The span of graphic design is not a history of concepts but of forms.

The meaning of his work is not in the story but in the storytelling.

he meant that the designer’s purview is to shape, not to write. But that shaping itself is a profoundly affecting form.

Paul Rand wrote “There is no such thing as bad content, only bad form,”

The apotheosis of this notion, repeated ad nauseum (still!), is Beatrice Warde’s famous Crystal Goblet metaphor, which asserts that design (the glass) should be a transparent vessel for content (the wine).

Designers also trade in storytelling. The elements we must master are not the content narratives but the devices of the telling: typography, line, form, color, contrast, scale, weight. We speak through our assignment, literally between the lines.

So to bring design out from under the thumb of content we must go one step further and observe that treatment is, in fact, a kind of text itself, as complex and referential as any traditional understanding of content.