Definition of Graphic Design

While reading through different articles, i came across this quote of Victor Papanek, and it really startled me and made me think. The quote is:

"There are professions more harmful than design, but only a few"

At first search, one can immediately find such definitions about graphic design:

- it is a visual communication used by a skillful combination of text & pictures for advertising, magazines and books;

- it represents ideas and messages

- a branch of visual art concerned with aesthetics, production of layout design and typography.

But is design only concerned with these issues? What is Papanek really talking about?
While going deeper in my research, i found other comments, ideas and points of views about this discipline... or is it not a discipline? I divided them into to parts, cause what i found was a dichotomy in their descriptions.

The first said that:

- graphic design is a talented and seductive industry that effects brainless mass consumption.

- it creates artificial needs to persuade people to buy things they don't need with money they don't have to impress people they don't like.

- graphic design is affected by marketing oriented development process that deprives it to think or act by itself

- graphic design serves consumerism, and someone well known once said that "It is greasing the wheels of capitalism in a stylish way".

The other opposing definitions were these:

- design is Power, it influences people's needs and wants, it promotes not only consumerism but human activity;

- it Compels readers to notice and remember , while educating them and presenting real solutions;

- it is a Cultural Democracy, most of the time it plays a propagandist role in society, influencing political thought and popular opinion;

- not only it is entertaining and persuasive but also it is rhetoric, common sense & logical, through all these it makes its designers Intuitive provocators;

- graphic design is Creativity.

Art can be wonderful without much change in ideas and perception. However, design through its evaluation, organization, deconstruction, interpretation and synthesis builds, challenges defies and excels. This is why it becomes a problem solver.
According to Carole Gruvin "creative people are often the last resort descramblers"; she adds that designers love problems, they make it a career while feeding and soaring on them.
Designers are experts in this field and usually major problems in the world will not be solved by further analysis but by design.

Hanna Arendt said that design is a Action. In her book "Vita Activa" she divides human activities into three parts:
1. labour
2. work
3. action

Action i the only activity that goes directly between man without any intermediary of things to the human condition.
Acting is by far the only way to bring something new to the world. It is the final cause of things. It does not wait for orders. Through action and creativity graphic design becomes also a rebel with its designers as rebellions.

"All creative people need something to rebel against, it is what gives their lives excitement"
Paul Arden

After finding all these definitions i guess what we can say is that graphic design is a melting pot of all these actions and definitions. It is a mixture of all. What makes it different each time is the choice that it's designer's choose to take and therefore the image they give.