A Few Quotes from Armin Hofmann’s “Graphic Design Manual” to Start the Year
When Armin passed late last year, I wanted to re-familiarize myself with his work after really not thinking about him too too much since my years in school (yeah yeah, I know, I should do better). So, I picked up his Graphic Design Manual as a place to start. It was originally published in 1965, and revised in 1988, so its, uh, a bit dated. However, no suprise that there’s stuff in there that’s just as applicable today as it was in ‘65 or ’88 or whenever it was originally written. It’s all pretty fundamental stuff, really, but it was good to be reminded of it, and I figured I would share a few lines that stood out to me.
“It would be wrong to conceive of the designer as anything but the service of giving messages, events, ideas and values of every kind a visible form.”
“The instruments and aids that are placed in our hands nowadays are far too tricky for us to use them unquestioningly. The more cunningly devised they are, the greater the knowledge that is required before they can be put to wise and responsible use.”
“We must accustom ourselves to the idea that our mental and vocational equipment must be constantly refurbished and that our chances of making an effective contribution to an essential process depend on the regularity with which we bring our knowledge up to date.”
“The boundaries between work as practice and work merely aimed at a particular result must be removed. Every exercise or study which is properly done must show a result, and every valid result must have aspects which provide scope for exercise and experiment.”
“No dividing line must be drawn in the future between work done with art qualities in view and work done with merely a commercial application in view. A valid form of unity can be found.”
Thanks Armin. Here’s to continued learning and more experimentation in the new year.
