Somewhere between the type and the norm: reflections on the behavior of the graphic designer in the academic environment

Abstract

This exploratory research seeks to understand how graphic designers, specialists in mediating information by the symbolic aspect of typography, behave dealing with the ordaining mechanisms of the scientific text. The assumption is that normative conventions, in establishing a standardized aesthetic, restrain the significant potential of types towards preconceived models. In view of this, we want to know how designers working at the academic environment deal with this issue, whether they resist the standardization service and what solutions can be presented in order to improve or change current standards. In the field, we chose to work with the Facebook™ group so called “Professores de Tipografia” (Typography Teachers), as it gathers teaching designers from different Brazilian institutions, as well as some international ones. They were provided a digital questionnaire created by Google Forms™, whose content of the answers was analyzed based on the concept of information regime by Frohmann (1995) and González de Gómez (2012). By the data obtained from the questionnaire, it is perceived that the actions and the opinions of the deponents present marks of the scientific ordaining regime, configuring to them an academic behavior conditioned by the norm, in spite of their abilities as visual communicators. It is concluded that chained to this system, the deponents not only follow the normative prescriptions, but reinforce them, expanding the consolidated regulatory power in the structural rigidity of the text, and also in the objective writing and the operational functionality of the means that retain and retrieve the information.