Переписал заметку для Граудфеста для одного англоязычного журнала:

I don't know what kind of games children play these days but I remember some weird little things from my childhood in the 90s. For example, you choose a word and repeat it quickly as long as you can. And in no time you lose the sense of the word, you start making the emphasis in the wrong places, you mix up syllables, and the word stops feeling right in your mouth. Usually, you would wait for some minutes and your control over the word would come back. Something like that happened to the term "graphic design" for me, only I am not sure if the control and the comfort are coming back.

One profession comfortably embraces the theory of how to make books with some terms and values that are hundreds of years old. Victor Hugo by the way wrote that the printing press replaced gothic cathedrals, he meant that cathedrals were books of their time — huge books with pictures for people who couldn't read. So maybe we are talking of more than just hundreds of years. At the same time, graphic design flourished in the digital space in the last 30 years: screens, web, motion, AI, etc. It's hard not to lose track.

Brian Eno in his lecture in Saint Petersburg in 2010 explained that cinema emerged as a documentation of theater at the end of the 19th century and slowly drifted away and developed into a completely new genre with a new name. Simultaneously in the 20th century, similar progress happened to the music, and the new music is so different in nature and process that it deserves a different name. John Cage also wanted a new name for the music. I am not saying that we need a new name for the graphic design, I am saying that the graphic design in the digital space is so different that it might be called something else.

Sometimes I get confused if a designer makes a poster in the Swiss style on a computer in 2023. Let's imagine the poster looks right, what would be its relation to the original Swiss style? If you are saying that the new poster is made in the style, then you make the process absent in your logic and the process is the king. All those beautiful minimal designs from the previous century were made with hands and quite often on 1:1 scale. Also, it was real physical labor to design, and modernism was quite economical in terms of time and materials at the moment. The absence of capital letters in some layouts from Bauhaus is a famous example. It seems ludicrous to imagine now that the number of capital letters in your layout could affect the production.

I am not sure what is the "real" graphic design. Is it when I make in-a-hurry commercial projects on my Macbook in Indesign and feel miserable? Or maybe when I make some weird books for myself or a small client, cutting everything and sewing it by myself? All those beautiful letterforms and typography from the 20th century were formed by the available materials, tools, etc. I don't see the point in talking about the form without the context. On the other hand, I would argue that graphic design was always a combination (a collage) in nature. I like the term coined almost one hundred years ago (1925) by László Moholy-Nagy "typo-photo". Nowadays this kind of term would have to include much more to make justice to the modern practice: typo-photo-semiotics-motion-3D-AI-... Add what you like but tomorrow there will be new words to add. So, what could we stick to? I would say trying our best with what we have at the moment and therefore I would suggest calling all new experimental weird graphic design — the traditional graphic design. And everything more reserved, especially today's Swiss style, as a radical innovation on the loose. It's good to remember that everything we think of as good taste today not so long ago was a mischief.