Much has been said about how to define graphic design in a multimedia age. These definitions range from the endearingly misguided (“anything with type”) to the baldly mercantile (“anything done for a client”) to the confounding and recondite (we’ll skip those). No one quite agrees. Yet there are serious, practical implications to the question, as well as theoretical ones. As Jens Gelhaar of Brand New School warned, “If graphic design continues to define itself so narrowly, it will remain the client-serving stepchild of the visual arts.”*

STEP’s 25 Emerging Talents for 2009 raise these issues even as they rise above them. They work for clients, and they work for themselves. They are employed by studios, and they assemble in loose collectives or go solo. They exhibit a range of abilities that practically defies description. They apply those abilities in fashion, film, advertising, branding, publishing and all of the fine arts (including, as you’ll see, sculpture, performance art and music). With so many skills at work across so many media, they can’t be called anything more specific than designers—and maybe not even that. As fish don’t notice the water, and we don’t notice the air, these 25 individuals are immersed in their creative environments, free to absorb multiple disciplines. They don’t appear to be paying much attention to the demarcations within their profession.

Their work speaks for itself, beginning on page 54. For our coverage of 2009’s Emerging Talents we are indebted to Terry Lee Stone, who portrays 21 of those on this year’s list, and Allan Haley, who features four Emerging Typographers. Thank you, Terry and Allan, for assembling a fascinating and accomplished group again this year.

Very much along these lines, Sweden’s Dizel&Sate—a pair whose work epitomizes the slipperiness of design definitions—are profiled on page 46. Charlotte West explores their roots as taggers and emergence as artists experiencing success in print, lighting, clothing and interiors.

This issue’s cover is by Sam Potts, a STEP Emerging Talent for 2008. I visited Potts while he worked on this project in his New York City studio, which he describes as “a linoleum-floored, booklined garret high—not really—above Union Square.” His cover design was born out of a desire to do something new, “one of those someday-I’ll-do-cutouts notions that designers keep in the back of their minds,” he says. “In this case it was a desire to do something dimensional and ‘real’—that is, something that had to be made first, as opposed to something purely representational or metaphorical. The focus was the idea of ‘emergence’ … in the case of the cutout, the technique essentially is the concept.” The cloud concept (below), which appears as an illustration on page 54, was “one of these purely metaphorical images, which became satisfying to me only by adding the upside-down plane, which undercuts the obviousness of the whole image.” Potts teaches at the School of Visual Arts and Cooper Union, and serves on the board of AIGA NY. A self-taught designer with a literary background, he says of his practice, “I am trying to put a liberal arts education to practical use.” Visit him at www.sampottsinc.com.

Potts is as good an example as any of the willingness of young artists to allow creative disciplines to seep into each other. Just exactly what it is these remarkable young talents do will continue to be debated. Meanwhile, they’ll be busy designing the future.

* pub (by CalArts design students); No. 1, Fall 2007