Note before reading: (_) = footnotes to be added

the grid and systems of control…

“For dialectical philosophy nothing is final, absolute, sacred. It reveals the

transitory character of everything and in everything”
Frederick Engels Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886)

You might wonder why I would begin here, why a discussion of the grid and
systems of graphic design would begin with dialectical materialism, the
theoretical foundation of Marxism. Yet, it is this foundation that might begin to
disabuse us of our unending search for perfect solutions, our careful theorizing of
conceptions of design as industry that we believe might somehow reform it just
enough to justify its violent entanglements with capital.

Dialectical materialism understands reality as matter and processes in constant

motion and contradiction. It “insists on the approximate relative character of
every scientific theory of the structure of matter and its properties; it insists on
the absence of absolute boundaries in nature” (1) Marx and Engels apply this
understanding to the science of economics in order to understand capitalism,
recognizing utopian philosophy as ideologically unprepared to confront
capitalism and the orders of reality that it constructs and reproduces. (2)

If we turn to graphic design in high capitalist nations (my context and analysis
stems from a U.S.-based design education) and consider its hegemonic
discourses or forms like the Modernist grid, it seems as though design has largely
been treated by designers as a science in a vacuum: an activity or practice to be
innovated, to be taught with the right number of “universal” rules to maintain its
ever-sought-after professionalism.

I say “in a vacuum” not to discount ongoing efforts to contextualize and

recontextualize design work in historical, social and political contexts, but to
stress that discourse surrounding graphic design developments and systems is so
often presented as if design, both as form and as a field, functions within itself.
Scholar Racquel J. Gates describes this decontextualization in considering
representations of Blackness in American popular culture, stressing that “we
cannot seem to shake the assumption that representations do the work by
themselves...outside of the histories and contexts in which they circulate” (3)

Understanding this unshakeable assumption in graphic design discourse, we can

see how design and its supposedly linear movements are assumed to do work or
function both ideologically and materially by themselves. As Darin Buzon notes
in “Design Thinking as a Rebrand for White Supremacy” (2020), contemporary
design manifests as a “digitally updated version of Eurocentric design doctrine
and practice,” with the violent “neutrality” of Modernism and the International
Style repackaged in the language and systems of “Design Thinking.” (4)

This repackaging or rebranding of a system of control should alert us not only to

the residues and continuities of dogmatic design ideologies, but to the insidious
work of design’s continual disassociation of itself from material reality and the
imperatives of capitalism. Instead of understanding its role as an extension of
and embodiment of capitalist production and consumption (along with the
exploitation it requires), design rearticulates itself through new buzzwords and
doctrines, whether formal or informal: “Design Thinking,” “human-centered
design,” and “Speculative Design,” to name a few.

Design has accepted late capitalism and its scientific and technological progress
as our future. More dangerously still, it mutates and recasts itself, encouraging
designers to continually resubscribe, to meet the needs of an “audience” or “user”
with the perfect solution: a system just flexible or just rigid enough to fulfill
whatever service or exchange is required.

The Grid System: A Depoliticized Default

What happens when we affirm the “universal validity” of our tools, when we
convince ourselves that there is something essential, innate, impenetrable about
their function, about their existence?

As they manifest from the New Typography of the 1920s and 30s, The Bauhaus,
and the International Typographic Style codified by the likes of Josef Müller-
Brockmann in the 1950s, grid systems pervade graphic design and its pedagogy.
No matter how many different ways students are encouraged to break it, “the
grid” is taught as default.

“Less is more.” “Carve out the white space.” “What is the underlying logic or
structure?” “What elements can you get rid of?”
These are the enunciations that spring from the grid’s mythology, the advice and
questions that students take up eagerly from their instructors. Even if
contemporary liberal academia posits to reject Modernism in its fascist
prescriptions of form, the logic of the grid and display systems wraps itself
evermore tightly around anxieties of crafting “good” or “professional” design,
particularly in the hyperaccelerated, hypervisible spaces of social media.

