The story: in 2006's Romania a group of people promotes the project of a so-called Design Law. This law is to state the ways design should be organized as a profession. If you have anything to do with design, you have to know exactly what they're cooking for you. Because it smells like communism, it looks like police and it will make you feel like it's 1985 all over again.

At the core of this law stays the notion that there will be ONE organization (does it sound familiar yet?), called The Professional Designers' Society [link in Romanian] that will grant designers enlisted in its Register of Professional Designers the right of signature. So, the deal is simple: if this organization doesn't recognize you as a designer, you're no designer.

A few points:



This text mustn't be argued on by point basis: it has to be repudiated in its entirety as an unspeakable aberration that tries to regulate a creative industry by means of centralized economy.

I don't think this kind of thinking has anything to do with the professionalization of design. I do believe though, that on their way toward losing the battle against history, the communist dinosaurs of the Romanian design are trying to pass a law that could save them from the free market economy and rebuild their lost influence and prosperity with the instruments they acquired during the communist years: the bureaucratization of the creative industry and its suffocation under police-like control.

My work is here for anyone to judge. I don't need SDPR bureaucrats to tell me whether I'm a designer or not. I don't want to ask them for permission to work as a designer nor do I want to have to be enlisted in their Register of Professional Designers. I don't want them to tell me what price I have to charge for a project, or interfere with my work in any way. Never.

Fellow bloggers, please help spreading the word. Designers, make your voice heard — here's a forum [link in Romanian] for the discussion, if you can get into the mainstream media is even better. Lobby against this in any way you can. Let's stand up and fight this dirt. And make this shadows of the past get back to where they belong.

Update: We do have now an on-line petition [www.petitiononline.com/sdprabuz] militating against the legislative project named "Law referring to organizing and practicing design as a profession," aka "The Design Law" as proposed by SDPR. Please sign it and spread the word. Thank you.