“The printing works is not a place that hires out fancy dress. It is not our task to fit out any literary content with a fashionable costume.” – Paul Renner
If ones works are conceived for purely aesthetic reasons (in an ideological vacuum) then the result will be hollow, insignificant design that serves no purpose other than further promoting and foreshadowing concept-less design in the future. The discussion, until now, concerns the phenomenon of post-ideologism. Manifestation and acknowledgement of this phenomenon leads inevitably to the conception of Neo-ideologism. Neo-ideologism is not a specific ideology or movement that governs aesthetics, method or thought. It is only a general philosophy that tries to promote the importance and necessity of abstraction and philosophical presence within design.
As previously shown, lack of concept or ideology almost inescapably leads to plagiarism and contributes to un-original and un-inspired design in the future. Here we can see one important role played by ideology in the field of graphic design: as a weapon to combat these post-ideological phenomena.
It would be conceivable for one to argue that there is not a place for ideological content within graphic or typographic design as they are traditionally disciplines that merely serve a commercial purpose. It could be said that the designer simply creates a concept that satisfies the consumer’s brief and has no time or need for grandiose delusions or elaborate abstractions concerning self-expression, philosophy or ideology. Whilst it is true that graphic design serves a commercial purpose, it is not true that ideology has no place within it, or that it would not benefit greatly from philosophical content. It is true to some extent that these disciplines are not Artistic as they are not, necessarily, concerned with self-expression. However, they are concerned with communication. Communication is a fundamental facet of graphic design, which opens the discipline up to vast, innumerable fields of potential ideological influence, including psychology, linguistics, semiotics and Art. It is within these spheres that careful consideration, pondering and philosophical application, can be implemented in order to enhance communication by introducing an ideological component.
This ideological component can conceivably be anything but it must be present. The ideology, of Neo-ideologism is simply the endorsement of a philosophical or conceptual presence within graphic design as a reaction to the realisation that a state of post-ideologism is indeed observable in contemporary visual/design culture. For example I will outline my personal typographic method:
“We can all look at the letters and characters from foreign languages and find them beautiful, intriguing and enigmatic. The characters of the Chinese and Japanese languages, the letters of Thai, Tamil, Sanskrit and Khmer appear truly magnificent aesthetically. Why is this so? If we cannot read said language then it’s letterforms are rendered nothing more than a dysmorphic mess of meaningless lines and abstract geometry.
I hypothesise that this enigmatism is the very reason we find foreign languages so beautiful. Because we cannot read or comprehend the words we can therefore appreciate their aesthetic qualities more deeply and objectively without the meaning or connotation of the language overshadowing, tainting or even totally concealing the architecture of the letterforms. For example, I might conjecture that it would be a very difficult and direful task to look at the English words “murder” or “rape” (knowing their meaning) and thus conclude that they were (aesthetically) beautiful words. With ones own language, if literate, it is of course impossible not to read the words and it therefore becomes inconceivable to look at the letterforms and shapes from a purely superficial, objective viewpoint. With my studies I aim to abstract the graphemes of the English language in order to find the aesthetic beauty in the letterforms, for I believe that it is through abstraction, that we will see the true beauty of our own language.
Regarding my own work, and within the field of typographic design more generally, I feel it is of paramount importance to expand and promote neo-ideological thought in order to change the way people think about type, written language and linguistics in relation not only to the aesthetic-morphology of language but also in the fields of socio and psycholinguistics. Abstraction of these areas opens ones work up to a vast wealth of potential to expand ones design concepts into new, exciting, efficacious realms of communication.
It is essential that high-concept neo-ideological design be further promoted and advocated to develop realisation that linguistics, psychology, art and expression are all intertwined and indeed influence each other respectively. Where typography is concerned specifically, by moulding not just the physical structure of letterforms, but also the metaphysical parameters that constitute language, I feel that, as designers, we are able to disseminate, communicate and connect to the viewer much more profoundly and eloquently.