Practitioner Opinions on Morals Research

Oliver Jeffers - Illustrator and Writer

The objective of my books is to entertain. I think children are possibly getting strong moral messages from every angle, and often they can come across as fake and preachy. Obviously I wouldn’t want to offend anyone, so try to steer away from anything that may be illegal or needlessly dangerous. But, I think the ‘good moral message’ is secondary to the entertainment value where my books are concerned.

In my experience, children are much smarter than they’re given credit for, and curious too. In fact, they’re often more observant than adults, as they give a different amount of time and consideration to something that is in front of them. There’s a difference between education dressed up as fun, and entertainment for fun, it depends on what your objective is. My books are all about satisfying my own imagination; about the things I’m curious about, and would have liked to see in books when I was young. But I try not to be completely reckless, and if education can happen naturally then it’s a bonus, and a successful satisfying story usually will have a few good morals intertwined through it anyway.

Illustrator Lizzie Mary Cullen (illustrator and artist) believes that the very nature of design and illustration means that you can be divorced from the intentions of your clients without being unethical. “I’m not a moral compass,” she says. “The wonderful thing about being an illustrator is the upfront nature of it. An artist may say, ‘I don’t want to sell out,’ but for an illustrator that’s our profession. We get paid to present a certain idea, brand or view.”

Kenn Munk - Designer / Visual Communicator

“Visual communication is always about getting people to do something, to steer their behaviour in a certain way – we manipulate. Is it better to manipulate [on behalf of] something that you think is good, or is manipulation in itself bad?”

Rob Coke - Digital Arts - Design and Ethics - Can you stick to your beliefs?

http://www.digitalartsonline.co.uk/features/illustration/design-ethics-can-you-stick-your-beliefs/

Rob Coke, partner at Studio Output in Nottingham, adds that mulling over these issues also makes us question the role of the designer. Are designers neutral observers, arranging other people’s content in a way that best aids comprehension, or more ‘active’ participants in the process of relaying that information?

“Certainly, the decisions a designer makes are not purely based on appropriateness for the job; we are all guilty of allowing personal preference to colour the work we create,” Rob says. “In that respect, every piece of work should be regarded as being ‘edited’ by the designer – perhaps best exemplified by David Carson’s infamous decision to typeset a Ray Gun magazine interview with David Byrne in Zapf Dingbats, because he didn’t believe it told us anything we didn’t already know.”

It is interesting to read practitioner opinions on the topic of responsibility. All of them seem to accept that their practice is not primarily based on their morals, although they do feed into it.