The Fluorescent Society

To be honest, this issue has been on my mind for quite a while. However, a recent visit to the London College of Communication made me question, once again, the irresponsible use of fluorescent materials.

From across the street, or rather, from the other side of the roundabout, it was impossible not to see the flashy, eye-burning letters in fluorescent yellow. From a distance, it read “summer, summer, summer, summer”, distracting drivers, screaming at people, telling (begging?) them to visit the students’ graduate shows.
As I was staring at it, I remembered a short essay by media philosopher Vilém Flusser on the relationship between ‘moral good’ and ‘functional good’. Its title could conveniently make a very good subtitle for this article: War and the State of Things.


Façade of the London College of Communications, July 2009.

Since the late ’80s, there has been a growing tendency to use this kind of attention grabbing technique. On the quest for fast access to another client, to turn citizen into consumer, many low-key companies started to advertise their stores using this particular kind of artifice. From New York to London, it was possible to see yellow, red, orange and green banners screaming at people pounding the streets: selling pizzas, pointing-out burger restaurants, delis, body piercing shops, clubs, laundrettes, card and palm reading booths.
Today, others have been added to the list: spray tanning, mobile phone unlocking, souvenir stores or beauty clinics.
This trend has also seen the rise of the walking human ad. A person is paid (exploited) to carry a board with an arrow pointing in one direction, normally boasting hand-written messages. It always looks cheap and desperate. If the words are not written by hand, bold typefaces are used, normally Arial Black or a similar font in a more condensed version.

This technique usually attracts the onlooker by suggesting some form of emergency or danger. It’s impossible to remain indifferent. But, how long will this last?
Mostly, it’s used for safety purposes. I’m obviously talking about the safety vests used by cyclists, workers, police and medical emergency personnel. The visual effect is so strong that it grabs your attention immediately. It makes sense that this material or ink is used in these cases; however, the safety industry has a major competitor when it comes to the use of fluorescent inks and papers: commerce.

If in the ’80s we saw the rise of trashy businesses using this ink, the seriousness of the present financial crisis has brought the consumption of this material to a whole new level.
I know we live in tough times (ironically, a few months ago, an insurance company was projecting ads onto the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral), but where do we draw the line?
Walking along a high street nowadays, where we used to see sophisticated – sometimes flamboyant – and glamorous vitrines, we now see entire façades covered from top to bottom with fluorescent yellow or pink. If covering every inch of space is not their first choice, then some stores opt to hang illuminated banners, using bright lights to maximize the overall effect.
The investment does not focus on the design, information, the lettering or on the message, but rather on the colour; on the visual shock and impact. There is no mediation, no nurturing period, no presentation. There’s nothing but a state of alarm: buy!


Left: London buses use fluorescent inks to maximize the legibility at a distance. Right: Façade of a high-street fashion store, using two layers of fluorescent papers. In front, a consumer carrying a bag in bright yellow, promoting the store where she just shopped, as a brand ambassador.

This scenario of desperation and radical marketing, which can be seen in many streets of the world today, raises the question of whether the use of this tool, on this scale, should be regulated. This is probably overstating the case, but the fact that it is increasingly difficult to walk down the street with our eyes open, should matter to society and especially to designers who consider using this material.

This brings us back to the façade of the college. How can this approach be allowed in an art and design education institution?
The importance and relevance of an exhibition by graduating students, who are all seeking someone willing to employ or commission them as an artist or a designer, is not being questioned here. What is being discussed is the way they communicate their exhibition. What is important is the fact that these are the people that studied Visual Communication and should be articulate in the way they convey a message. Yes, we could say that the whole exhibition was about emergency, but it’s not the case here.
Having said this, it would be interesting to quantify how successful this strategy was, in terms of visitors.

Following this line of thought, according to Vilém Flusser, one can either be a saint or a designer. He defends this statement when returning to the discussion of what defines ‘good design’. Flusser explains it by giving a practical example: a well-designed knife can both be good and bad. Only if designers made a knife that didn’t cut very well, would the knife not be effective for bad purposes.

Between pure good (‘moral’ good), which is good for nothing, and applied good (‘functional’ good), there can be absolutely no compromise, because in the end everything which is good in the case of applied good is bad in the case of moral good. Whoever decides to become a designer has decided against pure good.1

Left: a construction worker using a safety vest to alert drivers. Right: An employee of a fast-food chain distributing leaflets using a safety vest to attract consumers.

The reality today is that everywhere we look, we see fluorescence. On the shelves of any bookstore, there are endless gossip and lifestyle magazines daubed with pink, yellow and orange type. The goal is to dazzle, to see who can visually shout loudest and produce the most ostentatious (and fast) aesthetic experience. Cities are submissively enduring a plague of fluorescence, with commerce being its virus.
The impossibility of remaining indifferent to these mineral-based inks will soon become a state of pure indifference, due to their banal and irresponsible ubiquity.

As such, the discussion and mediation of a compromise between good and bad will always have a major influence on a designer’s practice, with added responsibility for design education institutions, for obvious reasons.
Flusser says: «Everything that is good for something is pure Evil». Fluorescent materials are a case in point.

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1 Flusser, Vilém. 1999. The Shape of Things: a philosophy of design. London: Reaktion Books. pp. 33