Vector leaves and budding vines, rainbow gradients, supermodels tucked in between it all—this hyper cool vector/pixel haberdashery is everywhere and is going nowhere. You have to give it up for the radical craft in the work of Brand New School, but enough already—they did it. Adding layers, adding more, simply adding—enough already and, yes, we can do the nil thing too. A few years back (2000-04) we had our old new-modernist, Helvetica, chill-out when doing nothing was the preferred and now the gluttony again. Yes, there have been attempts to intellectualize it by dropping it all into info space—chartifying, infographisizing, mappifying—but that just reads like putting on the smart glasses to look the part. The frequency increases and the style cycles collapse—more/less, less/more—it matters little in how the distinction is made—it is all the same. Please, tell me you hope more for your isometric pixels than either on or off.

We need our vapid, pixel massaging, disco-super fun—we can’t live without it as part of the continuum—but in a time of such immense scientific and technological invention and range of knowing and exploring in all things, why so much of one thing from design image makers? Where is the range, depth, exploration of the image? Images are everywhere and going nowhere in Graphic Design. Pornography has become clip art, common, acceptable—the new beige. Abu Ghraib becomes bumper sticker fodder and graphic designers swing between more and less in an attempt to do everything but invent.

Let’s look around a bit and fill out the gradient—maybe expand the gradient of possibilities. I’m not talking about running to experience design, interface design, interaction design, environmental design, et. al. I’m not advocating we somehow ramp-up the encyclopedic land grab that Graphic Design has become as it gobbles up all contexts, media, and content. I am talking about considering the graphic part and more so the single, still image part. Nothing in motion or manipulated in any “interactive” sense, but a well-framed, lit, conceived text phrased in/as a picture.

Ask a graphic design student what their most important work is and they will invariably look past telling photographs that seamlessly and effortlessly connect the heart, mind, and gut to point out something with the most layers, type/image synthesis, multipage, maximalism that they have been able to wrangle out of Indesillushop. I’m not bashing the digi—never—but lets turn it off for a while and come back to it when the lessons of the analog can be re-framed, re-cognized, and re-valued. Go read Barbara Stafford between choosing which side of the Frosted Mini Wheat to favor.