Using the text from an article I wrote for The New Republicin 1997, this film was shot on a small digital film camera and edited in whatever we used before we had proper tools.
(This explains the sub-par quality.)
When he invited me to write this essay, my editor said: Begin at the beginning and explain what graphic design is to our readers. Assume they are smart, but have no idea.
This explains the text, which follows—and why the film is called “Graphic Design Is.”
Graphic design is the most ubiquitous of all the arts.
It responds to needs at once personal and public, embraces concerns both economic and ergonomic, and is informed by numerous disciplines, including art and architecture, philosophy and literature, politics and performance.
Graphic design is everywhere, touching everything we do, everything we see, everything we buy: we see it on billboards and in Bibles, on taxi receipts and on web sites, on birth certificates and on gift certificates, on the folded circulars tucked inside jars of aspirin and on the thick pages of children’s chubby board books.
Graphic design is the boldly directional arrows on street signs and the blurred, frenetic typography on the title sequence to E.R. It is the bright green logo for the New York Giants and the staid front page of The New York Times.
It is hang-tags in clothing stores, playbills in theaters, timetables in train stations, postage stamps and cereal box packaging, fascist propaganda posters and junk mail.
It is complex combinations of words and pictures, numbers and charts, photographs and illustrations that, in order to succeed, demand the clear thinking of a particularly thoughtful individual who can orchestrate these elements so that they all add up to something distinctive, or useful, or beautiful, or playful, or surprising, or subversive, or in some way truly memorable.
Graphic design is a popular art, a practical art, an applied art, and an ancient art. Simply put, it is the art of visualizing ideas.
(Those are the footprints of my then-infant son, and his chubby board book, too. I was a new mother at that time, so, working with what I had.)
The film—which ran in both English and Spanish—was reverse-projected onto the facade of what was at the time the AIGA headquarters building (on Fifth Avenue in New York City) from dusk until dawn for several months during the summer of 1998.
