Speculative Design for Graphic Designers: Futures Told Through Labels, Notices and Front Pages

Speculative design gives graphic designers a way to make a future believable through the things people would actually read in it: the label, the notice, the ticket, the front page. A scenario asks to be imagined; a piece of ephemera simply asks to be read, and the reader fills in the world around it. Graphic designers can make one in an afternoon, which makes them among the most efficient speculative practitioners there are.

Ephemera persuade because nobody designs them to persuade, and a shelf-edge label from 2040 says more about that world than a page of scenario prose. If you need the definition first, read what speculative design is.

What graphic designers already have

Cheap fidelity. The workflow asks at every stage how much of a future to build, and for most disciplines fidelity is expensive: a working prototype, a staged service, a film. For you the costliest artefact is often a print run. A label or a front page can be fully believable within a day.

A trained eye for signs. You manage meaning for a living, which is what semiotics describes. In "Myth Today", the essay that closes Mythologies (1957), Roland Barthes reads a 1955 Paris Match cover of a young Black soldier in French uniform, saluting. The image, he argued, is not only a photograph of a soldier but an argument made to look natural: that France is a great empire all of whose subjects serve it faithfully. Anyone who has chosen a typeface to make a bank look trustworthy knows the mechanism from the other side, and futures travel by it too: a label that prints a carbon figure where the price used to sit is an argument about what matters. Our introduction to semiotics and reading note on Mythologies go further.

Precedent. On 12 November 2008, copies of a fourteen-page New York Times dated 4 July 2009 were handed out free in New York and other American cities. The Yes Men made it with collaborators; its lead story reported the end of the Iraq war; its masthead read "All the news we hope to print". The typography did the persuading and the content did the provoking. A familiar format carrying an unfamiliar world is the whole move.

A conscience, if you use it. Ruben Pater's Caps Lock (2021) argues that graphic design is bound up with capitalism, and does not exempt speculative design: the skill that makes a future believable also makes it saleable. See our reading note on Caps Lock.

Why graphic designers struggle with the long horizon

Graphic design runs on two clocks. Most of the work is short-lived: next month's poster, the season's campaign. Some of it outlasts almost anything else a designer makes; a sign family specified this year will still be read in the 2040s, by people its designers will never meet.

Meanwhile the discipline has a habit that stands in for thinking about the future: the futuristic. "The future" is usually a look (extended sans-serifs, chrome type, neon gradients, interface overlays), and a look is a trend, which dates faster than anything. So your horizon problem is specific: you are often asked to make things look like the future, and rarely asked to design for the people who will read them in it. Speculative design swaps the first question for the second, and looks beyond ten years, where the long-lived systems live.

Where speculative design fits in graphic practice

A worked example: the heat notice

Imagine a small studio retained by the transport authority of a hypothetical southern European city to refresh its passenger information for the next five years. The example is illustrative; the signals are real.

The brief. In 2040, how does a city's transit network speak to passengers during extreme heat? The source of change is the naming and grading of heat events; the domain is passenger information. The audience is the authority's communications and operations leads, who are about to re-let the contract for the city's bus shelters.

Signals.

• •In June 2022 Seville launched a pilot that grades heatwaves in three categories and names the most severe. The first, Zoe, arrived in late July at category 3, the highest. Names run in reverse alphabetical order.
• •On 1 June 2023 the UK Health Security Agency and the Met Office launched an impact-based Heat-Health Alerting service for England, with alerts issued in yellow, amber and red.
• •Since 2002 the Free University of Berlin has let the public buy the names given to the highs and lows on its weather maps, through a scheme called Adopt-a-Vortex, with the money supporting its weather observations.

The trend: heat is becoming an event with an identity (a name, a grade, a colour) rather than a number on a forecast.

The future wheel. At the centre, every serious heat event is named and graded, as storms are. The first ring is obvious: names on notices and in the news, the grade colour as a public code, timetables changed by grade. In the second, a graphic designer starts to worry. Grade colours collide with existing codes, such as the red line on the network map; named events become memories people date things by; and names become sellable, because Berlin shows someone will pay. In the third, an emergency notice carries a sponsor, and the city's identity needs rules about what may stand next to an event's name.

The concept.

• •Name: The Shade Line Notice.
• •Tagline: One sheet, every stop, within the hour.
• •Description: When the city names a heat event, every stop carries the same notice within an hour. The event's name is set very large. A band gives the category in one of three colours, distinguishable by colour-blind readers and never matching a line colour. Below: the hours when buses to the cooling rooms are free (the Shade Line service), the three nearest cooling rooms with walking times by the shadiest route, and the day's reduced frequencies. At the foot, a narrow strip: Supported by, and a logo. In this 2040 the city sells naming rights to heat events to fund its cooling rooms.
• •Sketch: A1 portrait. IRENE in a heavy grotesque across the top third, a deep red band, a map fragment with the shaded route dotted, and the sponsor strip, small and unmistakable. Deliberately dull, as if a duty officer made it from a template, because that is how it would be made.

