Notes
- Commodity fetishism makes you forget that a thing you buy is the product of someones labour - you don't think about someone making a product with clothes you buy from a shop as you would with buying something from a craft fair
- A system with the ultimate drive for profit can't really ever be sustainable. For a business, profit is always their first concern and the environment comes after this
- Brands create a new market for their products with re-branding and greenwashing
First Things First - A Manifesto (1964 - Ken Garland)
- Because you have skills you have a decision to make: put your talents to use to influence the world for good or use them to advertise random objects
- How simple/possible is it to actually stick to this? People still need to earn money, especially students with all the debt they will be in. Why do something that won't help you?
- You should design things that promote education; culture; and the good of the world
- Graphic designers waste their talent when they could be doing something better
First Things First - Manifesto (2000)
We, the undersigned, are graphic designers, art directors and visual communicators who have been raised in a world in which the techniques and apparatus of advertising have persistently been presented to us as the most lucrative, effective and desirable use of our talents. Many design teachers and mentors promote this belief; the market rewards it; a tide of books and publications reinforces it.
Encouraged in this direction, designers then apply their skill and imagination to sell dog biscuits, designer coffee, diamonds, detergents, hair gel, cigarettes, credit cards, sneakers, butt toners, light beer and heavy-duty recreational vehicles. Commercial work has always paid the bills, but many graphic designers have now let it become, in large measure, what graphic designers do. This, in turn, is how the world perceives design. The profession’s time and energy is used up manufacturing demand for things that are inessential at best.
Many of us have grown increasingly uncomfortable with this view of design. Designers who devote their efforts primarily to advertising, marketing and brand development are supporting, and implicitly endorsing, a mental environment so saturated with commercial messages that it is changing the very way citizen-consumers speak, think, feel, respond and interact. To some extent we are all helping draft a reductive and immeasurably harmful code of public discourse.
There are pursuits more worthy of our problem-solving skills. Unprecedented environmental, social and cultural crises demand our attention. Many cultural interventions, social marketing campaigns, books, magazines, exhibitions, educational tools, television programmes, films, charitable causes and other information design projects urgently require our expertise and help.
We propose a reversal of priorities in favour of more useful, lasting and democratic forms of communication – a mindshift
away from product marketing
and toward the exploration and production of a new kind of meaning. The scope of debate is shrinking; it must expand. Consumerism is running uncontested; it must be challenged by other perspectives expressed, in part, through the visual languages and resources of design.
In 1964, 22 visual communicators signed the original call for our skills to be put to worthwhile use. With the explosive growth of global commercial culture, their message has only grown more urgent. Today, we renew their manifesto in expectation that no more decades will pass before it is taken to heart.
- The items that described are luxury items that define a person, they are carefully chosen as there is an ethical dilemma between each one
- Would you be comfortable marketing those?
- This manifesto has a different focus: anti-capitalism
- There are lots of differences between the manifestos
- Do you agree? Ultimately your ethics are what you can afford them to be, the designers who have signed the manifesto are all already rich and successful
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