Method of Translating: Written Response

(I used the style of Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino to represented the ideas of F**k Content by Michael Rock)

At some points in your life as a designer, you are often doubtful whether your work has any value, right? In the anxiety of figuring out the meaning of your projects, you often envy the power, social status, and prestige that artists and authors seem to have, so you declare yourself a designer and author in the hope of obtaining similar respect. For you, design is a vibrant and provocative language. Regarding yourself as an author, you try to restore the act of design to essential language behavior. However, I want to tell you that, in fact, this does not mean that you need to generate content. You need to be a designer as an author rather than a designer and an author.

Nowadays, the idea of “form follows function” has been reinterpreted as “form follows content” by many designers. You may also struggle with the notion that without profound content, your designs will only be reduced to a meaningless style and suspicious tricks. However, I want to assure you that what matters to a design is not its content but the way of communicating it. I should take Hitchcock’s movies as an example. Suppose you study the style of his films. In that case, you may agree that his greatest genius is that although he is not involved in cinematography, acting, makeup, and lighting, he created his own consistent style by coordinating all those technical aspects. The importance of Hitchcock’s work lies not in the story but in the way he tells story. The idea is also true for you: Although you are involved in storytelling through graphic design, you should understand that the skill you must master is not generating content but the means of communicating them.

In the history of graphic design, you will eventually find that it is not a history of concepts but a history of the form. You will find that the form is changing dramatically every year, transforming how we view the world. In fact, at the very moment, your life is surrounded by these most ordinary graphic design works: ink, cigarettes, shampoo, red wine, or mechanical advertisements. Perhaps the content of graphic design, as many critics say, does not intend to tell us what it feels like to live in a moment of civilizations but just to reconcile people with the commodity, banalities, and vulgarities in this world. You will find that you have a close physical connection with your work, which will inevitably be stamped with your seal. The project selection in each of your works lists a map of your interests and preferences. How these projects are analyzed, dismantled, reconstructed, and rendered reveals philosophical and aesthetic positions, arguments, and criticisms.

Find a way to speak through design treatment, through a series of rhetorical means, from writing to visual to operation, and then you will learn to re-examine and re-express. In this way, you will establish a body of work, and a unique message appears from this body of work, which may even tell us what it feels like to live in a moment of civilization.

Remember that the so-called “content” is always the design itself.