Implications. Begin with an ordinary morning. A commuter reads IRENE, CATEGORY 3 from across the road and knows the afternoon buses to the cooling rooms are free; a visitor who does not read the language reads the colour. Socially, a named event becomes something a city goes through together. Culturally, naming domesticates: a heatwave with a friendly name may be taken less seriously, not more. Politically, the strip is the problem. May an air-conditioning manufacturer sponsor a heat event? An oil company? Trust in the system now rests on the smallest element on the sheet.

How does it go wrong? Grade inflation: three category 3s in a summer and red stops meaning anything. Sponsor creep: the strip grows. And the quiet failure: the notice serves people at bus stops, while many of those most at risk in a heatwave are not out at all. That one sends the studio back to the brief: the system needs a version that goes through a letterbox.

Backcasting. Work back from 2040. Some institution has to own heat naming; Seville did it as a city, England grades alerts nationally, and a 2040 system needs both. Agencies have to agree one colour code, so red means the same at the bus stop and the school gate. Someone has to decide whether emergency information may carry sponsorship at all, a policy question with no obvious owner today. In many cities bus shelters are run by outdoor-advertising companies under long concessions, so taking over every panel within the hour depends on a clause in a contract signed years before the heat arrives. And a correct notice in under an hour is a template and training problem, not a creative one.

What changes this quarter. The stop template in the current refresh gains a reserved alert band, and its candidate colours are tested with colour-blind readers now. The studio builds a notice template a duty officer can fill in without a designer. The brand guidelines gain their first section about the future: what the identity does in an emergency, and what may never stand beside it. And the studio sends one page to the authority's procurement team asking whether the new shelter contract includes an emergency override and a rule on sponsorship. That page is the most consequential thing the project produces, and it is not a design.

Where it goes wrong for graphic designers

The future as a typeface. Render 2040 in a "future" style and viewers see a style they have seen before, not a world. Real futures mostly look like the present with a few things wrong. Use the house style of a 2040 municipal printer, which will be ordinary, and let the content carry the strangeness.

Dystopia by default. Graphic designers have a satirical reflex: the fake advert that sneers, the bleak poster that is easy to admire. Dystopia is the quickest future to make and the quickest to dismiss. The Yes Men's newspaper, notably, was hopeful. A future that is good for some and bad for others, like the sponsored notice, is far more useful than one that is bad for everyone.

Critiquing the kerning. You can make anything look finished, so the room responds to the craft and the argument goes unheard. Make the artefact to the production standard of the institution that would issue it.

Leaving out the small print. The world lives in the small print: who issued this, under which rule, beside which logo. Without it you have a picture of the future, not a document from one.

A first exercise for graphic designers

1. 1.Pick one piece of ephemera your studio made this year: a label, a notice, a ticket, a form.
2. 2.Collect three signals for its domain, one line each: who, when, what.
3. 3.Run a future wheel on one of them on A3 for thirty minutes, and circle a third-ring consequence.
4. 4.Remake the piece as it would be issued in 2040, in the house style rather than a futuristic one, with all the small print written.
5. 5.Print it at actual size and leave it in the studio without explanation. Note what people ask, and what they assume.
6. 6.Write three sentences: what the artefact assumes, what would have had to change for it to exist, and which current decision that touches.

Where to learn speculative design as a graphic designer

Speculative Design Basics is our self-paced online course: 42 lessons, lifetime access, no prior experience assumed. For graphic designers the Tools & Methods chapters matter most: signals, future wheels, and the chapters on future prototyping and backcasting, which cover what to make and how to bring it back to a decision. The case studies include Near Future Laboratory, whose TBD Catalog (2014) is a mail-order catalogue for an ordinary near future. For more semiotics, our Decoding Culture course goes further into reading signs and culture. Brand teams work this territory from the client side (speculative design for marketers), and speculative design for industrial designers covers the objects your ephemera accompany. The series is at speculative design for every role.

Key takeaways

• •Speculative design lets graphic designers make a future believable through the ephemera people would read in it.
• •Fidelity is cheap in graphic design: a fast route into the method, and a trap when craft replaces argument.
• •Signs carry futures: as Barthes showed in Mythologies, a familiar format makes an argument look natural.
• •Your horizon problem: you are asked for the futuristic, while your long-lived systems are read in the 2040s.
• •Avoid the futuristic typeface and default dystopia; use the issuer's house style and write the small print.
• •Backcast to contracts, standards and templates. The key output may be a one-page memo.