In September, Communicate: Independent British Graphic Design Since the Sixties opened London’s upgraded and refurbished Barbican Art Gallery. The show justifiably celebrates a remarkable historical phenomenon, and also considers how graphic design has shaped design for new media and, in particular, the Web. Although there is much evidence for the influence of British graphic design on new media, the impact of British graphic designers is hard to trace.

In the U.S., graphic designers stepped into the digital revolution. In the U.K., they fell into it – typically dragged in by clients. Of course, there are many obvious reasons why designers in the U.S. took a lead in this area. American leadership in information technology is part of the dynamic, as is the U.S. home base of many of the corporations that were first to benefit from the Web’s potential. I addressed these issues in a panel presentation entitled ‘The View from Abroad’ at the 1996 Living Surfaces conference in Chicago. At that time, the lack of engagement of British graphic designers was understandable. In the popular consciousness the Web was a new medium and had yet to prove it was more than a passing fascination. Understandable but unfortunate. Earlier that year I co-programmed Designing the Internet, the first major U.K. conference focused on Web design, subtitled ‘when digital design demands analogue thinking.’ This was an implicit recognition that this area of design should not be led from a technical perspective, but in the succeeding years British graphic designers broadly declined to get involved. What went wrong?

Fear of technology has been one issue. Designers who are at one with color separation, offset printing, and paper engineering don’t seem to be able to get their heads around HTML code, bandwidth limitations, and Web site performance; they seem stymied by a medium in which the final appearance of a page isn’t determined until it’s displayed on the user’s screen.

I am not advocating that technology be given ultimate primacy – we have seen where that leads in terms of design – but I do advocate that British designers engage with it more seriously. In this U.S., this level of engagement led graphic designers such as Clement Mok to co-found NetObjects, a software company that aimed to produce better Web site creation tools, and take up the role of chief creative officer at Sapient, a major technology consulting firm.

Instead, established British designers fetishized tools to the point that the first question many graphic designers ask when confronted with a Web project is ‘What software shall I use?’ rather than ‘What is the challenge and how shall we go about addressing it?’ Thankfully many students graduating today are technically very adept – and this isn't at the expense of their design or problem-solving skills.

In general, U.K. designers lacked an enthusiastic and exploratory attitude and didn’t strive to understand new developments or to investigate their application. They had little sense of intrigue compared to their U.S. cousins. Stateside designers such as Terry Swack, who had an established graphic design practice in Boston, refocused her company on interactive design in the early ’90s; it eventually became part of Razorfish. Editorial design maven Roger Black – quick as ever to spot a trend – got into Webland working with designer Jessica Helfand on Discovery.com. He went on to co-found the Interactive Bureau, which designed many high-profile sites including MSNBC.com. It is hard to find U.K. parallels for Swack and Black – evidence that few British designers transformed their expertise into a proficiency for Web design – though Malcolm Garrett is an honorable exception.

In particular, British design’s obsession with branding and esthetics has had a variable effect on design for new media. Although branding is understood by some, such as Wolff Olins, as being more than visual – delivering experiences rather than things, extending through the company’s identity and its services – this has rarely been translated into interactive media, not least because customer touch points and the elements of user interaction are poorly understood. The mobile communications company Orange, for which Wolff Olins developed the original brand concept, has a Web presence that falls far short of its brand aspiration; the site only works well on a visual level. In the area of editorial design, Neville Brody’s Research Studio designed the overall approach for the Guardian Unlimited newspaper sites, but focused on typography in the 'sells' for stories and features (which became known as ‘Brody blocks’) rather than the text, and devised a navigation system that broke all the rules of interaction design. The result is a bland, difficult-to-read site which, as the publication has evolved, quickly outgrew its design.

A rigorous process – from clarifying the brief though idea development, exploration and evaluation, to reflection on the project – is central to all design disciplines, and it has become so ingrained for British graphic designers that they’ve become almost unaware of it. Partly because of this, they have been unable to take their (unconscious) understanding of design process and apply it to design for new media. Instead, they’ve tended to abandon any process and blindly grope toward solutions.

