Yet for most people graphic design is something that seems to spontaneously occur as if it simply grows on trees. Graphic design helps you find the bathroom in a foreign country, it tells you what the contents is of a bottle of dish washing detergent, it can seduce you into buying the next 4AD release and it can simply blow you away upon seeing the first issue of Ray Gun. Graphic design can't do much by itself. Graphic design is all about ideas. It is the visual manifestation of particular contexts.
Ideas can be subversive.
Graphic design is simply a means to make those ideas visible. Hopefully design can enhance the ideas, make them more powerful, or more memorable, but it can just as easily obscure or nullify a good idea if executed poorly. The last magazine that impressed me in terms of its design was the New Yorker. It's so unrelenting in its intentions. I'm attracted to obsessiveness.