In his book Grid Systems in Graphic Design (1981), Müller-Brockmann argues

that the grid “as a controlling system,” indicates the designer’s constructive,
future-oriented implementation of design. (5) The grid thus becomes
ideologically linked to progress: progress as it manifested first through the
colonial imperatives of utilitarian and Enlightenment thought. Müller-
Brockmann describes “penetration of the essentials,” cultivation of “objectivity
over subjectivity,” “the will to achieve architectural dominion over surface and
space,” expressing notions of domination and objectivity essential to colonial and
imperial projects. With an even more explicit use of the language of colonization
and genocide, Italian Modernist designer Massimo Vignelli described design as
the eradication of “visual pollution,” that “visual disease is what we have all
around, and what we try to do is cure it somehow with design, by eliminating, as
much as possible, the people who make it. Not physically, but at least limiting
their possibility of polluting the world.” (6)

Vignelli’s positioning of design and the grid systems it is presumed to rely on as a

“cure” in the fight against ugliness, against “visual disease,” must be understood
as a violent political choice grounded in the instruction of colonialism and its
export of capitalism as an economic and racial system. Enlightenment
philosopher John Stuart Mill in his essay On Liberty (1859) describing instances
of a supposedly rightful exercise of compulsion and control, declares “those who
are still in a state to require being taken care of by others must be protected
against their own actions as well as against external injury. For the same reason
we may leave out of consideration those backward states of society in which the
race itself may be considered as in its nonage” (7)

Mill’s notions of civilization and the idea that certain “backwards states” of
racialized peoples should be left out of consideration in a violent project of
empire manifests in the grid’s crafting of white space. A search for the perfect
balance, for the optimal construction of this space hinges on whiteness as default.
The white space becomes both a territory to conquer and an already purified
space ready to be recrafted with a presumably “neutral,” “harmonious,” purity of
form.
Limitations of Democracy: The Grid and “Oppressive Deception”

Before examining a few understandings of the post-modern and the new “Global
Style,” I’d like to return to Müller-Brockmann to examine his notion of
systematized design as contribution to a “general culture.” He argues that “design
which is objective, committed to the common weal, well composed and refined
constitutes the basis of democratic behavior...work done systematically and in
accordance with the strict formal principles makes those demands for directness,
intelligibility and the integration of all factors which are also vital in sociopolitical
life.” (8)

Responding to Müller-Brockmann’s statement in his essay “Graphic Design

Systems, and the Systems of Graphic Design” (2019), Francisco Laranjo describes
how “the illusion of universality and objectivity coming from a specific historic
and geopolitical context is exported worldwide,” often as an “eternally marketable
style.” (9) Laranjo stresses that systems we take as universally valid are instead
“systems of oppressive deception.” This deception manifests in our consciousness
as questions of style or taste, as a search for or belief in a formal manifestation of
“democratic behavior.” This knowledge building creates language systems that
works dialectically with labor, the process through which humans change the
material world. (10) Even as labor and its effects become abstracted in the digital
spaces of contemporary capitalism, grid systems can be understood as both
responding to and creating “deception,” bound up in a cycle of the “universal”
notions of design that both compel production and are reproduced by laboring
designers experiencing their seduction. We present our “eternally marketable
style” on curated Instagram feeds and increasingly permanent stories. Whether
the grid becomes saturated in grain or subtle gradient, the feedback loop of labor
and consumption extracts its value for capital, no matter our disillusionment to
it. (11)

Brockmann’s consideration of form as something that could somehow define the

idealized, utopian “democracy” might seem enticing under a liberal social order
that posits “Western” democracy as the ultimate model of moral being. It is
“democracy,” of course, that the U.S. imperial empire posits as its justification for
the violent upheaval, sanctions and terror it inflicts on nations of the global South
under the guise of maintaining order and prosperity for “all” people.

In The State and Revolution (1918), Lenin describes a democratic republic as

“the best possible political shell for capitalism, and, therefore, once capital has
gained possession of this very best shell, it establishes its power so securely, so
firmly, that no change of persons, institutions or parties in the bourgeois-
democratic republic can shake it.” (12)
Lenin’s analysis of the state as the locus of political power in capitalist societies
and understanding of capital’s dialectically reinforcing relationship with the
structures of the democratic republic is crucial in politically contextualizing
controlling systems of design.

