From Swiss Modernism to the International Compliant Style: Grids and Graphic Design in the Age of Information Disorder

What role does communication design play in the current crisis of information disorder? What ethical responsibilities and agency might communication designers have in solving the problem? This chapter explores the function of communication design in the era of online information disorder. I argue that when Swiss modernism was remediated on the web as the International Compliant Style (IC-Style), form and content became separated, along with a loss of ideals about the social responsibility of design. In the hyper-capitalist, digital environment of the 1990s, Swiss modernism became a style that, although suited to the technological restrictions of the early web, quickly became co-opted by ideologies of functionalist web design. This resulted in the application of the IC-Style across a variety of information with a disregard for the suitability of form to content and a focus on speed and profit rather than consideration of communication design’s responsibility to society as a medium between people and information. The dangers of this can be seen today in the crisis of information disorder, where the IC-Style has been applied to websites peddling mis/disinformation driven by perverse online economic incentives. The chapter concludes by exploring the ethical responsibility of communication designers in the era of information disorder, arguing that the social ideologies of modernism should be placed at the fore and applied to new communication structures that promote dialogue, discourse and slow, considered engagement with information.