Ethics in Graphic Design

There are a few controversial subjects surrounding ethics in graphic design, however, this is not questioning the usual route of what designers should draw the line at, but instead, when.

You see as students we are encouraged to contemplate what clients or briefs we would design for. Would we take up a tobacco contract for example? Work for a fast food company? What if this fast food project wanted to target kids? There are millions of these hypothetical situations we could consider. This is something that has been discussed numerous times from Milton Glaser’s  “Road to Hell,” to this lovely article by Michael Johnson, of johnson banks.

But at what point should we start to implement these ponderings?

Occupy Design – a movement I support – recently targeted the D&AD brief of rebanding the city of London. They argued that “Students, who are one of the groups who had suffered the most as a result of the banking crisis what with wide scale withdrawal of higher education funding and the tripling of tuition fees, were now being asked to use their talent, suppress their anger and rebrand the very people who were causing their hardship in the first place.” (Deband the City) Now this is a fair point, and a good one. But winning competitions such as D&AD awards are the things we need to make us stand out when applying for work. I’m aware that we will have to face up to moral decisions such as these at some point, but should the same stigma apply to students answering a purely hypothetical brief as it does to agencies receiving money for their work? I’m inclined to think not.