If you're trying to get a government grant for any design or
design/education initiative then you better call yourself an artist
or your product art. =)

It's not about being logical or objective.

If I say I am an artist, or if someone else says I am, then I am.

This is, after all, the post-modern era.

If you're looking for a handle, I always liked General Noriega's, "Maximum Dictator".

Tiff, you are a Maximum Artist

If you call yourself a Sanitation Engineer or simply a Garbage Collector, you still take out the trash. There is art and craft to every profession--a rose by any other name....
I prefer to call myself "The Designer Formerly Known as Artist" :-)

didn't you answer your own question with the question itself? if you're a designer, why call yourself anything else? i think that the term designer captures the meaning of "problem solver" better than artist does without losing the notion of creativity and imagination.

but then again... words are just words and really have no other meaning than what we attach to them, so you could call yourself anything you wanted and (to you) it will mean precicely what you want it to mean. (sorry had to get my decon theories in there) :^D

[ Duplicate post deleted ]

Aren't we visual communicators?

In application, that is often a very bogus term, since much of what graphic designers do is not communicative at all; it is at most evocative and even then tends toward the hopeful rather than the proveable: one hopes that the choice of colour and arrangement of elements suggests something to the viewer that will evoke the desired response. This is not communication. Communication is the transfer of an idea from one mind to another, measurable by the accuracy of the transmission. Despite the barrage of visual imagery in our society, the vast majority of communication is still linguistic, either verbal or literary. The only true 'visual communicators' are people who work with information design systems, which codify mental concepts using symbolic equivalents.

I was called a graphic artist the other day, by an older gentleman. I thought it was rather nice, and quite accurate.

A couple of weeks ago a client said that our work is like a Picasso's painting, "some may consider it a great master piece of art and some may consider it crap" and this really annoyed me. I had to control myself from replying him because I din

I like the old term Commercial Artist.
It is an accurate reflection of our profession.
:?)

Kosmo

John I

>measurable by the accuracy of the transmission<
Communication occurs whether it is measurable or not. Just because it is easier to measure word transmissions does not mean they communicate any more effectively than visual transmissions. As humans, we tend to give greater value to things we can easily measure. We call this data so it sounds oh so scientific. We don't want to point out the shortcomings of the human race so we ignore things we have no data for. One day when we are smart enough to figure out how to measure more abstract things, they will suddenly become valuable. Until then we just focus on only the data we have been smart enough to collect. Was it as easy to measure the communication that took place in the nonverbal video of the Rodney King incident? Not easy to measure. Was there visual communication taking place? You dag gum betcha.

You should call yourself what you feel you are - and that's the most you can do.

Nothing exists in a pure state - so nobody is totally an artist or totally anything. That said, it's highly useful -and necessary- to consider concepts as being pure. For example pure Art is when you create something motivated only by the need to express yourself - which of course never actually happens. But there is some Art in any act of design. The key thing though is that -for the act to cross a certain threshold into Design- this need to express has to be an unintended, or at least an undirected, force, emanating inescapably from your human-ness, sort of in spite of yourself. For example, if you make an upright Italic simply because you've "always wanted to", or if you believe that design comes from the urge to create, then you're being mostly an Artist; mostly selfish. Design comes more from a desire to serve.

> we tend to give greater value to things we can easily measure.

Very true. Especially in the West.
"If you can't count it, it doesn't count."
Totally bogus, duh.

hhp

H

>>If I say I am an artist, or if someone else says I am, then I am.

...and if someone says you're an accountant, or a gazelle, or a cornflake?

I hate labels, as they so often do not represent the true nature of the individual. But if I have to wear one, then I

'art' or 'Art'?

The difference is really one of intent and tradition. I'm sure we all know what the difference is. When I make a painting, even a digital one, it is Art (or fine art (it doesn't have to be good to qualify)), the making of a fine peice of design is an art. If your the making of your designs is an art then you are a good designer, if your paintings hang in a gallery you are an artist.

John,

>"There is no grammar of visual imagery, there is no syntax, there are no rules of morphology: there is nothing in it that makes language language."

I have to disagree with you. Of course it all depends on the definition of the word language, but assuming it means something along the lines of a system of comunication that is agreed upon by the group of people that use it, then images certainly have a linguistic properties, with a full grammer and syntax.

Taking line drawings as an example. What does the line represent? In simple line drawings, it is commonly agreed (it's grammer) that a line represents an edge or division. This is arbitrary, it is a social construct.

