I wrote this over a year ago, when my blog had no readers, and I was writing for myself. Because I have recently become interested in organizing a Society of Graphic Designers into a standard-bearer for Pakistan, I hope to revive dialogue on design, and maybe inject some life into a stale industry.
I spend some time every day surfing other designers’ portfolios, looking for the roots of their inspiration for each piece. I vividly remember one site where the designer placed photographs of random places (a public crossing painted on the road) next to a finished design piece, showing the elements from which he drew his creativity. It made me think (yes, I do that occasionally). Are the symbols and traditions of design built from the environment around us? If so (and I believe that), then perhaps the biggest problem with Pakistan is our inability to merge the British Raj with centuries of Mughal history; our identity as muslims, and as a secular nation; our admiration for the West and India, and our contempt for our own products; our desire to rekindle the past, and the world’s inexorable move towards globalization; our grass-roots, cultural past, and the future’s hi-tech world. Perhaps this is our identity: conflict.
Literally and figuratively, Pakistan has designed within a conflict zone: three wars with India, close ties with Afghanistan through the Soviet War, and the focus of the world in the Global War on Islam.. oops, I mean Terror. Many years ago, in the midst of the worst violence between the MQM and the government (Operation Clean-Up – Benazir Bhutto’s paranoid reaction to a legitimate political party that threatened her own. She murdered 15,000 men, young and old, in her battle for power in Pakistan’s most influential city), one analyst pointed out the impact of living with constant threat on ordinary citizens. He mentioned apathy and an inherent coldness acquired by Karachiites, a patina of self-preservation and acclimitization to destruction and death.
Somehow, this must also affect our sense of design, shouldn’t it? The most visible forms of design in Karachi are the massive bilboards that block the landscape at every turn. Multinational corporations, most notably banks, have commissioned annual boards, over 60 feet in size, dominating the view at every turn – today these boards are slickly designed, with crisp photographs of happy shiny people endorsing a product. There is no conflict here. Nor is there any real semblance of branding. Every product looks alike. At the moment colors and words differentiate one product slightly from another, but what happens when there are multiple companies sporting the same colors?
As early as 10 years ago, a handful of advertising agencies boasted the entire sum of Pakistan’s designers – distinctive agencies that sported their own style, their own vision. Until 1996, when Indus Valley graduated the third batch of graphic designers, agencies brought interns in to train them to their style, their ideas – from hard sell, to elegance, to crazy clutter and some outstanding works by one or two newcomers, the field was bursting with energy, ready to explode as technology, on the one hand, offered new, endless possibilities to the designer, and on the other, with a whole new generation of designers who would come in “pre-trained” would take over the grunt work, and let the senior designers blow their minds open in the new-found spare time.
So, what went wrong? What led the advertising and design scene from diversity and rich tradition to bland, slick photography and type-play?
Pakistan has lost nuance in its design. I come from a school that has tried hard to embed a Pakistani flavour among its students, but their traditions have lost out to modernity. Unfortunately, the only modernity we aspire to are found in western Graphic Design books and on Cable TV. Technology is the real designer today, as the pace gets faster, and the time to make brain-to-hand connections gets shorter and shorter.
From a broad field of illustration, style, typography, photography, art, and conceptualization with one’s hands, the design industry is now about cameras, film, software; about clean layouts, shiny faces, impact and surface gloss. There is no room for exploration, deviation, radicalization, delirium, crazy labyrinths of clues and subtle, subliminal dilemmas that reflect me, a Pakistani, a muslim, an individual.
If our identity is conflict, then perhaps embracing it would be a worthwhile experiment, instead of burying our heads in the sand and pretending we live in the first world.