Author: Eduardo

A manifesto for designers

There’s been a movement for graphic designers to create more content instead of manipulating existing ones. The importance of content has grown even in academic settings as if what we design is more important than how we design.

Design must be used in a linguistic way, as a vibrant language that represents the world. The designer’s role is to reshape content, not write it. We must acknowledge that shaping is a form of writing in itself.

Separating Metahaven and Vishmidt’s (2010) “intro riff” text into different topics and creating a diagram-view helped me understand the content by making its structure apparent. The way I mapped the text, with extra space between its fragments in each subject, and the end of one excerpt aligned with the beggining of the following in the next column, creates two possible reading orders. A linear one in relation to the original text is achieved by switching from column to column, and the other option is to read one entire subject column at a time before proceeding to another topic, a linear alterative in relation to the map itself. The first reading method is closer to the traditional way, the one intended by the editors, and the second one is useful for diving more deeply into one of the topics.