complic8d

I face the computer everyday. That may conjure the image of a computer whiz kid or a geek which I am far from or of someone who belongs to a whole new generation brought up and bred on the ubiquitous presence of the internet and other electronic wonders.

I am none of those. But neither am I a typewriter-hugging, sentimental, old world lifestyle lover. I’ll always be interested in things past, mine or that of my people. But the past will always be in the past no matter how many times you turn it over, flip it upside down, burn it sideways, do whatever you want with it. (Whew! For someone who’s so stuck in the past, that was refreshing!)

I face the computer every day and I write about historical stuff. That sure is quite an unlikely mix. But somehow things past and new complement each other. Just like writing and graphic design.

I do graphic design. It’s an art form that gives one a certain high quite different from writing. Just like in painting, one expresses oneself in graphic design through symbols, forms, and spaces.

If a modernist painter had to come up with abstract expressionism to reveal the unexpressed, intangible truths inside him, the graphic designer has only recourse to symbols in order to communicate. The content (as in publications) being the domain of the writer.

Western writing is unlike other forms of writing where symbols like pictographs are part of the writing process. There can be a whole lot of story why a stroke or symbol is applied to this or that kind of writing.

You don’t look at the alphabet and imagine what image they suggest. They simply have assigned meanings already.

One graphic designer made a breakthrough when he simply declared “print is dead,” and in its wake, numbers and the alphabet are freed from their function and assigned meanings. Suddenly a flipped number 3 can stand for letter E, or 5 for S. His name is David Carson.

With the popularity of text messaging nowadays, Carson seems prophetic with his repurposed graphic symbols. We type Gr8t when we mean great. That’s quite even more radical than what Carson first experimented.

What we’re seeing, I’d like to think, are more than lazy shortcuts but maybe of writing itself evolving. Language as recorded in writing is never static. It’s always dynamic.

There has always been a dichotomy between writing and meaning. We say so much when we mean so little. It’s like paying a stack of devalued paper bills for a t-shirt.

For the graphic designer, it’s both exciting and alarming. It’s like stealing fire from the gods or eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge. The medium is now the message. Modernist dichotomy is replaced with deconstruction’s chaos and primordial creativity (Carson’s work sometimes seem primordial with their originality). It’s either Carson simply broke down all the rules or really started quite something new.

This morning, I’m facing the computer as a writer. Tonight, I’ll face it as a graphic designer. I would want a synthesis myself. Life as it is, is complc8d enough.