A brief moment of anger.
A few hours ago, I came across an article from “etapes magazine” (which is one of the only french magazine dedicated to graphic design.) that talked about a “Manifesto” wrote by Pierre Vanni about making a portfolio. As I said before, making a portfolio is probably the worst experience for a designer, and I’m always curious as to know what others think about it.
Basically, all that Pierre Vanni says is that you should make a big virtual artboard, jpeg format, and use the built-in zoom tools to make it happen.
At first, it didn’t bugged me, as it’s pretty clever and useful for non-developer or newbie graphic designers. I, myself, am pretty happy to read tips and tricks from other designers. What caught my attention is the plethora of hard discussing comments about this position, especially the repetitive use of “pretentious”, “stupid”, ” dogmas”.
Just because somebody tries to sum-up his position as a designer, toward his portoflio, he get flamed at just because he uses a dogmatic tone. How many manifestos were written and followed by people before, where they fluxus or Dada, without being flamed at? I really don’t find it pretentious, he never forced anyone to follow his ideas.
Worst than that, he gets insulted as being an “artist”.
How often do you hear someoneusing the term “artist”, as an insult for a designer. Such as: he is good, but he’s an artist, he’s no good for commercial work. I tend to think that creative people, be it designers or artists, are in the same basket nowadays. We work for money and prostitute our creativity for fame. There’s no real difference between a gallerist and a client, is there?
And then, we got a indexhiitisboring-galore.
Eventually, all of this leads to a simple pitch: those designers are bored because junior designers are all doing the same portfolio-thing on indexhibit, but flame a guy that propose an easy and itelligent way to make a portfolio a little bit more original. (And then, they just say he’s an artist, but it’s not really the subject here.)
Okay, so why do I get all excited about all this? Because I truly, and deeply think that it is important to explain your work and why you do it. Be it by a manifesto or any other form of writing. Graphic design is not only pushing pixels around. It’s also a way of thinking, building up ideas, and talking about them. I don’t get why somebody has to get flame at because he’s doing the fundamentals of his job.
There are no dogmas in graphic design. There are only rules, that you can choose to follow or to ignore, but that you’d better know.
And now, I’m going to watch Alien 3, again.
\o/ Zélia
