That Thing You Don't!
From the archives: TWTFL vol. 2's essay on "a hit in graphic design"
This essay originally appeared in/on the second volume of t-shirt-as-zine Two Way Tie for Last, a collaboration with my good pal Ian Lynam for his and Yuki’s excellent shop, Sailosaibin, and released just in time for their popup at Harajuku’s signature fashion mall, LaForet. Packed with graphic work, Ian’s and my two essays on the idea of a “hit” in graphic design were too long to fit on a shirt anyway, so the essays also exists as/on a microsite (QR code is on the tees of course). I am posting here for visibility, and also as a reminder(? reflection?) on growth and change. By which I mean: rereading this now I don’t think any of this is wrong, but I don’t think I would have thought to look at things this way if I were to sit to write something now. I started this Sub awhile ago thinking it would be design and art writing. I think I’m actually more so writing about “life,” so the fact that the subject matter has drifted photowards lately, I think is just a reflection of where I’m having insights. You can infer a lot about my mental state re the practice of graphic design at the time of originally writing this (Fall 2024)—but I’ll leave that to you.
Ian graciously and expertly edited the tee/site version of the essay down from about twice as long, and gave some much needed structure. I have lightly edited a few passages here to correct one continuity error and some grammar.
Oh, and I still haven’t had a hit yet! But I seem to have naturally stopped caring about it. Or—can it be?—is writing…a powerful tool for overcoming internal strife?!?!??!?!?
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Welcome, dear reader, to Two Way Tie for Last, Vol II. The first “volume” was a ‘hit’—by the standards of a small shop in a quiet neighborhood of a big city where English isn’t the first language. People seemed to respond to a weird set of two long-sleeve shirts covered in text and graphics—to the tune of selling out both printed editions…
So when we think about another, maybe without realizing it, we wonder: can we do it again?
Will we have another hit, or will it be the ol’ sophomore jinx? Will this one sell even more? Will it be Sailosaibin’s biggest hit? And if so, is that on its own merit, or due to the cachet of debuting at Harajuku fashion hub Laforet? Where does the “hit” lie in graphic design, which is so dependent on the context of the surface that bears it? There’s not much profit in t-shirt-as-zine, so why exactly do we care if it’s a hit, anyway?
Deceptively, “Graphic Design(er)” as a term has historically designated a wide range of career vectors, with only the core tools in common. The main route (and assumption of design education) was working in-house at an agency, publication, or other corporation. This has (or at least had) stability as well as a path to career advancement. However, for we intrepid, foolish, independent designers, (i.e. freelancing, even if only on the side) we need to secure a steady(ish) stream of work, which means expanding our potential client pool beyond the circle of people that we personally know. As far as that goes, there are primarily two ways:
The first is based on you/your reputation as designer, as person, as worker, as craftsperson. Knowledge, creativity, attention to detail, being pleasant to work with, delivering on time, managing one’s ego, tours of duty at well-known studios or agencies, etc., all help build up a reputation as a good designer. As your reputation grows, you’ll work enough that you’ll get to know enough people that know enough people, and your name will get around. The only problem with expertise, consistency and professionalism is that they take a long time—maybe an entire career.
The second way to get known is via the work, where a piece or a project stands as metonym for you as a person. Phrases like, “Oh, right, I recognize that [work], I just didn’t know the designer’s name” or “The name sounds familiar but can’t picture the work…what’s something of theirs I would know?” show that there hasn’t been the desired fusion/attachment of the designer to the work. But when it works correctly, a notable work crosses the wires and short-circuits the distinction between known as person and known for work. A piece of work can suggest ability and gives a rapid jolt to the image of efficacy of the designer. “If she did this, she must be a really good designer…” To borrow from ol’ Saul Kripke, the name “Milton Glaser” might not mean anything, but “the designer of the ‘I ❤️ New York’ logo” is clearly a skilled genius!
The allure of getting known for the work is that a successful single work or short run doesn’t require any of the aspects of consistency or expertise above. There is such a thing as getting ‘lucky’—the right place, the right time, the right client, the right platform, etc. And here’s where we cross over into the framing of the hit.