With Joe Biden’s presidential campaign came the “VOTE NOW” rhetoric of
liberal design studios and consulting agencies, the unending creation of VOTE!
graphics in typefaces deemed aesthetically relevant set with dynamically gridded
layouts. It was as if corporate entities and individual designers alike had taken
bipartisan electoral politics as an esteemed client. Biden’s election came also with
an aesthetic display of democracy’s supposed return, a manifestation of
“oppressive deception” that refuses recognition of imperialism as a decidedly
bipartisan effort.

As Vienna Rye (@vrye) states “reforming empire is really rehabilitating empire.”

(13) And while the design industry and its oppressive, deceptive systems might
feel disconnected from “empire” or the political imperatives of the democratic
state, design (like philosophy, art, law, science and other institutional structures
not directly to do with production) is bound up in the superstructure of society,
affecting and affected by the relations and means of production that make up the
economic base under capitalism.

Marx’s theory of the material base and superstructure is vital in pushing our
analysis of design beyond self-enclosed understandings of progressions of style
and form, supposed “innovations” of perfect solutions or “universally” relevant
brand systems. Design, like the state, is not a neutral system but a system of
political domination entangled with countless other systems that manifest from
commodity production bound up with private ownership and control. It
simultaneously reifies these relations of production, maintaining capitalism’s
relentless exploitation of the material world, convincing an already alienated,
disillusioned audience that our world and structures of capital as we know them
are natural and therefore eternal.

Systems “After” the Modern: Questions of Post-Modernity

I’d like to begin this section by acknowledging that this may not feel, thus far, like
the expected deep dive or close look at the grid system that the title might imply.
Maybe we have grown too familiar, too comfortable with design criticism that
picks apart the supposed matter of design as insular—its developments, its
innovations, its pitfalls, its triumphs—yet fails to analyze its connections, its
contradictions that create and re-create it in constant motion. Too often we
reproduce the assumption of phenomena and fields of knowledge as static even
as we presume to recognize their dynamism, their multiplicity.

I placed “after” in quotations to emphasize that the dictates of Modernist design

persist even as they morph and shift across time. The segmentation of “Western”
design history into easily-packaged movements—Modernism, post-Modernism,
etc— constitutes a reductive narrative of progress that disassociates social
processes from one another, fulfilling notions of an insular, special design world
to be constituted and navigated through an illusion of isolation, of the singular.
With this in mind, we can turn to criticism produced in the late 1990s that
posited what design might mean with the Internet and a questionably
postmodern field.

In his essays “Greasing the Wheels of Capitalism with Style and Taste or the
‘Professionalization’ of American Graphic Design” (1997) and “Graphic Design in
the Postmodern Era,” (1998) designer and educator Jefferey Keedy describes a
relationship between designers and “users” with the rise of the Internet and
“service of other’s desires,” positing “but the ‘others,’ that designers are now so
eager to please are not just some others, or most others; now we want to please
all the others” to guarantee a “huge audience, or maximum usability.” (14) Keedy
questions “is graphic design just a lubricant that keeps everything on the info
highway moving - are we just greasing the wheels of capitalism with style and
taste?” (15)

Keedy’s use of the word “just” in these questions exemplifies an anxiety of

designers at the turn of the century contending with what they saw as the
potential obsoletion of graphic design practice as a “professional” field of
production given the Internet’s transformation of spaces of mass consumption.
Yet in seeking a homogenized audience and formal rules to extend “maximum
usability” to a utopian “all,” graphic design decidedly lubricates capitalism’s
demand for rapidly producible and consumable commodities; it does not matter
whether a symbolic “professionalism” is maintained and cultivated so long as it
fills this material demand.

