Printed text and images are still the central artifacts for housing of memory in literate culture. Although storage and retrieval of information is rapidly being transferred to computer memory banks, daily transactions in information, whether statistics, persuasion, or sentiment, are still made on paper. Some printed information is for reference, some is persuasive, and almost all of it is processed into a format determined by technology; for example, the typewriter determines the sizes of paper and envelopes. In many countries, graphic design is still largely in the hands of printers, and even in countries with many active graphic designers, much of the printed material in daily life is designed by traditional format or with the new software from phototype and digital type companies. With this competition, designers present themselves as having achieved the unique ability to analyze and project images that constitute the symbolic meaning in the public message of their clients. Designers have accomplished this through long and specialized training in a highly theoretical body of knowledge and sophisticated technique, bolstered by a service orientation and a self-regulated social code, that is to say, by the definitions of their profession. The mantle of skill is evaluated by the paying clients, who focus on economic results either in terms of products sold or interest engaged, or by the graphic designers themselves, who focus on novelty within a changing but restricted range of established conventions. Designers have had to be self-referential inasmuch as the other group concerned with visual images the coalition of museums, art marketers, painters, and sculptors contend that they alone generate images worthy of symbolic belief and use their publicity systems to exclude the replicated image of mass culture from public and scholarly attention or assessment. However, designers' claims to communicative skill necessitate greater understanding of the nature of the real and the posited audiences and of the elements of image with which designers work, than has so far been demonstrated in designer critiques. Far from understanding the nature of the tools of visual communication, designers tend to elaborate formulae that are evolved