Just like a hit single for a one-hit wonder can potentially create a lifetime of revenue, the right piece of design at the right time can—if not make—then at least launch a design career. Compared to the possibility of instant and overnight success, it seems tedious to resign oneself to the long slog of establishing a career. Once we have the idea that things can be a hit—hope springs as eternally as disappointment.
As human beings, we are mental modeling machines, and our hunger for more categories and classifications means that it’s almost impossible to unlearn a concept. Especially for a concept that’s repeated and reinforced in popular culture and everyday language as often as some iteration of the hit/flop dichotomy. Once you have the concept of a unicorn in your mind, if you see a horse with a horn, that’s what you’re gonna call it. It becomes difficult to approach new circumstances without filtering them through the old lenses we’ve picked up along the way—and so things hit—succeed, as verified by popularity, or miss—fail, as verified by obscurity.
Obscurity doesn’t serve the work or the creator. Why put it out there if there’s not an assumption that someone, somewhere, might see it, and respond in some way? And wouldn’t it be even better if a lot of people liked it? Well—that’s a hit. A hit is the first step. A hit shows that you can produce, that you can be trusted, that you have the juice. The word hit calls up montages from films like That Thing You Do! and Josie and the Pussycats—expensive A&R dinners, makeovers and shopping bags, playing in front of massive crowds, star-studded events, etc.—the notion that a hit means an overnight change in one’s life.
Even though in talking about graphic design we don’t really use the word “hit,” there are circumstances that conform to the idea we have of hits from other media, with pop songs being the canonical example. What follows is sort of an examination of: how applicable is the concept really? How does it shape our expectations and the way we encounter other designers and their work? Would we think about design differently if we thought in terms of hits, or consider if we already do? What effect does a “hit” mentality have on practice, self-image/identity, etc.?
Star power
Ultimately, the question of a hit might be more of a question of nobody/somebody dichotomy. After all, the thing we were after from the start was being known as a means to securing more work. But does a hit really make you a ‘somebody’ overnight?
The level of fame that a graphic designer can expect relative to a musician is paltry at best. The image of celebrity we picture for musicians is about having: selling out Madison Square Garden more so than playing it, lounging by the pool, long vacations, etc.—whereas for the designer it typically means just the ability to get more and better work, with bigger clients and budgets theoretically ensuring more opportunity to create with fewer limits.
For aspiring musical artists, that’s also the final stop. They can, of course, continue to hone their skills or start composing/directing, but they remain just that—an artist, a musician. For designers, to stay a mere designer is in many ways a failure to advance in one’s career. The expectation is that everyone must strive to become an Art Director or a Creative Director, etc., which doesn’t make a lot of sense considering the fact that the pyramid is smaller at the top—there are far fewer Executive Creative Director positions available than Junior Designer positions.
Creative direction and art direction also aren’t necessarily the same skillset as graphic design. And then being so far downstream of the overall process of a project, it’s often very difficult for unknown designers to have much input—often reduced to “hands work”—the frustrating act of executing the directives of someone with less experience or expertise in graphic design, but higher up the call sheet, so to speak.
A pop song hangs on the identity of the artist involved, and is brought into being by the producers. All other personnel are simply that—personnel. A track with a different singer would be a different artistic expression, but with a different synth programmer—arguably less so. There are obviously vastly different skill, knowledge, and creativity levels among designers, but it would be a rare type of project that the designer is “above the line.”
Being above the line signifies importance, someone who is contributing a performance. A record is, after all, a record of a performance. The Zutons’ Valerie and Amy Winehouse’s Valerie are the same song, but not the same record of the same performance (and to further the point, the latter is actually a Mark Ronson record, featuring Amy Winehouse). The performance, that marriage of artist and moment, is The Thing: discrete, and with its own identity. Graphic design isn’t thought of as a performance in the same way (although the process of creating a popular record in a digital studio environment is probably closer to Photoshop than it is to a ’60’s Stax studio session), but rather as an optional, relatively interchangeable element of the marketing of the thing itself. And indeed the fact remains that while I have loved many, many record covers over the years, I refer to them by the musical artist, not the designer—if I know who that is at all.