These anxieties seem to manifest similarly in questions of authorship, in the

writings of the likes of Michael Rock who proposed, in his 1996 essay “Designer
as Author,” alternative models that seek to accept the multifaceted work of design
without seeking a totalizing vision: “designer as translator,” “designer as
performer,” “designer as director.” Yet, he ends his critique by suggesting that to
create a phrase capable of encompassing all the different modes through which
design functions we might turn to “designer = designer.” (16) And, 13 years later
in his amended statement “Fuck Content,” (2009) addressing the notion of
design as a transparent vessel for content, Rock stresses the need to speak
through treatment, declaring that “our content is, perpetually, Design itself.” (17)
Rock’s analysis of content in relation to the designer arguably reifies the search
for a singular message or truth, drawing boundaries around the idea of “design.”
It seems that in defining the designer as itself and declaring design treatment as
“our content,” Rock seeks the insular purity of purpose that his critique
supposedly subverts. In the notion of “designer=designer,” design becomes a
decontextualized, “perpetual” subject: something that we can draw boundaries
around throughout time and apply again and again to different manifestations of
what we typically understand as “content.”

The conditions under which a design is produced, the power structures dictating
that production, the tools used to craft form, the ideological functioning of the
textual content itself, and the dialectical, dialogic relation between them are
obscured in this search for the right theory of an insular, self-perpetuating
graphic design model under guises of “authorship” or “professionalism.”

The Grid and the “Global Style”: Invisible Control

This veiling or erasure works both to depoliticize and decontextualize design

work and to, in contemporary manifestations, obscure the controlling systems
that design clings so desperately to. Returning to the “innovation” of the
Modernist grid as one of these controlling systems, it becomes evident that no
matter how many different ways they have been broken or reconstructed with
post-Modernist thought, the formal dictates of the grid remain.

Years after his questioning of design as the “grease” in capitalism’s wheels,

Keedy, in his essay “The Global Style” for Slanted Magazine (2013), describes
Modernism as “not an unfinished project” but “an unending one” for most
designers. (18) He argues that the “universal visual language” of the International
Style that became the default of corporate capitalism has now morphed into the
“Global Style,” which “looks new but still familiar. In fact, it radiates newness and
very little else...it is easy to assimilate and is obedient to the point of near
transparency.”

This familiarity and “near transparency” manifests in digital spaces where the
grid is not absent but “no longer visible or even detectable...so it is
understandable why designers would stop fussing with grids when it is the
ground beneath us, the water we swim in and the air we breathe in our
virtual/digital world.” In a meme that draws connection between the A paper
system with its attempt to economize and standardize mathematical relationships
for print media and responsive web design as we know it now, designer Leslie Liu
(lliu.site) points to the illusory “democratizing” function of the unendingly
responsive web space. (19) The connection they build between these systems of
standardization problematizes flexibility as a new default of systems building that
attempts functionality at every possible device size; the web browser becomes a
new territory to conquer, to provide a democratic “universal” function that does
not exist. The hierarchical web space is saturated so heavily in grid forms, that it
becomes impenetrable, a space of insidious, invisible control.

Returning to Darin Buzon’s essay, we can read the “Global Style” as a fitting
continuity from the “International Style,” understanding how both assert a
violent universality: a false reference to a collective. Buzon stresses that “by
extending itself outside its borders, the International Style mobilized the same
Western imperialism that sought to supersede whole graphic traditions, language
loss, and the disappearance of indigenous scripts. What was even “international”
about International Style if only accessible to Europe and its colonies who
underwent a conditioning of white supremacy?” (20)

Just as the idea of an “international” style constitutes an ideological genocide in

exporting graphics dictated by the white colonial order, a “global” style presumes
to encompass the totality of our world. This shift in language mirrors the
hegemonic violence of the contemporary U.S. imperial project. A supposed
“Global Style” weaponizes the term at the same time that it neutralizes it, creating
a false aura of a universal system that is rather a violent global order that crafts
and maintains empire, demonizing racialized communities of the global South.

No matter how “transparent” the newness of this style might become, no matter
how invisible its grids, this supposed Global Style functions as yet another
attempt to package design systems in the right language. But what comes from
this insistence that we might add the appropriate term to “design” and unlock
some imaginary potential? What revolutionary possibilities do we diminish?

