12 (New) Steps On The Road To Design Hell

Milton Glaser was responsible for some of the most iconic pieces of design and illustration from the past century, but as an educator and public figure, he also became a prominent advocate for ethics in design. He didn’t shy away from the messy questions about commerce and consumption that regularly come up in our profession.

With that in mind, he wrote the “12 Steps on the Road to Design Hell,” a series of hypotheticals he’d pose to his students about the jobs that might come up during a career in commercial art:

In the time since Glaser wrote this, the landscape of illustration and design has changed significantly. Illustrators have seen a massive spike in popularity from both tech and real estate sectors. When our field’s largest benefactors have become industries that primarily profit from brutal surveillance regimes or violent displacement through gentrification, questions centered around truth in advertising (“Would I design the package for a chocolate bar that’s actually too bitter for my taste?”) feel less pressing.

Further complicating issues around complicity and collusion, creative workers are expected to sell their “brand” as much as their own work; a colleague recently pointed out contracts from clients that required them to share their completed illustration pieces on their social media profiles.

I attempted to update Glaser’s list to better reflect the way illustration and design are most commonly weaponized, for an industry that has become even more craven and depraved.

There have been attempts to describe the recent illustration trends most commonly associated with tech companies - bright, flat colours, cheerful shapes, scenes of nondescript “Playmobil”-style figures gardening, eating on a patio, laughing, or playing in a park. When Google’s Sidewalk Labs “smart city” project announced it would be building in Toronto’s waterfront, the mural adorning its office depicted a cheerful, faceless, racially-diverse cast of characters eagerly lined up to walk inside its door.

What message is being delivered here? Perhaps this scene was supposed to evoke the 100,000+ people currently on Toronto’s waitlist for subsidized housing, or the 9000+ currently unhoused. In May 2020, Sidewalk Labs announced it would be withdrawing its plans to build in Toronto amidst concerns over rising housing prices, surveillance, privacy, transparency and accountability.

I can’t imagine an artist alive right now who hasn’t faced the pressures of rising rent, or seen themselves priced out of art spaces our communities once relied on. I also can’t imagine a freelancer who hasn’t been forced into the same, degrading, race-to-the-bottom spiral that the ever-expanding “gig economy” encourages and profits from. When we’re asked to paint a friendly, familiar face onto displacement, policing, precarious work and ecological destruction, we’re providing the set dressing for our own eventual demise.

By interrogating our role in systems of capital and violence, we can identify our own power within them. What resistance can we offer? What solidarity can we show? Glaser admitted that he had personally answered “yes” to some of these questions at different points in his career, as have I, from both his list and mine.

The point of Glaser’s list was explicitly not to condemn individuals for their answers. Where any single artist draws the line is likely going to change depending on their financial situation or the current political moment. What I’ve found startling about the illustration field in the ten-plus years I’ve worked here isn’t what answers individual artists might give to these questions, but how rarely these questions are asked at all.

Deception and manipulation aren’t just a part of our jobs, they’re the most potent and frequently-used weapons we have at our disposal. Creative workers must be honest about the power we wield. Illustrators and designers must be clear-headed about the material impact our work has on the world around us. If the souls stuck in Hell are the ones who refused to acknowledge their sins, we can’t pretend that our art and labour aren’t a part of political struggle. We must enter the fray with our eyes wide open. Turn away at your peril.

Michael DeForge works as an author and illustrator in Toronto. He’s published graphic novels with Drawn and Quarterly and Koyama Press, and his work can be found at michael-deforge.com.