Outside the palatial walls, typographic masonry is commonly known as a graphic design. It is the professional occupation of applied art for visual communication and mediates visual messages between commissioners and audiences. Yet how does the mason participate in a practice and relates to its commissioner and audience? What is the role of pleasure and the pursuit of personal and professional improvement in the development of a practice? And what is the role of the designer within society? These questions strike at the core of the development of graphic design as an autonomous discipline and likewise occupy a place within the palace at the Department of Practice.
These practices reside between the personal–and often passionate–interests of individual designers and their professional occupation within the public sphere. This social modality of graphic design necessitates to thoroughly approach the typographic mason as custodian of visual communication. Frictions between the societal servitude and cultural commitment of design practices seem to point to a continuous interplay of limitation or liberty, and concession or identity.