Conventions of perspective are another grammer of imagery. From full on renaisance three point perpsectives, to cubism, to simple drop shadow. They are all grammers necessary to show how objects ought to be arranged by our mind when we percieve the image. Perhaps analagous to word order in a sentance.

I would go on to argue that nearly all qualities of images are subject to conventions such as these. Even in photographs. Even the use areas of light or dark colours to show shadows and highlights. This is essentialy linguistic, in that they need to be agreed before being understood.

Abstract painting is intersting in this respect, but I would say subject to the same rules. Abrstact Expressionism seems to me to have been built on a fraud, at least as far as its emotional content is concerned.


Ed.

ps. I hope that makes sense. I wrote my dissertation on this, but am several thousand kilometers from my books at the moment. I've been a lurker for a while on these forums and have learnt a lot, but now I've decided to jump in...

While i'm at it...

John>"Language remains the only remotely reliable and translatable (another key aspect of language) medium to convey an idea from one mind to another"

Surely it is that words are the only reliable means of transmitting a verbal idea, images are the only reliable means of transmitting a visual idea.

If i had to convey what i was seeing through my window, or an idea for a new letter form, i would use a photo or a sketch respectively, not words.

ed

>...and if someone says you're an accountant, or a gazelle, or a cornflake?

Yes. The meaning of words depends on the circumstances of their use. There are no absolutes, it's all negotiation.

>>Yes. The meaning of words depends on the circumstances of their use. There are no absolutes, it's all negotiation.

Nick, I tend to think that bank notes are much like breakfast cereals. Under these circumstances, can I have Beaufort for 175 cornflakes, instead of $175?

Steve, I'm quite prepared to exchange font licenses for items of value other than money, but your paltry breakfast cereal offer is, quite frankly, an insult. Now, for a case of Jordan's finest organic muesli...

Paltry?
An insult?

How do you work that out?

more decon:

like visual symbols, words are just signs that make reference to things and ideas without actually being connected to them in any way beyond the connections that we give to them. If you called me a gazelle, i'd hafta laugh, i'm not that fast; if you called me a cornflake i may be offended because i can be a bit flighty... one of the greatest features of symbols is that they don't mean "exactly" anything. there is a certain amount of "play" where a symbol can be more literal or more figurative.

Words can be just as arbitrary as visual symbols. In a class on lanugage and culture the story was told of a fire that was started in a factory that all began when a sign was misread that said "Empty Gas Drums". Knowing the outcome, i'm sure you know what that meant, but those at the factory understood an entirely different meaning.

John, i think it's humorous that you're championing language as a superior communicator of ideas in a thread that is basically an argument between the meaning of (verbal) terms.

I am fascinated by verbal language. I believe there's good reason to call the study of it language arts. i think it's beautiful to be able to choose words as an artist would choose her pallette to convey different shades of meaning, but in the end it is the reader who decides what the text means, no matter what the author intended it to mean.

that's why i think making a distinction between "designer," "artist," "communicator," etc. is bunk. to me. these terms overlap but have slightly different meaning, but you could choose any one and i think i would get the general understanding of what you are trying to convey - so call yourself what you want.

How about: information repair specialist?

In that any communication I undertake as a designer is not my message, but that of another, I am not an artist. Because I try to do a good, careful job I am an artisan.

In support of visual communication and as an example, Goya and Picasso, in their pictures of Spain at war, have made a more direct lasting communication than text and it doesn't need translation.

As no man is born an artist, so no man is born an angler.
Izaak Walton 1593-1683: The Compleat Angler (1653)

Tim

Once, long ago, I made a pop-off remark in a philosophy seminar that something was a very boring distinction. What followed was a 45-minute discussion about whether any distinction could be boring . . .

Having said that, maybe a designer has to distinguish between what they call themselves (government grants, etc.) and how they think of themselves. In the world of graphic design, all I really know is books. Sadly, many of the terrible interior designs for books come from graphic designers being

> 'visual language' ... is spectacularly unreliable.

But "formal" language is simply less so; the difference is not qualitative.
Anyway, it seems the disagreement here is largely terminological.

> Language, on the other hand, allows us to describe experience,
> and so to set contexts of understanding and response.

But it can't really communicate emotion either.
In any case it's all in our respective heads.

> The claims in favour of visual communication have always been overstated.

With that I agree. I love text.

--

> There are people who label themselves graphic designers that have the
> misguided perception that the business is about making things

In Latin. Maybe.

French, actually. Ask Derrida.

Reading to my earlier comments back, it comes off as a rant and off topic. Never write anything when it

I avoid it scrupulously. I've found that the term 'artist' carries connot