To Me You Are a Work of Art
Updated: Sep 13
Graphic designers could do with some of the revolutionary spirit of ISO Recommendation R216
It is all too easy to feel discouraged today. The contemporary graphic designer is being encouraged to turn their back on the past, to accept that we are responsible for past mistakes (real or invented) made by those who came before. That we must atone by being better, more ethical designers, activists in the service of social justice. Graphic design is being recast as a moral imperative and not merely the transmission of ideas for the social and cultural good. The past, we are told, is morally and politically sinful, and that the sins of the father are to be borne by the sons and daughters. A process of deracination is underway. This is year zero.
This sense of dislocation from the past is understandable (perhaps more acutely for graphic designers) when we consider the changes in the means of communication. Our areas of responsibility, the boundaries of graphic design – intellectually, technologically and interpersonally – have changed where and how we work, and they seem to bear little resemblance to how it was done in the past. The form has changed too, in new and exciting ways – rethinking the ‘old’ (print) and determining the ‘new’ (digital). The production process has gotten cheaper and more expensive! Progress in communication technologies has required new ways of working – the World Wide Web, social media and AI have forced designers to professionally pivot. Changing social, cultural and artistic influences are transforming our approach to work. The tools we now employ further set us apart from our past selves – the hand-made and the hand-moved. Design associations have relegated championing craft, instead fearmongering about ethical, social and environmental catastrophe. Progressive educators tell us that design history books have excluded women, ‘trans-people’ and ‘black and brown’ voices at the hands of white supremacists and misogynists. The canon too has suffered the same fate. Studiousness, expertise and craft have given way to a therapeutic, grievance-based approach to teaching. The contemporary designer has been left at sea, alone, alienated, while the new design elite fumble around in search of a semblance of authority, trying to make sense of the senseless.
The elitist insistence that we need to decolonise history impoverishes education and puts the brakes on social and cultural progress in the present. It celebrates particularism over the universal. It degrades the best of us and denies that we stand on the shoulders of giants. History placed at the centre, read correctly, warts and all, is littered with inspiring individuals, epoch-defining moments and transformative ideas. None more so than the paper size system we use today, the International Organization for Standardization’s (ISO) ‘Recommendation R216’ (R216).
Born of the French Revolution, R216 is Universalism made tangible. It is a rational project that even stretches as far back as the Greeks. Although it was developed in recent times by the Germans in the early twentieth century. The Germans, through their Standards Institution (DIN), further rationalised the long-forgotten French standard for paper sizes that became known as the DIN Standard. In 1946, 25 countries met in London and founded the ISO. By 1961, the now familiar A-Series paper standard (A3, A4, A5, etc.) was issued and would unite Europe and much of the world besides, including Australia and New Zealand, India, Japan, South Africa, South America, the Middle East, Africa and most of Asia. It allowed nations to use the same ‘vocabulary’ of standardisation and a universal system without speaking the same language.
R216 is a rational system of metric trimmed paper sizes based on an aspect ratio of the square root of 2. It is a system that replaced an arbitrary, often inconsistent measure based on the imperial inch.
The revolutionary significance of modern European paper sizes is implicit in the metric system developed during the French Revolution of 1789 and based on the ideology of ‘pure reason’. It broke down barriers between nations and streamlined relationships between businesses at home and abroad. The leaders of the Revolution demanded that, ‘The new units should have no dependency to such national, local or temporal circumstances.’
The rationale of the now standard ‘A’ paper series begins with the ‘A0’ sheet. Measuring 1189 × 841mm, it has an area of a square metre. Its proportions are derived from drawing an arc using the diagonal of a square. Each paper size in the sequence derived from A0 is half the total area of the parent sheet above. So, from A0 you get A1. A1 is half the area of A0. From A1 you get A2, half the area of A1; from A2, A3; to A4 – the most common paper size due to everyday communications, measuring 210mm wide × 297mm high. A4 is reduced to A5, A5 to A6.
The ISO system of paper sizes and measurement was derived from the earlier German DIN system, which itself developed from the French paper-size proposals of the eighteenth century. Its defining mathematical principle is the square root of 2. Its relationship with the Greek Golden Section is mathematical rather than historical.
Inherent in the metric paper system are ideological, mathematical and human forms of beauty. The ISO system of paper sizes is a rational system of communication for an increasingly expanding world. It was developed as a systematic and rational approach to the needs of emerging nations and is a celebration of that which we have in common, over those that divide. The history of man is a history of the coming together of groups, communities and nation states. R216 played no small part in driving modern society forward and planted a flag for reason, rationality and international communication. R216 satisfied the human impulse to make more with less, to be creative, efficient, rational and scientific.
What a piece of work is man!
(With apologies to Norman Lewis - https://normanlewis.substack.com/)
Alex Cameron, September 2026
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To Me You Are a Work of Art
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