The hit as unit
Following the way we use the word colloquially, I’m thinking of the unit of the hit as We’ve Only Just Begun, or Close to You, rather than the oeuvre of Carpenters, Karen Carpenter as person, Karen Carpenter as a drummer, the musicianship of Karen Carpenter, the legacy of Karen Carpenter, etc.
It’s tempting to say that the equivalent for graphic design is the (singular) piece: the poster, the CD/LP, the book, the zine, the t-shirt, the layout, the campaign—this is where it admittedly starts to get fuzzy—rather than the portfolio, the oeuvre, the Twitter personality, the AIGA profile, the lifestyle spread in Casa Brutus…
In my earlier musing on if this shirt would be a hit, you’ll notice I wondered if the shirt would be a hit. It’s sort of implied that that would be because of the design, since the shirt itself, prior to graphic intervention, is an ordinary Gildan blank. A hit design needs something else to act as the vehicle on which it rides. This causes a major difficulty for comparing hits to hits: pop songs are discreet standalone media, valued for their own merits.
On the other hand, graphic design hits can be hard to parse: is the design a hit, or the substrate? The recent Charli XCX brat memes that became tired long before people were tired of making them, would not have become a visual meme in the first place if people didn’t like the album, its vibe, and want to align themselves with the record and Charli. The design is a hit, but not necessarily because of the design, aside from ease of imitation.
You can argue that pop songs are also influenced by the wider cultural moment, the artist, being on the soundtrack to a blockbuster film, etc.—but the hit single, to qualify as a hit, must take on a life of its own independently, where it can be tracked as itself. “Hit” designs might echo on in the form of tropes or (rarely) canonization, but ultimately graphic design tends to live and die (or hit and miss) more on the back of the substrate than on its own merits. You’ll go a lot higher if you hitch your wagon to a star.
Industry and Advocacy
The reason there are hits in music is because there are people whose job is making sure that there are hits in music. This isn’t just facilitating the recording, but also making sure that the track gets airtime and exposure and subsequently profiting from those tracks, which are, as established above, discrete. Music marketing is relentless and multi-channeled and regardless of whether it’s directly or via radio or other programming, the idea is that it reaches consumers. Graphic design by contrast is less an industry and more of a vocation, the services of which are applied in service of other industries (for example, a designer working at an ad agency is part of the advertising industry). Graphic design organizations and awards generally (and vaguely) promote graphic design to other industries, or more frequently, to other designers.
Graphic design in the abstract does seem to have some cachet, to be thought of as “a cool job,” and even as in some way important, but that’s a very general and casual opinion that I suspect is just runoff from 2010’s product design/“design is good business”/“Airspace”-type business and hustle culture and the rise of streetwear as a dominant fashion paradigm. So, while probably more people are aware of graphic design as a discipline or at least activity, than ever before, and probably more people consider themselves to be proficient at it, and practitioners, than ever before, I don’t see any evidence that having more avenues for encountering graphic design facilitates more graphic design hits. It’s some kind of machine, but it isn’t a hit machine.
The Airwaves
A major difference between a radio/LP/casette/CD/iTunes purchase model and the platforms we have today is what exactly they’re promoting: the massive promotional machine of music was promoting music: tracks, albums, artists; the platforms of today promote themselves, as slightly different flavors of infinite “content.” The music industry is famously problematic, but the level of stewardship of platforms is truly dismal by comparison. “Popular content” is almost its own media type at this point, an amalgam of memes, selfies, AI slop, and influencers, but the main content is speed, not at all conducive to graphic design. Brat in blurred Helvetica on barf green might be all you can really get away with in an attention economy.
While a platform like TikTok has the ability to generate pop hits by bundling them with videos of e-girls doing dances seemingly developed for people trying to regain mobility after an accident, graphic design doesn’t benefit from an environment that’s hostile to careful, thoughtful reading; mixing graphic design in with other stuff means it has to compete with everything else on there, while also reducing it to the same level. There is an unnecessarily robust critical apparatus for popular music, but graphic design… well, less so. Most appreciation of design is already surface level, with most attention it receives due to the substrate, and social media doesn’t seem like the richest soil for a studied, nuanced medium to thrive.
