Abstract

"The Business of Cataloguing Visual Acuity in Design"

Michael Golec, School of the Art Institute of Chicago (mgolec@saic.edu)

In the business of sales, the effective design of a trade catalogue is measured by how, through visual cues, it engages with its audience's ability to recognize a reflection of their own interests and their capacities to act. In this paper, I argue that the cognitive abilities of architectural and interior designers—their technical and visual acuities—are perceptible in the printed pages of trade catalogues. I consider these cognitive skills to be the medium in which the designer of visual communications works. Through an analysis of the capacity of architectural and interior designers for skillful visual interpretation, I discuss two key examples of “exploded” and “interior” views of Chicago Millwork Supply Co. mortise door lock sets (1906) and C. Kurtzmann & Co. pianos (1912), respectively. Each example demonstrates how precision hardware and interior objects can be represented such that page layout and illustration convey their feel in use—and how they may not only invite the specialized gaze of their viewers but also the hand of their potential users.

This paper provides a theoretical basis for the concept of co-creation as it relates to visual communications design for business. As an informational and pictorial record of the commercial realm, the trade catalogue is a resource for the study of the everyday world of mercantilism and the expansion of industrialization. Even more so, it is a record of its designer’s intentional integration of the technical knowledge and visual practices of a specific audience. Thus, trade catalogues not only reflect industrial-commodity culture but are interpretive interfaces that embody the co-creative dynamics of commercial visual communications. They demonstrate co- creation—or cognitive interconnection—as embodiments of an audience’s interpretive acumen and of a designer’s acknowledgment of the visual fields of knowledge constitutive of that audience.