The Fluorescent Society

To be honest, this issue has been lingering 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 in fact, 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, ordering (begging?) them to visit the students’ graduate shows.
As I was staring, I remembered a short essay by Media Philosopher Vilém Flusser on the relation between moral good and functional good. Its title could conveniently make a very good sub-title for this article: War and the State of Things.


Façade of the London College of Communications, July 2009.

Since the late 80s, it has been a growing phenomenon 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 papers. From New York to London, it was then possible to see yellow, red, orange and green banners shouting at people who walk the streets. Selling pizzas, pointing-out burger restaurants, delis, body piercing shops, clubs, laundrettes, card and palm reading booths.
Today, others were added to the list: spray tanning, mobile phone unlocking, souvenir stores or beauty clinics.
This trend also saw the rise of the walking human ad. A person is paid (exploited) to hold a cardboard with an arrow pointing in one direction, normally written with hand-made type. It always looks cheap and desperate. If the type is not hand drawn, we can see bold typefaces being used, normally Arial Black or a similar font in a more condensed version.

This technique normally has two results: it attracts the onlooker by suggesting emergency, or caution. It’s impossible to remain indifferent. But, until when?
The majority of its use is for safety purposes. I’m obviously talking about safety vests used by cyclists, workers, police and medical emergency personnel. The visual effect is so strong that grabs anyone’s attention immediately. It makes sense that this material or ink is used in these cases. Yet, the safety industry has a big competitor on the use of fluorescent inks and papers: the commerce industry.

If in the 80s we saw the rise of trashy businesses recurring to the use of this ink, the aggressiveness of the present financial crisis, brought the consumption and use of this material to a whole new level.
I know we live in rough times (a few months ago, an insurance company (how ironic) was projecting ads on the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral), but where do we draw the line?
Walking on a high street nowadays, where we used to see refined - sometimes flamboyant - and glamorous vitrines, we now see entire façades covered from top to bottom by fluorescent yellow or pink. If covering every inch of space is not the choice, then some stores opt to hang some banners with light pointing at them, maximizing even more the effect.
The investment is obviously not on the design, information, the lettering or on the message, but on the colour, on the visual shock. 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. And, a consumer carrying a bag in bright yellow, promoting the store where she just shopped (brand ambassador).

This scenario of desperation and radical marketing action, which can be observed in many streets of the world today, raises the question of whether the use of this tool at this scale should be at all controlled. This word is probably too strong, but the fact that it is increasingly difficult to walk on the streets with the eyes open, should matter to society and especially to designers who consider applying this material.

This brings us back to the façade of the college. In an art and design education institution how can this approach be allowed?
The importance and relevance of an exhibition of graduating students, who are all seeking a rare person willing to employ or commission them as an artist or a designer, is not being questioned here. What is in discussion is the mode through which they communicate their exhibition. What is in discussion is the fact that these are the people that studied Visual Communication and should be articulate in the way they convey a message. We could say that the whole exhibition was about emergence, but that was not the case.
Having this said, 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 affirmation when going back 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. Unless the designers made a knife that doesn’t cut too well, he continues, would the knife also not work very well 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 dressed in 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. The cities are quietly facing a plague of fluorescence, with commerce being its virus.
The impossibility to remain indifferent to these mineral-based inks will very soon just turn into indifference, due to its banal and irresponsible ubiquity.

Thus, the discussion and mediation of a compromise between good and bad will always have to have a central role on a designer’s practice, with added responsibility to design education institutions for obvious reasons.
Flusser says that everything that is good for something is pure Evil. This is the case of fluorescent materials.

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