Reflections on the lecture

This week’s lectures look at the future and what form graphic design will take and what lies ahead in a general sense. The second part of the lecture is a conversation between Susanna and Mazier Raein. It will explore how ideas are perceived in new environments, impact of future trends and how graphic design can prepare us for future needs and a future world.

What are potential future definitions of design practice? What are the sectors that might change or need to change?

Simon Manchipp

When asked ‘what are the future potential definitions of graphic design,’ Simon Manchipp answered saying that the definition is getting broader. People will be more interested in the overall experience, which won’t necessarily stop at visual media. For example, he spoke about his work for Wolves Football Club, and how a branding project stretched to designing the tunnels at the stadium.

Regular practice: Tom Finn & Kristofer Soelling

Wolves football club branding

Sam Winston

Sam’s perspective on this question was also quite interesting, he started by saying ‘design is a living enquiry into a problem.’ He went onto discuss what he called an ‘attention economy’ and he believes in the future attention will be what is most valuable, and that the nature of graphic design will be shaped by ever-increasing channels of communication. As people increasingly rely on social media, our attention spans have continued to shrink. As a result, I can imagine that graphic designers of the future will have to work harder and harder to win people’s attention.

Regular Practice: Tom Finn & Kristofer Soelling

Regular Practice touched on how that with the increasing reliance on the internet as a design tool, it is likely that design will become a lot bigger. We can already see this happening, with platforms such as Pinterest and Behance causing design trends to be spread more rapidly than ever before. They also thought that there will be an over saturation of digital media, causing people to react against this and move back to print. But it is also chance for you take more unique things in a sea of people producing similar work.

Sarah Boris

When it came to look at the second question, ‘what are the sectors that might change or need to change,’ Sarah had an interesting perspective. She noted that production facilities will have to look towards more print on demand solutions, as companies will be less likely to invest in print and are also more conscious about the environment. The way companies are shifting everyone is more collaborative and therefore more up to speed.

Intro Design: Julian House & Adrian Talbot

Intro Design noted that budgets are getting increasingly smaller, and these two issues are tied together. Clients do not want to put down the money to buy things in bulk anymore, they would rather only print what they sell so there are no overheads. However, the problem is that there is a significant drop in quality when it comes to print on demand.