Working with technical collaborators – typesetters and typographers, scanner and press operators, finishers and binders – is a strength of British graphic designers. But when it came to the Web, many who started to engage with it failed to show much interest in their new set of colleagues – coders and programmers, server and network engineers, researchers, and human-computer interaction professionals – and where they did, they largely failed to empathize with them or understand how to evaluate the skills these professionals brought to the collaboration.

This failure is due in part to the fact that British graphic design has a poor track record in developing and sharing knowledge in new areas of design practice. In the U.S., graphic design has tended to have a more vibrant discourse with an almost scholarly bent, and this has been true of its engagement with new media. Figures such as the user-interface specialist Aaron Marcus have bridged the practical world of design and the academic world of human computer interface research; design consultants Paul Kahn and Krzysztof Lenk have developed a body of work that spans graphic design and information science; and Jessica Helfand has brought the rigors and insights of cultural theory to new media. In contrast, British graphic designers have a lackadaisical attitude to design discourse, and as a consequence they tend not to read substantial articles in design publications, let alone seek out peer-reviewed research or learn from related fields.

British journalists have been culpable in failing to nurture U.K. Web design, since they’ve largely neglected to explore the new-media design world, and have been notable by their absence at new-media design events which, one would imagine, would have provided them ready-to-write stories. The established graphic design periodical and book editors viewed the Web as a sequence of pretty Photoshop screens, and with their superstar-centric glasses firmly fixed to their heads, they’ve tended to focus on new-media designers who come ready-endorsed from the U.S., such as Josh Davis, or who had pedigrees to which they could relate, for example the Royal College of Art alumni who founded Deepend. Eye magazine has largely bucked this trend, particularly during the editorship of non-Brit Max Bruinsma.

In the U.S., many more journalists and design writers have written about design for digital media. Interestingly, many – including Janet Abrams, Peter Hall, and Liz Farrelly – are originally from the U.K., indicating that Brits have the critical insight but find it easier to get a venue in the U.S.

When it comes public exchange of knowledge, and particularly conferences, traditional British graphic design organizations have been at a dead loss. Windows on the Digital Future, convened in 1996, was the high point of digital media events from these groups. Since then, big design events, such as DA&D’s SuperHumanism, have tended toward ethical handwringing. And though the government-backed Design Council has done a good job, other British organizations that focus on graphic design have failed to demonstrate significant insight into new media design in event programming, awards, or publications.

In the U.S., the AIGA, the Design Management Institute, and the no-longer-extant American Center for Design all developed relevant and illuminating programming and publications, beginning in the mid-’90s. In addition, conferences linked to academic institutions (Carnegie Mellon, Illinois Institute of Technology, and ArtCenter) and publications (the HOW Design Conference) have helped to develop and broaden understanding of Web design.

My argument is not that digital, or interaction, design is the only important area of design in the U.K. (or elsewhere), or the only one where there are important developments for designers to address. Nor I am suggesting that British graphic designers have not engaged with the challenges I have outlined; they have, but the breadth of the engagement has been limited. Just as graphic and product design came of age in the 20th century, interaction is the design discipline of the 21st century. Graphic designers in Britain contributed magnificently to 20th-century design – as the Communicate! exhibition demonstrates. But design for digital media cannot be considered superficially, not least because digital developments will continue extending their reach to new areas of design. If British designers are serious about making a difference with design as well as bringing design to center stage in society, they will need to get to grips with interaction design.

For all the whining Brits (and other Europeans) do about the U.S. – from criticism of the country’s supposed consumerist excesses to complaints about its environmental ‘greed’ – U.S. graphic design has taken a lead in this new era of design and made a significant contribution. As the networked society becomes more of a reality, the contribution British graphic design could make will be needed more than ever. It’s time to stop the navel-gazing and engage with the future.