On holiday recently I was faced with an opportunity to indulge in some very designer-ly navel gazing.
Residing in a family home tucked away in a small town in the Bavarian Alps I was surrounded by a ready reference of hundreds of year’s worth of applied design. Being this particular part of Germany there was a certain amount of ecclesiastical content on display.
Amongst it all were a pair of pictures hanging over the kitchen table. They both bore traditional Christian motifs, one being the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus the other, Joseph and baby Jesus but, unusually, it was not the Catholic vernacular that was forcing itself upon me, rather it was what was happening in the background – namely a very contemporary looking gradient fade.
It struck me that despite their belonging to a past age here was a very clear rendition, a remarkably bright rendition, of an idiom that has been used to the point of saturation in contemporary graphic design for the past X years.
My initial reaction was somewhat downbeat, was this yet another reminder of how misguided us designers can be?
We all strive hard to be fresh, original and innovative when all along everything we invent will turn up to have a historical counterpart? But then, perhaps as a result of the fresh mountain air or perhaps because of the spiritualism installed in the icon I found myself make a paradigm shift away from this downbeat thinking.
I propose that my historical evidence shows us that we should consider human visual communication as not being an ever-evolving process but rather that it is one concrete canon of themes and ideas.
However, we must not be disheartened by this, we should enjoy the fact that we are free to discover any of these notions for ourselves. By this simple change in our thinking we can liberate ourselves from being singular design units struggling to make it on our own and become a vital part of a larger collective thought.