And probably not mine.

According to Luke Burgis in his ‘The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life’;

“…mimetic desire is responsible for the formation of our very identities…” 

and while his thesis is centred around what drives ‘want’, a notion of design as mimetics was too good a thought to pass; so in the spirit of Burgis’ argument this ramble is dedicated to the idea that graphic design is possibly the most mimetic of professions. Baring actual Mimes, obviously.   

There’s something primal and appealing about a language - a body of design work - of mimetics, built around a powerful gesture, expression, or movement exclusively. If it weren’t for the fact of needing to use some words (or brand-names) - the things that almost separate ‘design’ from ‘art’ (and apologies to the Text As Art practitioners, your Kruger’s and Weiner’s and Hamilton’s) - we’re almost the cast in Burgis’ identity-forming stage set. Bio-graphical-mimics, identity-making performatives.

And yet, and yet, while mimicry in the graphic design world is endemic - actually, it’s kind of what almost all graphic design is. Referential, that is, from the frowned-on category copy-catting to poach attention from brand or product leaders, referencing some vernacular, artistic or historic visual language, or by some metaphoric reference to an entirely random endpoint (like the ‘Engine Oil’ Gin I wrote about a while ago) - why the coyness of ‘making by impression’?

The nature of graphic design is inimitably mimical. It’s actually wonderfully so. It feeds off itself and creates such rich visual vocabularies sometimes it feels more like chemistry than physics*.

Now, nobody likes to be called out copying (or found out, ha ha) but swap the word for mimicry and suddenly you’re not plagiarising. You’re in a whole new space, sharing desk space with people who discovered velcro, why spiders don’t get stuck in their own webs, making swimsuits like shark skin for swifter swimmers, those kind of thing. 

Not that there’s a lot of bio-mimicry to be had in graphic design (maybe apart from the limited opportunities to specific pearlescent paper stocks), but the notion of design as The Study of Mimetics suddenly sounds (especially if we capitalise it) like nearly a science. Which is ok. It would make for an interesting part of our studies and skills. 

And the title? A little wordplay on a (Not The Nine O-Clock News… I think?) sketch by Rowan Atkinson of a Marcel Marceau lookalike performance. Something about tools, as I recall. Not design tools though.

* A photographer I know mentioned, years ago, that his profession used to be about chemistry - of film, developer, fix, of what went on behind the lens - and was now (then) all physics. As digital camera’s did the maths between the shutter and silicone chips. Much as our profession use to be about cow-gum (eww) and ink, the software math certainly hasn’t stoppered our creative, mimetic engines.