design Q Graphic design is the most ubiquitous of all the arts. It responds to needs at once personal and public, embraces concerns both economic and ergonomic, and is informed by many disciplines including art and architecture, philosophy and ethics, literature and language, science and politics and performance. Graphic design is everywhere, touching everything we do, everything we see, everything we buy: we see it on billboards and in Bibles, on taxi receipts and on web sites, on birth certificates and on gift certificates, on the folded instructions inside jars of aspirin and on the thick pages of childrens' picture books. Graphic design is the boldly directional arrows on street signs and the blurred, frenetic typography on the title sequence to E.R. It is the bright green logo for the New York Jets and the monochromatic front page of The Wall Street Journal. It is hang-tags in clothing stores, postage stamps and food packaging, fascist propaganda posters and brainless junk mail. Graphic design is complex combinations of words and pictures, numbers and charts, photographs and illustrations that, in order to succeed, demand the clear thinking of a particularly thoughtful individual who can orchestrate these elements so that they all add up to something distinctive, or useful, or playful, or surprising, or subversive, or somehow memorable. Graphic design is a popular art and a practical art, an applied art and an ancient art. Simply put, it is the art of visualizing ideas. - Jessica Helfand Jessica Helfand is a graphic designer and the author of "Six +2: Essays on Design and New Media" and "Paul Rand: American Modernist", distributed by Emigre. 000131 ... nameless A design for life (manic street preachers) 000331 ... doggy Commercialism. Arbitrary art. Pretty little pictures. Nice. 000331 ... birdmad this prison is my own design my own device foolish me i forgot to build a way out 000819 ... girl_jane A Robert Frost poem 020328 ... Photophobe Burning fuck you doggy. Its not abitrary art, its more than art. Art with its snooty "art for arts sake" ideals. Design reaches people regardless. Design demands that you see it, because it has purpose beyond itself. 020329 ... zeke embrace error 040130 ... hsgatincamail happiness 040701 ... once again Meaning Beautiful. Form & Functionality. The bane of my existence. The love of my life. 040701 what's it to you? who go blather from