Then, when my alma mater changed the name of my degree program from Bachelorstudiengang Grafikdesign to Bachelorstudiengang Kommunikationsdesign, I went through something of a professional identity crisis. A crisis of calling, so to speak.
As a consequence of resolving this tension, I renamed my profession from Grafikdesigner to Kommunikationsdesigner.
Which, of course, felt like something halfway between an attempt to stay “with it” and the efforts of certain German design movements to write everything in lowercase letters.
Even the Verein (a very German institution; I’m a member of two Vereine, three if you count the one that hasn’t been legally established yet) that exists to represent my professional interests has undergone much the same identity crisis.
The BDG originally stood for Bund der Deutschen Gebrauchsgraphiker from 1919 to 1968, then Bund Deutscher Graphik-Designer from 1968 to 2009, followed by Berufsverband der Deutschen Kommunikationsdesigner from 2009 to 2021, and finally, since November 2021, Berufsverband Kommunikationsdesign.
Apparently, even the people representing German designers have trouble deciding what German designers should call themselves.
And modernizing really works in one simple way: by making something obsolete, or at the very least, seem obsolete. If I call myself a Grafikdesigner, is that the same as mentioning that I own a fax machine?
Calling myself a Kommunikationdesigner feels sort of nebulous to me. Almost everything designed communicates something. A chair communicates. So does a building. Supermarket aisles are really good at communicating, too.
Calling myself a communication designer seems broad, broader than I am comfortable with, to be honest. Institutions are all about broad categories, I know that, but personally this breadth is less useful to me.
So I have decided to do something rather unfashionable: call myself a Grafikdesigner because it describes what I actually do.
Quelle: Original auf Code & Canvas