The Virtues
So what are the six virtues with which Poynor would counter these sins?

1. Being critical

2. History
3. Smallness
4. Imperfection
5. Dialogue
6. Refusal

Perhaps these are self-explanatory. Turning a critical eye on the world around us, including its graphic design, seems an obvious response to living in a world that's trying to sell us something all the time. And if criticism is going to be anything more than reflexive rebellion, we have to know something of what came before this moment: therefore, "history." (Poynor didn't point out that there's nothing more fascinating than finding out what went before, the campfire tales that make up history. It's not all academic jargon and exam questions.)

"Smallness" is a reaction to the all-blanketing chains as well as to the megabuck theory that only what's big and appeals to a mass audience is important. (Curiously, he said, people who advocate paying attention to a smaller audience are frequently dismissed as "elitist." What could be more effectively, indeed efficiently, elitist than the tyranny of the huge?) His "smallness" could also be described as "localness," since it's the local, "site-specific" things that Poynor cherishes. He cited the example of Cornel Windlin, a Swiss designer in his mid-thirties who worked in London for several years and then returned to Zurich, where he makes posters and other graphic works that are tied to local events. Windlin also worries that perhaps he's too isolated or limited in Zurich, away from the metropolis, from London or New York. Poynor suggests that while these worries are natural enough, perhaps they aren't all that important.

I've already alluded to Poynor's preference for the imperfect, the unpolished, the rough-hewn. He quoted Robert Venturi Robert Venturi's phrase "messy vitality," and argued that since design is something fundamental to being human, it can't be left solely in the hands of designated practitioners. Poynor seemed to think that design professionals had taken the possibility of designing things away from the public through increasing professionalization. To me that seems like a perspective that's only possible from inside the design profession; in the real world, I'd say that graphic design is practiced by far more people today than ever before. As a designer, I'm always trying to instill a higher level of excellence in the design that's produced, but I'm very, very happy to see the tools of design in so many hands.

"Dialogue." Designers, like any other citizens of our world, have to take responsibility for their effect on everyone else; neither graphic design nor any other profession exists in a vacuum. As Poynor pointed out, graphic designers claim great importance for their work, right up to the point where someone asks them to take responsibility for the effect of what they do. "We can't have it both ways," he said. The counter to this is "refusal" – the refusal to take on morally odious work, but also the refusal to live our whole lives as consumers. He cited the extreme example of Michael Landi, an artist in London who set up a storefront art project on Oxford Street where a team of workmen fed all of his belongings into an industrial machine that turned them into recyclable grains. Poynor didn't suggest that anyone else ought to do this (he wasn't about to himself), but he held it up as a fine gesture. Responding to a question from the audience, he said that the interesting thing might be to interview Landi a year later and find out whether he'd replaced all the material goods he tossed away.

The Audience
Poynor was certainly speaking to the right audience. Who could embody more precisely the group of people his questions are directed at than an AIGA crowd attending a Design Lecture across the street from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art? Judging from the questions at the end, his vice of relativism is alive and well, and the habit of critical thinking isn't practiced among designers as carefully as one might wish. I was surprised by his saying that he thought the kind of discussion embodied by this lecture series was seldom found in design talks in the UK (where I think of the art of intelligent criticism as being more developed than here; perhaps it's just a facility with debating techniques), but I was encouraged by the large audience. Maybe some of them will go home and find themselves arguing with him.

Read more by John D. Berry.