Issue Introduction

Issue 44 • 2026

GRAPHIC DESIGN FOR THE PUBLIC
COMMUNICATION, ACCESS, AND CIVIC EXPERIENCE

In recent years, Service Design has emerged as a strategic approach within the public sector, contributing to the adoption of human-centred and participatory methodologies to address increasing complexity. Through innovation labs, governmental units, and specialised consultancies, it has supported processes such as policy-making, organisational transformation, citizen engagement, and digitalisation.

However, the growing relevance of service design should not obscure a fundamental condition: long before these approaches gained visibility, and still today, most interactions between citizens and public institutions are mediated through graphic and visual communication. From transport systems and wayfinding infrastructures to tax forms, digital interfaces, electoral information, and public health communication, the everyday experience of the public sector is largely constructed through communication design.

In this sense, visual design artifacts can be understood as a critical interface between institutions and citizens, where effectiveness depends on the capacity to organise, clarify, and deliver information but also to raise awareness in ways that support real actions—such as navigating systems, accessing services, completing administrative processes, or understanding and responding to public communication flows across visual and audiovisual media. Even when services are conceived as intangible, they are not invisible. Their access, comprehension, usability and aesthetic qualities rely on visual and multimedia structures, informational hierarchies, and communication devices—including time-based and audiovisual formats—that enable citizens to engage with institutional processes and to navigate increasingly interconnected public services.

Public institutions and national and supranational organizations have a responsibility to reduce barriers to participation in civic and social life. This includes ensuring that tools such as forms, platforms, publications, signage systems and multimodal experiences are accessible, understandable, usable and effective by diverse populations.  These design operations are crucial in areas such as elections, emergency communication, healthcare, migration, transportation, and economic reporting, contexts in which clarity, reliability, and trust are essential.

Despite its centrality, this form of design is often unglamorous, silent, and largely unnoticed. It is frequently perceived as neutral, default, or merely functional, expected to work, and therefore rarely questioned. Yet it profoundly conditions everyday life and plays a decisive role in shaping the relationship between citizens and public institutions and organizations. Precisely because it often operates anonymously, without recognition or visibility, it requires a high degree of care, responsibility, and quality. Public communication design must meet demanding standards of clarity, accuracy, and usability, not for aesthetic recognition, but for its direct impact on citizens’ lives.

At the same time, contemporary public institutions are increasingly confronted with complex, dynamic, and often contested scenarios. As highlighted by Burns et al. (2006), many systems have historically been designed for a complicated rather than a complex world.

Today, however, the proliferation of information, the acceleration of digital infrastructures, and the instability of political and social environments challenge the capacity of traditional communication models to effectively mediate between institutions and citizens. Citizens rarely experience public institutions as isolated organisations; rather, they encounter the State as a network of interconnected organisations, services, and platforms. In this context, the role of communication design extends beyond representation, requiring processes of research, iteration, and multidisciplinary collaboration to ensure that information systems effectively support real-world use and help citizens understand how to move across institutional boundaries in pursuit of their goals.

Accepting the challenge raised by issue 42, Design under attack, which called for a renewed ethical, political, and operational reflection on the role of communication design in a context of crisis and instability, this issue proposes to shift the focus toward the public domain in a national and supranational environment. If design can operate as a form of resistance, critical communication, and social agency, then public communication design can be understood as a form of silent yet fundamental resistance: a practice committed to the common good, to clarity, to accessibility, and to the functioning of democratic systems across static, dynamic and interactive experiences.

In a context marked by political polarization, misinformation, and increasing distrust toward institutions, the role of graphic design in the public sector becomes particularly significant. It is not only a matter of aesthetic refinement or superficial “beautification” (as suggested by President Trump’s America by Design statement), but of sustaining the credibility, transparency, and operational capacity of the state. As Richard Saul Wurman famously stated, “public information should be made public”: information that concerns collective life must be accessible, understandable, usable, and free.

This issue invites contributors to critically explore the role of graphic design, visual communication, and information design within the public sector. The aim is to investigate how design practices can support, question, and transform the ways in which public institutions communicate, operate, and engage with citizens.

 

REFERENCES

Bason, C. (2017). Leading public design: Discovering human-centred governance. Policy Press.

Black, A., Luna, P., Lund, O., & Walker, S. (Eds.). (2017). Information design: Research and practice. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315585680

Burns, C., Cottam, H., Vanstone, C., & Winhall, J. (2006). RED Paper 02. Transformation design. Design Council. https://www.designcouncil.org.uk/fileadmin/uploads/dc/Documents/red-paper-transformation-design.pdf

Downe, L. (2020). Good services: How to design services that work. BIS Publishers.

Frascara, J. (2008). Diseño gráfico para la gente: Comunicaciones de masa y cambio social. Ediciones Infinito.

Government Digital Service. (n.d.). Service manual. GOV.UK. https://www.gov.uk/service-manual

Nesta & IDEO. (2017). Designing for public services: A practical guide. Nesta. https://www.nesta.org.uk/toolkit/designing-for-public-services-a-practical-guide/

Pontis, S., & Babwahsingh, M. (2023). Information design unbound: Key concepts and skills for making sense in a changing world. Bloomsbury Visual Arts.

Schwesinger, B. (2010). The form book: Best practice in creating forms for printed and online use. Thames & Hudson.

Sless, D. (2004). Designing public documents. Information Design Journal + Document Design, 12(1), 24–35. https://doi.org/10.1075/idjdd.12.1.04sle

Zwaga, H., Boersema, T., & Hoonhout, H. (Eds.). (1999). Visual information for everyday use: Design and research perspectives. CRC Press. https://doi.org/10.1201/9781482295375

 

 

PUBLICATION FEES

• Scholarly Essays:
  AIAP Authors: €300 per essay
  Standard Authors: €400 per essay

• Communication Artifacts:
  AIAP Authors: €300 per artifact
  Standard Authors: €400 per artifact

• Reviews:
  Free of charge

Additional Third Author Fee: €50 per contribution (applies to all types)