News >> Browse Articles >> Design
News >> Browse Articles >> Fashion Design
News >> Browse Articles >> Graphic Design
News >> Browse Articles >> Illustration
News >> Browse Articles >> Interior Design
Do Nations Have a Design Aesthetic?
Patrick Burgoyne / Creative Review via Yellowbrix
October 01, 2009
Is it possible today for a country to have its own national graphic design aesthetic? When any designer with a decent internet connection can view work the world over, surely the range of influences will be too great to produce distinct nation-based styles? I’m only asking because I have recently returned from chairing the Kyoorius Designyatra conference in Mumbai (see review p49). There, the question on many lips was ‘What is Indian graphic design?’ or, rather, ‘What should Indian graphic design look like?’
Many in the burgeoning Indian graphic design and advertising scene are struggling to come up with an answer. They are in a country with perhaps the richest indigenous tradition in the world for decoration, color and texture, but how can they translate that into their work without the results descending into airport gift shop kitsch? And should they?
Popular Links
Nine Steps to Become a Designer
How Do Artists Make Money?
Improve your life. Get a degree.
Why should we expect Indian graphic designers, or Chinese or anywhere else, to root their work explicitly and recognizably in local vernacular traditions when we rarely do it ourselves? The only country that has previously managed to translate national characteristics successfully into its graphic design language is surely Switzerland, which then exported its Modernist outlook to the rest of the world. But even then it was more about attitudes and mindsets than specific visual references. What about British graphic design? Perhaps in the 80s you could point to the kind of witty work documented in A Smile in the Mind as being recognizably British (even if it owed a considerable debt to the likes of Milton Glaser and Bob Gill), but now?