The Currency of Being Current
The music industry has mechanics for tracking hits, such as Billboard in the West and Oricon in the East. Awards have never meant much of anything in either music or graphic design, so—what’s the threshold of a graphic design hit? How do you know you have one? Who decides it? What does it really mean?
Since graphic design and music alike hitch rides on fashion, advertising and marketing—these affordances create the possibility of speed and even instantaneity, with moodboards and algorithms making this process even faster. As culture accelerates and becomes infinitely more disposable, so too do music and graphic design, resulting in the hyperpop goop that is today’s sonics and aesthetics: album design reduced to a 1080 x 1080 jpeg and music reduced to the populist results of songwriting boot camps or Spotify soundalike murk.
Ultimately, mass media are just that: for the masses. The music industries are dedicated to making sure their output is everywhere, and palatable to the middle of whatever bell curve one wants to consider, no specialist knowledge required. Design is probably only looked at on its own merits by other designers, or by coastal elite types who absorbed the notion that design is something they should know about, as part of feeling “in the know.”
The attempt to capture the current vibe, to be current, is as responsible for shifting preferences in graphic design as in Top 40 radio… and practitioners are expected to keep up with the times. Popular tastes are popular regardless of media, and general palatability is a restrictive concern in both.
Ahem…
Wondering about this out loud is probably deeply uncool, and also reveals my personal struggle with never having had a “hit” in my career-to-date. People that have had hits probably don’t need to think about it in the same way—just like how people that are born into wealth don’t understand how money works. The fact of the matter is that trying to have a hit is very cringe—just like knowing your exact follower count on social media or Googling yourself. Still, there’s an irresistible cultural allure to “heat” as in Hot 100—and art directors and clients looking to work with a hot (young) designer show that hit-adjacent thinking has infiltrated the way that we think about graphic designers and their output.
Now that we’ve considered some formal and contextual similarities and differences, the fact remains that there are hits, somehow. Periodically, out of nowhere, somebody’s gotta get a hit—and it might be that the very fact that it’s unpredictable is the very thing that makes the possibility so hard to let go. Sometimes, something that doesn’t seem like there’s any reason to expect it to hit, does. So we find ourselves disappointed or agonized over the work and its reception and performance—which aren’t up to us—rather than focusing on developing skills and craft—which are.
The skills that lead to being good at doing the work don’t always result in good work (e.g. needing to accommodate factors such as clients’ tastes, disorganization, or ineffective communication). Designers aren’t classified by the wider culture as artists, but I suspect that more of us than not think of ourselves more like artists than technicians. I suspect that most of us, if I asked, would prefer to be known for being good at our chosen vocation than merely well-known at it. But that’s not really the value we pursue or are rewarded for. The language of jealousy is often couched in terms of “hit-like” instances or runs of success, rather than “I wish I was as good as X designer”
A popular, hit work doesn’t guarantee any of the qualities of a mature, capable designer. In the absence of a promotional machine or advocacy group, a hit in graphic design is a matter of popular taste—which doesn’t necessarily mean “good” work. Indeed, as we work towards stability the old fashioned, hard-won way, we might also move farther away from the kind of trope-heavy or instantly memeable work that popular taste increasingly favors as mainstream awareness of graphic design as an element of everday culture grows.
Having a hit isn’t up to us, and susceptibility, even incidentally, to thinking in terms of hits puts the way we think of ourselves and our work at the mercy of a mass audience that isn’t really paying attention to our collective work in the same way that we are. But I also don’t think that most graphic design institutions are particularly relevant, and most seem to spend a lot of effort vainly trying to institute some sort of star system, with crowning the current designers of the moment as a means of elevating the institution by association. When I implied before that awards don’t matter, I wasn’t kidding, but in lieu of any other clear measure of “success” in graphic design, I’ll definitely accept a retroactive ADC Young Guns or (strangely, more likely) a Grammy. In the meantime, I guess I should get started on developing expertise, consistency, and professionalism.∎