Been making collages for, what, close to 40 years and it wasn’t until last week that I’d been brought up short with a thought - what if all this time I’d not been a wannabe collage-ist but a bricolager?

That all the time I’d been trying to work off the surface rather than remain glued to it.   

It’s a fine distinction, but it feels like there is one. 

And in fact, that the day job of graphic design (in the the workspace I occupy at least) is much closer to bricolage - “a sculptural approach that constructs artwork with materials that are at hand” - as assemblies of things according to a usually limited framework and resources dictated by a brand. 

I don’t get to choose fonts, colours, assets mostly. My day-job is drawing them up into things which provide the setting for a particular message or bunch of information. And particularly drawing them off the screen-canvas and into the world, as objects. 

While much of the time is spent in organising on a small, screen-sized scale, I’ve always seen things in 3d (and not simply as skeuomorphisms - actual objects, like signage.)

Bricolage can command a huge canvas, and at an architectural scale (which is also where the academic paper shared with me about the need for a c.21st  response to legislation to reuse in the built environment kicked this off. But that’s another story.) 

Tadeusz Trepkowski - https://neveragain.artmuseum.pl/en/artysta/tadeusz-trepowski - was an amazing Polish graphic designer (who I discovered in the superb ‘Very Polish’ monograph), who created the powerful ‘NIE’ poster. As part of a contemporary exhibition featuring his work, the motif - the assets - were borrowed to form a hugely powerful interpretation as the grainy image taken at the time viscerally shows. 

I guess that’s why I’m suddenly thinking bricolage (not craft) could be the real skill of graphic designers who - with few being the ‘authors’ and more the ‘interpreters’ - work to take the things around or give to them and make and make do. Perhaps design education needs to address this (if it’s not already.) Feels like an overlooked skill set, to free yourself off the page.