The article analyses the possible corrections of the late-capitalistic relationships between ordering and commissioned parties working in the area of visual communication design. In the first part, it recalls historical processes which led to the development of capitalism as such, as well as to the formation of a synergic relationship between visual communication and capitalism. Next, the article presents the negative consequences of those processes and recalls postulates formulated in the critical manifestos by Victor Papanek as regards the update of assignments addressed to visual communication designers. The second part of the article analyses crowdfunding as a tool for executing those postulates in order to make the contemporary design practice more meaningful. Based on his own designs, executed by means of the crowdfunding model, the author presents the advantages and disadvantages of this form of funding and indicates why crowdfunding is more effective as a form of employing the labour and material resources than the mechanisms of strictly commercial endeavours. Further, the article sketches out the need for designers’ presence also in the area of content creation. Its final conclusions refer to the possibility of making the crowdfunding projects the professional routine for visual communication designers.
Keywords: visual communication, crowdfunding, self-initiated projects, socially responsible design (SRD), anticapitalism
