Design Ethics
As graphic designers, we are often posed with issues that may or may not reflect our ethics. How much are we willing to photoshop a teenage model’s body? Are we willing to put together imagery for an adult site? While these maybe obvious questions for some of us, the ideal of creating a meaningful image is across the board in all visual arts. But ours has to sell an idea.
This question of ethics comes from an article I saw on MSNBC’s Today Show site.
In search of that meaningful image, are we going too far by creating an ideal figure. I believe we already go way over board on female models. But this article is about airbrushing a baby’s fat rolls away.
Personally, I’m having a hard time with our nation’s obsession with fat, that we’d feel it necessary to airbrush a baby. Babies are supposed to be chubby. I can see airbrushing out a fold if it’s creating a heavy spot on the image. But not for the aesthetics sake of the baby itself. Babies are innately perfect. While there is a point in a child’s adolescence, that excessive body fat is sign of an unhealthy lifestyles, but there’s a reason it’s called baby fat….and it’s cute.
“It is terrible and shocking if it has got to the stage where babies’ folds of fat are being got rid of,” Belinda Coleman of the retouching agency The Shoemakers Elves told the Telegraph. “This sounds like very dangerous territory. You will have parents thinking, ‘My baby isn’t attractive enough. How do I make my baby more attractive?’”
Thus again, this comes back to a question my professor asked in the mid-90′s. How do you justify anything? Morally, ethically, aesthetically, creatively or logically?
To answer that defines you, not only as a designer, but as a person. Choose wisely.
