accessible. In the 90s when my age was in the single digits, we had the beginnings of what would become our every day norm. Consequently, my perception of “design” was affected by digital upbringing. My senior year before going to design school was when I really came to the realization that this thing called “graphic design” was what I wanted to do (it just so happens that my senior year was in 2008). My idea of design was fueled by the internet and all of its (potentially misleading) glory. What I knew to be design was flashy websites and shiny buttons. What I thought was design was dropping a reflection under an already glossy logo first popularized by the sterile behemoth known as Apple. But my entire notion of graphic design and design in general was radically changed in my first year of college. Because it was then that I was introduced to the legendary likes of Tibor Kalman and Paul Rand as well as living legends like Milton Glaser and Paula Scher. Now I’m not saying that super shiny glossy logos are not true graphic design but do they have the same lasting power as Rand’s logo? What is the measure of good design anyway? I don’t really know where I am going with this post. Sometimes I think I was born in the wrong decade and where I truly belong is in a world where moving type meant sliding cold metal letters instead of pushing imaginary pixels. But as I try to cater my education and experiences towards graphic design in a traditional sense, it seems many students in my area of study are drawn towards the shiny and new. Am I old fashioned? Can honest graphic design ever go out of fashion? Am I so naive as to ignore popular design trends in favor of “the principles”? Or maybe I am just being overdramatic and I should just shut up and finish school.
0 Responses to “Back in my day ...”