Make, Do, and Mend

Graphic design mediates surfaces: the page, the poster, the screen, the spread. This inherent superficiality might become a source of disillusionment for the graphic designer who wishes to enact real-world change. But a confinement to surface-level interventions might also ground the graphic practice and challenge practitioners to exhaust the existing tools of graphic design to make meaning.

To uncover the radical potential of the surface, designers might reach to another superficial craft to find practical analogues. One such craft is textile mending. Mending offers strategies for localized acts of surface repair as a means of interaction with gaps, wounds, and wear. Mends can manifest traditionally, as concealment of disrepair, but can also be decorative, to draw attention to the reparative act.

Taking the mending practice as a guide, Make, Do, and Mend is a series of five site-specific publications that make a case for mending as a graphic design practice. Its title references Make Do and Mend, a government pamphlet produced and distributed to housewives in World War II Britain. The minimal typographic gesture of added punctuation transforms the referential text from a command of wartime rationing to a call to action for graphic designers to bloom where they’re planted; to engage locally, actively, and quietly to shape change.