For Reference Only¹
Exhibition identity design for Graphic Design MFA Biennial at RISD.
—
For Reference Only¹
We spend hours designing books, posters, websites, and “personal projects” that will never be handed off to clients or exist beyond an Instagram feed. The irony of most designed objects—especially printed visual graphic materials—is that they are barely read. The typeface optimized for the reader’s eye will never experience the satisfaction of being truly read, instead becoming reference material for yet another design doomed to the same fate (dark, we know). The heavily treated, dithered, duotone photo isn’t an image, just an ornamental texture. But who cares? If it looks good, designers will buy it.
Nobody actually reads graphic design books. Nobody meaningfully interacts with a website that has been “graphic designed.” And honestly, these things are fantastic to look at.
So let’s celebrate the surface. The aesthetic. The reference-only.
*Or—let’s reconsider what “reference-only” actually means. Graphic design is a discipline that thrives in adjacency. It is not literature, yet it shapes language; not theory, yet it structures thought; not art, yet it influences visual culture. It is defined as much by what it isn’t as what it is, existing in the negative space between disciplines, borrowing, reframing, and meditating. Maybe the failure of graphic design to be deeply “read” isn’t a failure at all—but proof that design doesn’t need to be the final destination. And that is precisely where its power lies.
Exhibition identity design for Graphic Design MFA Biennial at RISD.
—
For Reference Only¹
We spend hours designing books, posters, websites, and “personal projects” that will never be handed off to clients or exist beyond an Instagram feed. The irony of most designed objects—especially printed visual graphic materials—is that they are barely read. The typeface optimized for the reader’s eye will never experience the satisfaction of being truly read, instead becoming reference material for yet another design doomed to the same fate (dark, we know). The heavily treated, dithered, duotone photo isn’t an image, just an ornamental texture. But who cares? If it looks good, designers will buy it.
Nobody actually reads graphic design books. Nobody meaningfully interacts with a website that has been “graphic designed.” And honestly, these things are fantastic to look at.
So let’s celebrate the surface. The aesthetic. The reference-only.
*Or—let’s reconsider what “reference-only” actually means. Graphic design is a discipline that thrives in adjacency. It is not literature, yet it shapes language; not theory, yet it structures thought; not art, yet it influences visual culture. It is defined as much by what it isn’t as what it is, existing in the negative space between disciplines, borrowing, reframing, and meditating. Maybe the failure of graphic design to be deeply “read” isn’t a failure at all—but proof that design doesn’t need to be the final destination. And that is precisely where its power lies.
Exhibition
Identity, Spatial, Exterior