This studio/seminar investigates the claims of visual identity, as a historically specific design project, in the light of its relation to critical theorizations of gender, race, disability, and capitalism. The goal of the course is to understand the project of visual identity as a set of aesthetic forms intimately related to the reproduction of existing social relations — but also, more speculatively, as a blueprint or prototype for new ones.
Visual identity, in its origin as a mark used to distinguish products and, later, corporations in the commodity world of industrial capitalism, is inextricably linked to the articulation of private property. As it finds itself increasingly conditioned by late capitalist tendencies toward dematerialization, the “dynamic” visual identity project has taken a cultural turn and become increasingly concerned with the production of vibrations and affects within subjects themselves. We will trace the history of these two visual identity regimes (modern and postmodern) in relation to their economic modes of production, as the modernist corporate “closed” identity systems of the disciplinary society give way to the recent vogue for “open,” flexible, and more explicitly culturally-oriented visual identities, identities installed at the level of the subject.
As a critical counterpoint to these capitalist sign systems, we will look at a series of non-professional visual identities that have immanently taken shape within subcultural and political movements — visual identities produced by the very people for whom they aim to speak, within the terms of the interests and struggles that define them as a group.
We will aim to think through and distinguish these commercial and political instances of visual identity through a series of readings that theorize postcolonial, racialized, gendered, and class-antagonistic political subjectivities in relation to regimes of control, as well as through a speculative identity project that produces visual forms for a historically particular or imaginary community.
Weekly reading and writing
Each week one student will initiate our discussion by introducing some key parts of the week’s readings and framing them with questions. You don’t need to summarize the entire set of texts, but rather focus on some critical part that captured your attention and which you’d like to think through further with everyone. Aim to get us started with a 5 to 10 minute introduction.
Each week you will write a one page response to the week’s readings. You can choose what you write about, but it should be based in a response to some part of the reading. This weekly writing will be a way to inform your participation in our class discussions, as well as a medium by which to develop the theoretical interests of your studio project. Aim to write between 250 and 500 words. Use the writing to clarify your understanding of the text, by reproducing its arguments, relating it to concrete design practices, and/or by drawing attention to problematic aspects.
Research
Each student will research and present to the class one particular visual identity as a case study with which to test the concepts developed in our readings and discussions. These case studies are on both sides of the historical divide between modern and postmodern identities. Gather as much source material as possible for the identity, including any texts you can find which discuss it. The presentation should be an approximately 10-15 minute long slide-based lecture in which the visual identity is demonstrated as a formal system in its scope of application. The presentation should focus on showing the particular forms and system of the visual identity. It should additionally attempt to critically position the identity within its historically specific political and economic context. What forms of individual and collective subjectivity are implied or constructed by the identity? What is the relation of the identity to the technology of its production and dissmenination? In what sense is the identity an ideological project? This will be chance to both study, as graphic designers, the range of formal possibilities for a visual identity, as well as ask critical questions about its social function and in whose interests it works.
Case studies might come from the accepted canon of graphic designc or from the (often) non-designed worlds of insurgent political movements or miscellaneous countercultural spaces. From whatever world it comes from, the visual identity should have a significant role in shaping the appearance, if not the actual fortunes, of the group for whom it works.
possible case studies
- IBM, Paul Rand
- International Paper Company, Lester Beall
- 1972 Munich Olympics, Otl Aicher
- 1968 Mexico City Olympics, Lance Wyman
- Container Corporation, John Massey
- Penguin Books, Jan Tschichold
- NAi, Bruce Mau
- MTV
- Sealand, Metahaven
- Whitney Museum of Modern Art, Experimental Jetset
- UIC School of Art and Design
- Documenta 17, Laurenz Brunner, et al
- Antifa
- Black Bloc
- Black Panthers
- Gilet Jaunes
- Group Material
- Palestinian Liberation Organization
- Radio Alice
- Red Army Faction
- Young Lords
- The Weathermen
Project
As a final project, students will produce (individually or collectively) a prospectus for a speculative visual identity, one which proposes a set of forms, a combinatory logic, and a scope of application for an imaginary group of subjects — an imagined community, which might also be a historically particular one.
The group for whom the identity is produced might be informed by the theorizations of postmodern identity we will read and discuss over the semester. One radical point of departure might be to design the identity for a group to which you yourself in some sense belong. This deviates already from a constitutive condition of identity design — that the designer is hired from outside the group or organization being designed for. Dissolving the division between client and designer can have interesting and radical effects. In any case the identity is emphatically not commercial. This is the fundamental negative condition of the project and the framework for our speculation. The aim of the identity is not to increase sales, but rather to formally produce visibility in the world.
The group subject of the identity could be imaginary. It does not need to already exist in the world. Part of the project might be the concrete imagining of the group for whom the identity is made. The identity work might then be a work of fiction. Or perhaps it is group that in some sense already exists but which does not (yet) explicitly imagine itself as belonging together. Another possibility would be to locate a specific historical community for whom a highly formalized visual identity did not already exist.
The prospective identify manual that you produce can incorporate multiple forms. It should include sketches for the set of marks and forms that compose the identity, and demonstrations of the syntax of their imagined iteration. The identity document should deliberately deploy typography and graphic design to these ends. As a proposal, it is a provisional work: it should assemble preliminary forms as instructions for an identity to come: a sketch or a blueprint that others will take forward and fill in further and actually execute in the world (which in fact is how visual identities are professionally propagated.) In addition to formally demonstrating a visual identity, the manual should also — at the same time — constitute a critical essay on the concepts of identity we will be exploring in writing and discussion throughout the semester. Consider including critical texts — from our readings or elsewhere — that impart context, scope, and significance to the proposed identity. This is an a visual identity manual in the expanded field — an essay on the very concept of identity as a social and political modality in late capitalism.
The identity manual you produce might reflect the historical forms of the graphic standards manual. Examples of these, particularly those from classic corporate modernism, abound. We will look at several over the semester. But these conventions should be deliberately experimented with and rethought. Additionally, you might consider related marketing genres like the trend report. Or literary genres, like the epistolary novel or bildungsroman. In any case, consider the reader: to whom — to what reader/user/agent/subject — is the document addressed? And what symbolic actions might it make possible for its imaginary readers?