Design is mid pt. 1
Reflections of a 'mid' designer
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I’m showing my age by incorrectly using the word ‘mid’ and using it as a descriptor of my current mid career concerns. But hopefully this essay won’t just be a self indulgent reflection of a 40-year-old, straight, Korean American male designer with a very privileged career, complaining about the “state“ of design. Rather, I hope to articulate some real structural concerns about the discipline of design that I’ve always felt insecure about, and are now increasingly threatening how we design today.
If I look back on my career, my first paid project was to Photoshop a friend’s yearbook page. The yearbook club at my high school had the novel idea of allowing each senior to “customize“ their page. Most of my peers made collages by cutting photos, applying stickers and attempting some “graffiti“, but my friend John wanted something a bit more unique. He had whittled his past four years down to five photos of significant memories, but he wanted to add some nostalgia to the layout by placing all the photos in a Polaroid “frame“. He paid me $20 to scan the photos and add a fake Polaroid border to them layout the assigned template. This first commission led to a few other friends wanting my services.
From the very beginning my career was intrinsically linked with capital and technology. My friends saw my ability to use a technology and they offered me money to execute their vision. Of course, I helped them refine and articulate their project with my cultural and visual skills, but the expression was not singularly my own, which is a distinction I’ve always drawn between design and art. Throughout my career I’ve been stubbornly ignorant how essential money and technology are to the discipline of design. I continue to hold on to high-minded ideals that conflate creative expression with capitalist productivity and it is at the core of my current career crossroads.
In 2014, I broke from my commercial career path and went to graduate school with the ambitious intention of independent studio practice and teaching. I’m proud and lucky to have succeeded in that direction. Before making this decision I had two pivotal conversations; one with my boss and one with my dad. My boss respectfully acknowledged my past work and charted a three-to-six month timeline for me to move into a director-level position. Admittedly, this preemptive promotion had more to do with the company’s need to establish clearer career pathways, but I was qualified for the role and in some sense deserved it. The call had the effect of drawing a clear picture of my future life for me. The conversation with my dad had a similar effect, but his pitch appealed to my impatient young designer ego and drew a path towards a professorship. At the time I was 29 and single with few obligations other than myself. In my head I was looking at a fork in the road where middle management was on one side and career “independence“ on the other. Now, ten years later in 2024 I have spent an equal amount of time working in design education as I have in industry (eight years each) and find myself back at the fork starring down two similar paths.
My design education was in a program that encouraged strong critical thinking and an almost defiant attitude towards corporate practice. Personally, I leaned into that as a young designer despite the irony of working on a major corporate account for the first two years of my professional career. But I wasn’t being fooled by my school, rather I was stating my values and my interests in design, which was and has always been about cultural production and creative expression. As I continued to work I saw my peers and friends lament about the contradicting opportunities that came with bigger projects, bigger clients, and bigger salaries. There seemed to be two common walls that we faced as young designers: the “control“ wall was defined by the frustration that came with working on large projects where the actual implementation of a design was handled by another company, studio, or the client themselves; leaving a designer feeling as if they’ve spent a year of their lives working on hot air. The “meeting“ wall came at that point in one’s career where a designer’s responsibility to attend endless meetings robs their creative abilities and time, leaving them with little choice but to either work longer hours or delegate and move in a management direction. These are two generalizations, but there are variations of both even in a small studio or independent practice, so I’m not criticizing the process of work.
In my current designer statement, I state that I believe in the “medial“ position of the designer between art and commerce. This explanation both allays my qualms of design production in capitalism and expresses what I value about a designers ability to be a conduit, a translator, an interpreter and intermediary between subject A and recipient B. Of course, in the word ‘medial’ is the root ‘mid’ and now I’m finding that being in the ‘mid’dle only serves to negatively position the designer. After the 2008 Great Recession, I saw many talented designers and creative directors retreat from the lavish expense accounts of agencies into the in-house teams of their clients. At the time, I remember feeling a sense of optimism for designers, because they were now a step closer to the ear of the client. I remember conversations with colleagues that conjured up the heyday of American design and the mythos of mid-century designers who sat at the C-suite level influencing the endless budgets of post-WWII industries. The TV show “Mad Men“ surely had a lot to do with this revisionist history.
During the few years before and after the 2008 Great Recession, I remember there was a strong trend towards Modernism that was captivating a new generation of designers. The designer Jesse Reed began his project of re-printing the New York City Transit Authority Graphic Standards Manual designed by Massimo Vignelli and Dieter Rams was getting a mythic level of star treatment that continues on today. I was incredibly resistant to this shift back towards Modernism because of my personal tastes, but as it grew and mid-century Modernist obsessions bubbled, I was incredibly turned off by the dogma that the trend came with. But this dogmatic attitude, that was particularly embraced by designers like Nicholas Felton, who could wield minimalist aesthetics with data-driven pragmatism, seemed to convince powerful institutions of design’s importance.
As a result of this transition and the rapid growth of Big Tech in the 2010s the design industry saw a shifting development of the in-house team. Design was taking a different place at the table and it wasn’t just the special dinner guest with smart suggestions and pithy anecdotes who politely leaves after a glass of brandy. We saw Google create Google Creative Lab as an in-house agency and experimental studio, Facebook created an “analog lab” and Dropbox crafted a rebrand with designer outreach at the heart of its new company ethos. With these welcome changes came six-figure salaries for recent graduates and true growth in design jobs across the industry. At the time, I was skeptical but felt that design had become placed in the “mid“dle in a meaningful way and I that this growth had been positive overall. But now we, as creative beings in the middle of technology, commerce and human communication, are being threatened with displacement.
I’m looking back at these situations from the lens of a design educator who teaches based on my above stated beliefs, that design is most interesting to me in cultural production and creative expression. I ask myself, if the reality of the discipline requires more leadership, cooperative communication and management skills, then why am I emphasizing skills like personal voice and editorial research? Am I perpetuating the same pedagogical delusion that I resented as a young designer? These very skills that I teach and believe in are eroding and threatened by emergent technologies in the field. So, now I find myself preaching for radicalism in the face of insurmountable change as designers stand to lose all control to the whims of capitalism and technology. It all brings me back to how my career started. I hope that this time I’m not as naive or defiant to my own ignorance towards capital and technology, so at the very least designers can hold their mid-position and not be swept away.