Returning to Dialectics: Radical Reimagination and Refusal

I do not want to pretend to know how to end this discussion, even if temporarily.
I feel a compulsion to wrap it up in a bow, to package my own analysis just tightly
enough so that it might, too, be consumed by those already deemed worthy in a
design world of “professional” taste and uncritical circulation. Yet, it is this
compulsion that reminds me of the vigilance (as heavy as this word may feel) we
must maintain in engaging critically with the field even before we supposedly
“enter” it. To even presume that there is a threshold I would cross into this
imagined realm, makes clear design’s oppressive delineation of both material and
symbolic boundaries with the illusory language of individual attainment
weaponized by and for capital.

As Libby Mars states in her essay “Post-Authentic Sincerity” (2020) “like it or

not, we’re always participating in commercial design. When we’re designing for
non-jobs or non-clients, we’re still doing marketing work: for ourselves, for the
institutions where we learned our methods.” (21) Yet this inescapable
engagement with commercial design, as Mars discusses, does not mean a void of
agency. If anything, it is a reminder that our individual participation is
necessitated by relations of production that leave us evermore alienated from our
labor, our tools, our fellow workers, in a cycle of production through which we are
further commodified, the more commodities we produce. (22)

We are bound up in cycles of value extraction but are taught to create as if design
is not essential to that those very same processes. We are taught to create as if
design has no material relation to any other phenomena, as if it became
professional and therefore impenetrable: a grand system composed of countless
regulatory tools to be honed and optimized in its ever forward-thinking,
innovative production.

I focused, here, on the Modernist grid because of its pervasiveness, its stubborn
reinvention across time. It seems helpful in articulating design’s counter-
revolutionary function, its necessary entanglement with capitalism, yet
dangerous refusal of its political functions. The grid assumes purity, it assumes
an objectivity that denies its existence as a political weapon: a system to be
reformed within itself; to be innovated but never overhauled; to be invisible but
never abolished.

You might ask then, so what now? Do we somehow abolish the European grid?
Do we invent an “abolitionist grid,” a “Marxist grid system” and thus, by
extension, “Abolitionist Design”, “Communist Design,” perhaps?

These questions reflect an impulse that now saturates the field. Decolonization
practices have been decontextualized and co-opted by white-dominated
institutions. Anti-racism has been stripped of revolutionary potential, another
tool for liberal design discourse to cultivate new heroes diverse enough to posit a
reformed, post-racial world. The historically and politically recontextualized
typefaces of VocalType have become decontextualized in their rampant
circulation, used as a new default rather than to hack the old. So, naturally, we
question if design might also co-opt the likes of abolition or Marxism, packaging
political ideology into counter-revolutionary, depoliticized forms.
Yet, so long as the economic base remains firmly in-tact and the working- class
cannot seize control of the state, systems of the superstructure, design included,
will continue to perform its necessary role in reinforcing the relations of
production and the supremacy of the ruling class. This does not mean, however,
that we cannot imagine and build new institutions, avenues of making public that
make for radical resistance and survival under oppressive state apparatuses. As
founder of Queer.Archive.Work and design educator Paul Soulellis discusses in
his narrative syllabus “Radical Publishing During Crisis” (2020), “urgency” in
publishing and practices of mutual aid, broadly speaking, might mean a “slow
ongoing commitment to maintenance and communal care” that rejects the toxic
cultural impulses of racial capitalism and white supremacy. (23)

Maybe we must reject our own commodification as laborers or future laborers in

an oppressive design field that convinces us of its sanctity, of its unending
innovation. In other words, maybe we might both survive and reimagine, refusing
the seductive impulse to seek change within a controlling system that becomes an
armature of capitalist empire.

Mao Zedong in his essay “On Contradiction,” stresses commitment to the

materialist analysis of social phenomena, quoting Lenin in saying that “in order
really to know an object we must embrace, study all its sides, all connections and
“mediations.” (24) We must disabuse design of its insular study, its refusal to
contend with the connections and mediations that constitute its dialectical, ever-
moving material reality. We must vigilantly reject solutionism and arm ourselves
with political grounding to confront uncritical aesthetic discourses. We must
contend with the anxiety of unknowing.