The manifesto for graphic design is:
1 IMAGINATION
Create, design, and make new things with childlike imagination and discovery by seeing the unseen and navigating the journey to get there by evoking magic and delight, dreaming up what doesn’t exist, and turning your daydreams and imagination into art. Free yourself from any misconceptions, maintain a growth mindset, unleash your creative instincts, and let your ideas grow through the creative process.
2 Do-It-Yourself
Fearlessly lead toward invisible horizons by applying a DIY sensibility to finding the future by being adaptive, persistent, and resilient in bringing new solutions to market. Be independent-minded and self-sufficient from start to finish, always finding the alternative by rejecting the banal and status quo to create in your own authentic voice and style.
3 EMPATHY
Authentic Designers hold themselves accountable for their actions and have a social conscience and empathy for the environment by continuously managing innovation that powers the products they design, make, and sell, and the businesses they run. To care deeply about the world they live in, its inhabitants’ inclusivity, and the pursuit of making people’s lives better and moving society forward.
4 THINK DIVERGENTLY
Creative thinking is looking at and approaching something in a new way. It involves lateral thinking by generating multiple creative solutions to the problem in a non-linear and spontaneous way by making your thinking more fluid and free by perceiving patterns that are not obvious and inventing or creating something novel, whether a concept, a solution, a method, a work of art, or an actual physical device. It applies techniques that drive evolution, synthesis, re-application, reinvention, re-imagination, disruption, revolution, and changing direction.
5 MANIFESTATION
Manifest how you feel inside and the things that you observe in everyday life, making connections from past to present, and across multiple disciplines and domains, regardless of how abstract they may appear at first, can help crystallize the solution to a problem and invent the future.
Originally published in 2021
design manifestos .org 