William Drenttel, "The Written Word: The Designer as Mediator." Rethinking Design III: The AIGA 50 Books Catalog. Edited by Michael Beirut. New York: AIGA/Mohawk, 1997. pp.6-8.

With all the discussion about literacy in America, the truth is that much of our country is losing its taste--perhaps even its appetite--for the written word. The issue is not what you read so much as whether you read; and if the illiterate can't read, the literate increasingly don't read. If the illiterate don't know where Burma is, many of the literate don't know that Burma is now called Myanmar. In either case, the new atlases read like Latin to most of us; who, after all, can remember the new countries that comprise the Commonwealth of Independent States (the former U.S.S.R. without Georgia and the Baltics) or the various nations that make up the former Ottoman Empire? In this context, it is no surprise that few understand the historical complexity of the crisis in Bosnia or that public discourse on economic matters is at best shallow.

If our reliance on the written word seems to be at an all-time low, there are many contributing factors: the influence of television; the rise of the sound byte and the corresponding loss of in-depth news coverage; the expansion and complexity of new forms of media; the decline in educational substance and quality; the proliferation of languages in a multicultural society; and our growing propensity to engage in other forms of leisure activity. Of greatest concern is the facile way in which these excuses are invoked to explain away the issue. Sadly, the very acceptance of these rationales has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This state of the written word has a profound effect on graphic designers. The fodder of graphic design is, after all, words and pictures. Yet how many times have you heard, "Well, people just don't read anymore" offered as a rationale for de-emphasizing the role or amount of writing (copy, text, language) in a design project? Some designers seem to acquiesce to the logic of this statement. Other designers view this as one of the principal challenges of being a designer today. Still others seem more cynical, taking this situation as license to render words fundamentally illegible, engaging in dense and self-referential work under the guise of faux avant-garde typography. (Here, I am not making a conservative argument against design research or experimentation: I am questioning textual presentations that are merely stylistic.)

In commerce, these changes are equally extreme, affecting the nature and form of business communication. How do designers willingly produce promotional materials for their clients, yet trash most of what they themselves receive? When was the last time you saw someone actually read CD liner notes or an employee handbook? When a magazine editor or publisher says they want their magazine to be easier to read, more scannable, they should be taken literally: they are praying that readers actually do scan it.

Many people, of course, still do read, especially books, magazines and newspapers. I believe the reason is simple, and that hidden within this reason is a way for graphic designers to approach this issue. These books and publications were meant to be read. They were written, designed and published to be sold, taken home and read. Often, the better they're written, the more they're read. If some of them become decoration on the coffee table, that's okay too. A book has a way of taking on a life of its own: someone else picks it up off the coffee table, and a new reader is found. (It is this glow of an afterlife that makes a good bookstore interesting and a large urban magazine shop exciting.) While we perceive them on one level as objects of commerce, they are also objects of desire.

The crux of this equation is their good intent: that they were meant to be read. Some literary critics have suggested that there is an implicit contract between the writer and reader--that despite the image of the solitary artist, there is always a reader in the mind of the writer. Designers seem to have an image of "viewers" in mind, even as they design the text in printed materials. The catch is that the idea of "viewers" has become a generic category, a composite consumer in a media audience. The same can be said of "the public," perhaps even of "readers." As the novelist Paul Auster recently observed, "I don't think of 'the public.' 'The public' doesn't exist, because books are not a communal experience. They're a private experience. Every book is read by one person. No matter how many people read it totally, it's always one person reading the book. So I don't think of the physical mass of the reading public." Designers, too, would do well to imagine a single reader and design things that are intended to be read. It is here that something like a contract can begin to take shape, and where the designer assumes responsibility for mediating between text and reader.

Instead, graphic designers too often define their task as having something to do with "communication," another term more generic than specific. If one designs something and never really expects it to be read, then what kind of communication is being created? Why does so much award-winning design include language that was never meant to be read? These are trends--and traps--for contemporary graphic design. The overuse (and misuse) of the word "communication" is often used as a camouflage for delivering sales messages without an idea on the page. Look through a design annual and try to read the words: most of the time it seems all surface, all façade. It is as if designers have grown fearful of language, and are, like some audiences, only capable of thinking in visual (pictorial) terms. As one designer told me, "We may argue endlessly over the copy, but when it's done the comment is always just that it 'looks good.'" If editors sometimes play the role of the visually illiterate, then there is something out there like the "dumb designer" syndrome, the desire to hide behind the right side of the brain. This, in some cases, flows directly from the typically inferior positions designers have historically held to counterparts such as magazine editors and advertising copywriters.

In the business world, writing incorporated by designers in corporate communications projects is seldom well written, much less communicative. The usual recipes include idyllic fluff (flowery metaphors that say nothing), bullet points (snippets of services, features and capabilities that would numb any reader), or strategic hard sell (barely rewording client strategies and pretending this is the way people speak).

Yet, designers frequently control the editorial content of their projects. They become, in effect, the editor, determining the "story," hiring the writer, assigning the artwork. It is sometimes instructive to define a project in these terms, to think of the strategy as that which requires a story. For a good editor, the story is the key, with writing and visualization both equally important. Designers, on the other hand, often consider photographers and illustrators to be more important than writers. When designers describe their favorite writers, the compliment used most often is "professional"; i.e., the manuscript delivered on time, ideally on a disk, with a flexible attitude about changes necessary to fit the design. This is writing on demand, filler that fits.

For most of us, there is much to learn from the editorial world. Respect for editors leads to an understanding of what makes a good story, a tightly written argument, and a concise headline. Like designers, writers thrive with a good brief and a lot of freedom. Designers who work frequently with writers are also more comfortable with longer texts and more difficult, complicated arguments. Some designers find that occasionally trying their own hand at writing is a way to get closer to words; it also helps to integrate writing and design into one process. These are among many such efforts that can be made by designers to elevate the role of writing in design projects, and to grow more accustomed to working with writers and with writing itself.

In the end, writing that gets read must be intended to be read. If one imagines a contract between client and audience, then perhaps there is also an implicit contractual obligation for the designer to mediate between text and reader. This is perhaps where we can begin to speak about the responsibility of designers to take seriously the role of the written word. It is here that communication starts to happen, when a reader knows that you mean it.

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