Sometimes I love graphic design. Sometimes I can’t help talking about it, though I wonder if my friends care about what the AIGA name change or the Red Cross’s logo concerns matter to anyone. Sometimes, though, I don’t love graphic design. I want to smack graphic design for being so stupid, so self-important, so willfully ignorant of anything that really matters to anyone.

I suppose that a recurring concern of mine is the “relevance” of anything I do—how much the practice matters to people who aren’t themselves practitioners or aspiring practitioners. Comics, cultural studies scholarship, and the real nitty-gritty practices of graphic design all sort of exist on the periphery of American cultural consciousness, and I’m okay with that, for the most part. I think all of these can actually have an impact on society at large in their own ways. I think they’re also largely composed of people operating in insular communities; and while I think it’s okay to only be well known to a niche market, I also personally think it’s important to keep things in perspective. I’ll reserve my rants about comics and cultural studies for another day. Today, I’m pissed at graphic design for being so frigging dumb.

And I’m not even talking about designing ads that promote useless stuff that nobody needs. This post was inspired, actually, by a designer hung up on a typographic error in the background of a movie. She cites a New York Times article about how the movie Good Night, and Good Luck featured a sign set in Helvetica years before the font came to be used in this country, among other typographic anachronisms. The designer writes that this is an “interesting” piece, but that somehow typography was “cited incorrectly,” a “vexing” start to the new year:

Sadly, the person responsible for this act of typographic malfeasance remains a complete mystery to the reader: he or she is, instead, protected by the reporter who somehow never manages to identify a production designer, set decorator, property master or design consultant — any number of individuals (depending upon the production) who might be responsible for the use of graphic design in a film. Though the critics of these anachronisms are named, none of the guilty parties are — leaving it up to those of us who sit patiently through the high-speed scrolling at the end of the film to concoct our own Halls of Shame, our own imaginary perp walks for the typographically unenlightened (if well-paid) hacks who somehow manage to avoid fact-checking that includes even the slightest debt to design history (another term, by the way, completely left out of Edidn’s piece.)

I have an idea of why “design history” is completely left out of the Times piece: Nobody gives a damn. This isn’t editorial oversight. It’s a newspaper keeping it brief because nobody gives a damn about your peculiar, nerdy bullshit.

The inability of graphic design to get over itself blows my mind. It’s not that I don’t think that avoidable errors such as these should be … well, avoided. That would be great, really. But the writer of the above statement notes herself that such errors “only seem to be noticed by type obsessives like myself and perhaps a few others.”

I had about ten more things I wanted to rant about with regard to the general foolishness of common designer complaints, but suddenly I’m struck by the irony of spending my morning ranting on a personal blog about insular communities wasting their time. I’ll now stop wasting your time ranting about designers wasting their time.