Is Design Still Reflecting a Country or a Culture?
“Walking Through Greek Design” was written for IDPURE mag #22
It’s a fine morning. You wander around the city and walk through posters, billboards, street signs, flyers, newspaper stands, t-shirts, etc. You actually live into design, like Mary Poppins’ scene were the gang jumps into the paintings. No matter if you like every single piece of work that surrounds you, you still walk through design. The design of your city. The design of your country. Or maybe not?
The past few years there is a buzz in Greece on the topic of greek design and whether it has been blooming and if that, if is it recognizable. Having been a member of several awards juries the past three years, what I’ve noticed, especially on the latest ED Awards, is that greek design has developed in a way. There are many greek designers that deliver really inspiring projects, and their work has in fact an identity. But is this the “greek design”?
Before trying to answer we have to clear the meaning of the term “culture” which defines the question. If we mean culture as an integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for symbolic thought and social learning it’s different from culture as an excellence of taste in the fine arts and humanities, (also known as high culture).
On the first interpretation, if culture is a more massive but average view of knowledge and behavior, then again greek “everyday design” is reflecting greeks attitude in every aspect of their lives. An average culture.
If you look around on street signs, public services identities, newspaper and magazine designs, lifestyle posters and the most of print advertisements you’ll face a different greek design, uninspired, easy, fast, ruff, and without identity.
On the second interpretation, which is how I prefer to see it, greek design surely reflects a modern view of greek high culture; in theater, music, contemporary art, events and even advertisement, visual communication is on a bloom, mostly because of young designers that wanted to show their work and tried to get clients to open their minds and go a step further from what they are used to see.
And clients where used to see a kind of design inspired from american design of the ‘50s and british design of the ‘70s-‘80s. Cause Greece had some tough times on it’s modern history and after the ‘20s there was a major mix up of cultures from Western Europe and Balkans to Turkey and former USSR countries. A colorful and interesting mix that in some areas created exceptional pieces of art (mainly music and theater) but had to evolve the same time with politics and community.
Though ‘50s was a full decade for our industry and arts, greek designers had no clear past on visual communication to follow, so they had to look at other markets. It’s only after ’73 that we see some serious first steps on greek design and those were mainly to support art (theater and movie posters and music cover albums).
Now, getting through a short period of swiss design inspiration, greek design shows it’s modern identity; an interesting aesthetics sum up of all it’s history and not only based on the ancient greek elements that someone would expect. It’s like greek design had a major reset from a back-to-basics path to a crisp modern greek feeling.
Our design is minimal in form and concept, but also kind of baroque in context and illustration patterns and technics. There is always a second or even third level of information for the viewer, but the main message is clearly delivered with a snap.
Greek designer’s influences are nature and the “underground” urban scenery, mostly of abstract forms and color pallets and not as specific imagery (eg. tree leaves or graffity). The special characteristic of the greek alphabet gives a more exotic feeling on greek typography and we are lucky to have some very good (old and new) typography designers.
One more thing to notice on the subject should be the difference between cities. As design is distinguishably different from London to Manchester and from Berlin to Munich, we notice such differences between the more grunch style Athens design and the clear artistic design of Thessaloniki, which for the record has the fame of the “greek designers city”.
Design is a global thing. Visual communication should work and have affect on every human, but we cannot forget the cultural and historical influences of both designers and viewers. For example try WWF’s posters for US, Brazil, France, Greece and Japan. They have the same message, but they reflect every country’s culture.
No matter if it’s a more local (city, neighborhood) or broader culture view (greek, european), design always does and should reflect it.