leading graphic designer. In it, Garland speaks about the duty designers have to their society and warns his colleague against being complicit with emerging consumerism. His warnings speak to a tension inherent to medium of design. Design separates itself from “fine art” as creating work whose aesthetic and form must function in collaboration with a purpose outside of themselves: a chair can be beautiful and unusually shaped, but must bear the weight and shape of a person to fulfill its primary function, which is to be comfortably sat upon. Garland believed that graphic design, in particular, had become so commercialized that aesthetic and formal innovation were close to being abandoned in the interest of selling goods to consumers. His manifesto seeks to ensure that design is not overwhelmed by commercial applications. It seeks to highlight design’s greater purpose, and to immune it from being completely overrun by mercantilism. In doing so, the manifesto asked designers to revise the way they thought about the work they were doing, and to consider the potential for design in the future. Garland revealed his “First Things First” manifesto in 1963 in a public speech at a meeting of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. He invited “graphic designers, photographers, and students” of design to sign it in protest of a society that “presented [advertising] to us as the most lucrative, effective, and desirable means of using our talents.” Designers, too, were victims of consumerist culture, having been: bombarded with journals dedicated to this belief, applauding the work of those who have flogged their skill and imagination to sell: cat food, stomach powders, detergent, hair restorer, striped toothpaste, aftershave lotion, before shave lotion, slimming diets, fattening diets, deodorants, fizzy water, cigarettes, roll ons, pull ons, and slip ons. Garland’s list of mundane products suggests the extent to which the artistic brilliance of designers, their skills and imagination, had been reduced. Designers are being applauded, in other words, for wasting their talents. However, Garland, does not criticize consumer culture in order to deny its influence. Nor does he disdain the employment it provides designers who earn their living through it. He understands that it is “not feasible” to abolish consumer advertising. He is not trying to dissuade people from buying things they want. However, he worried that designers, in their embrace of this culture, were simply perpetuating the “high-pitched scream of consumer selling.” The manifesto sought to counter this “sheer noise” by building an alliance of graphic designers committed to elevating the artistry of their work. “First Things First” struck a chord at the meeting of the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Many well-established designers, artists, and photographers signed it, dedicating themselves to “more useful and lasting forms of 85
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