This is Earth to Astroknot

Can't sleep for some reason. It happens, I suppose. Oh well, I will be a tad tired at work tomorrow.

I noticed something in class a few days ago that weirded me out a little bit, so I'll bring it up here (where I am sure none of my classmates read, so I won't feel like I am being mean).

In my Communication Design class, we had to pick an issue of some social importance (mine was high tuition fees) and create a magazine insert based on that topic for a fictional or real company/organization etc. Anyway, during critiques I started to think to myself "wow, what exactly is it that I do here?" I sort of started to realize that it wasn't just this project that was steeped in the concept of persuasion, it is the entire field. If you want someone to buy something, you need to persuade them to buy it, tell them that they want it, that they need it, that they are incomplete without it. Designers do that with images, type, colour, form, all of the elements of visual communication. If you aren't selling something, you are selling an idea, or a concept of some kind, and the same rules apply (maybe without the capitalist vocabulary).

That's when it hit me - I am a magician! I make people do things, not through a physical means, but using art to evoke certain emotions and to target a certain part of a person's sense of want or need ...

No, wait, magician isn't right. Crap, uhh ... propaganda officer? No not quite ...

Then I looked around the class and my previous realization was forgotten as another epiphany slammed into the back of my skull. Not a single person in the room really cared about the cause they were advertising. The hours of breaking down the words into abstract forms, adjusting them, composing harmonies within the visual elements, the pure formal qualities of the piece, focusing on this had taken the humanity out of our approach. We were barely aware of the significance of the issues, we just needed to convince other people that they were, in fact, significant.

I'm more like ... an atheist priest?