Huijun Huang

In today’s society, sometimes women are still living in the shadow of men. This phenomenon could be discovered from many parts of the community, such as the Australia graphic design field. 

In reviewing Jane Connory’s article, “Women in Graphic Design”, she pulls out the fact that “despite women comprising more than 50% of GD graduates since the 1970s, only one woman, Dahl Collings, was included in the AGDA Hall of Fame.”[1]The statistic is showing how women designers are lack of getting recognition when comparing with male designers. The result from this is that many female designers have been forgotten or invisible by the community.

Within the field, people have discussed the different design choices made between male and female while they were doing design individually. People say, generally, women like “bright colours, surfaces replete with detail, curvy as opposed to straight lines.”Whereas men like “darker colours, surfaces devoid of detail and so on.”[2] However, I view that as a gender stereotype. Because of this kind of opinion with female designer, women’s ability could not be seen fully by people. My argument to that could be proved from looking at Lynda Warner’s works. Lynda Warner was one of the female designers who has experienced inequality during her career. Warner has been a significant graphic designer in Australia. Warner was one of eight designers invited to contribute a poster design for the 2000 Sydney Olympics. The other seven were men. Warner particularly has a love of typography. One of the identity design she designed for MGArchitecture.Interiors(figure 1) is solely type based. The design of the logo is simple, with only black and white colour used. These two colours give audience a feel of stability. In addition, the square shape under the letters gives the same impression, match with the colours. The font she created was in semibold with sharp edges.  The logo could be view in two parts; the first part is the square at the left side, the second part is the “A” on it own at the right side. As the letter “A” has one stroke missing which makes it almost looks like an image of a roof or another thing. At most of the time, “such designs reference traditional sex roles rooted in sex-trait stereotypes, such as masculine strength and feminine gentleness.”[3] From my point of view, those design could be graphic or product design. However, logos like MGA is a successful gender-neutral design, which designed by female. The reason Warner has chosen to use those design elements(bold font and darker colour) in some of her works is to show the ability as a female designer. Not only male designer can call as profession, but female has also tried to be  flexibility of using different colours and forms in their works to prove that they are profession as well. Other logos designed by Warner such as the logo for Tasmania floriculture association(figure 2) and Ossa design(figure 3) has shown the ability to include feminine gentleness in her design.

As mentioned in the article “women designers-is there a gender trap?”, In order becoming success in design field, except showing ability from designing works, gaining awards is also important. However, as “the majority of firms are established by men, the majority of awards are presented to male designers, and the majority of senior positions are held by men.”[4] Therefore, it is hard to reach gender equality, unless, people make changes from “established social order” and “gendered expectations.”[5]

References:

1.  Jane Connory, “Plotting the Historical Pipeline of Women in Graphic Design”, accessed 10 April, 2019, http://dharn.org.au/dharn2017/plotting-the-historical-pipeline-of-women-in-graphic-design/ ,1
2. Gloria Moss, “The Implications of the Male and Female Design Aesthetic for Public Services”, The Innovation Journal: The Public Sector Innovation Journal, Volume 8(4), 2003: 2
3. Drake, Carly K., and Scott K. Radford. “[Softly Assembled] Gender Performance through Products: Four Practices Responding to Masculine and Feminine Codes in Product Design.” Research in Consumer Behavior 19 (2018): 125
4. Margaret Bruce & Jenny Lewis, “women designers-is there a gender trap”, Butterworth&Co(Publishers)Ltd, 1990: 119
5. Jane Connory, “Plotting the Historical Pipeline of Women in Graphic Design”, accessed 10 April, 2019, http://dharn.org.au/dharn2017/plotting-the-historical-pipeline-of-women-in-graphic-design/ ,2

Huijun Huang

On the 21st of March 2019, I went to visit an exhibition held in National Gallery of Victoria, which called “Designing Women”. It displayed roughly 30 pieces of work, all created by female designer. The exhibition was located on level 3 of the gallery. 

The painting “The painter”(figure 1) was the first work I saw before I entered the main area of the exhibition. It was created by Paulina Olowska, who is a painter, photographer and filmmaker. Olowska used to “give back a voice to those who have been excluded or forgotten, in particular women of the socialist era in Poland”[1] in her works. This information makes me think that the female in this painting might also be considered as “forgotten” one. So that is the reason Olowska has drawn her. As an audience, I do not know who the lady is in the painting and the story behind her. However, in the painting, the way of lady sits on the chair with legs apart and no emotion on her face, makes her look powerful and independent. It could be designer’s decision which has made us view in her designed way of seeing. Just as what John Berger has written in his book, “The painter’s way of seeing is reconstituted by the marks he makes on the canvas or paper”[2]. In addition, the placement of the artwork may also influence the way we view this artwork or the role of female in the painting. In my opinion, the way lady sits has already differed her from those ladies on usual traditional female portraits. The lady is looking straight at the audience which generates pressure on the viewer. Olowska has chosen to mainly use grey colours on this work, both at the foreground and background. 

Olowska’s painting was the only graphics work which has displayed on exhibition. Other works are mostly either industrial or fashion design. It was surprising to see much successful industrial designs created by women at present. As according to a previous statistic, “ The Design Innovation Group’s… between 1982 and 1984 showed that in a typical sector, office furniture, 72% of firms employed in-house industrial designers but only one company employed a woman in this capacity.”[3] So where were all the female designer in the past decade? I found the answer after I read a wall text at the exhibition. This was shown under the section of “Teamwork”, which listed out a few designers’ names “who all experienced relative anonymity when co-designing with their better-known husbands.”[4] We all have to know the fact that we are still live in a patriarchy society since six thousand years ago, which means in some cases, men are still think as better than women. In my opinion, this exhibition was a successful one. Especially, the way they have displayed the works which have lead audience to view the exhibition in their designed order that they want viewer to perceive. The result from doing this gives audience a better experience. Designer has put those selected interesting design everywhere around the room, so audience would not get bored even it takes a while for every one of them to finish seeing all the works. I wished to see more great female designed work in other exhibitions. This kind of exhibition has empowered me, to feel more confident to work as a female designer both now and in the future.

References:

1. Culture.pl, Paulina Ołowska, accessed 25th, March 2019, https://culture.pl/en/artist/paulina-olowska
2. John Berger, Ways of seeing, London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, 1972, 7
3. Margaret Bruce & Jenny Lewis, women designers-is there a gender trap, Butterworth&Co(Publishers)Ltd, 1990, 114-115
4. National Gallery of Victoria, Teamwork shown at Designing women Exhibition, Contemporary Art & Design: NGV Australia, 28 Sep 2018 – 29 Sep 2019. Visited on 21st, March 2019.