It almost seems like a dream now. Big budgets. Fat, happy, suggestible clients cruising happily along, with fat, happy design firms feeding greedily in their wake. Lavish corporate identity manuals. Hardcover brochures promoting office space in shiny buildings by brand name architects. Annual, reports for non-profit clients - non-profit! - with a little picture on the cover, a flyleaf with nothing printed on it, then another page, new paper stock, with just one or two words in 8 point type, then another page, another paper stock - with nothing on it – then a piece of coated paper with another little picture on it, and then - maybe - the darned thing would finally start, after the atmosphere had been properly created...

The eighties seem far away now, so far away, so much farther than the calendar tells us. To young designers entering the field in the lean and mean nineties, the previous decade will surely seem like an impossibly golden age, one of almost unimaginable excess and bravura. Even to those of us who lived through it, it takes the incontrovertible evidence of a flashy portfolio piece - circa, say, 1986 - to remind us how much things have changed.

And they have changed. This decade sees a new awareness of environmental issues, much of it lip service abounding with soy-based images of squirrels and pine cones, but for, the most part deeply felt. It doesn't necessarily mean that graphic designers have ceased to trade in excess for its own sake, but that examples of that excess are just as likely to provoke embarrass­ment as envy.

This decade also sees among designers a new social consciousness as well, one provoked by equal parts Clarence Thomas and Daryl Gates. The voice this conscious­ness takes is sometimes cracked and halt­ing (perhaps due to years of disuse), but genuine nonetheless. Ten years ago, it seemed as though a typical pro-bono piece was a lavish six-color production of a clever visual pun; today it's just as likely to be something down-and-dirty that at least looks as though it was designed to truly help the client's cause rather than add awards to the designer's trophy case.

All in all, designers in the nineties seem to want more than ever to create work that's appropriate, that's relevant, that chal­lenges the client's brief, that's aimed at more than the next design competition. In short, the spirit is willing.

But the flesh, for the most part remains weak. While these issues dominate design­ers' consciences, they still remain periph­eral to most of our practices. Designers continue to work dutifully (probably, in fact, more urgently than ever these days), wishing that 'they could do what they think is right, rather than what they're told to do, all in the name of "professionalism." The fundamental idea of truly challenging the client's expectations, of getting outside the grinding process of filling the orders and shipping the goods, of "being bad," (as Tibor Kalman exhorted us at the 1989 American Institute of Graphic Arts Conference in San Antonio) still seems an elusive goal for most designers.

Is it hard to see why? As Milton Glaser said at that same conference, "Friends are friends, but a guy's gotta eat." Most of us would say that our ideals, whether new­ found or long held, give way at the end of the day to the pressures of running our businesses, that the sanest course of action is to push environmental activism or social consciousness as far as you can and then back off to fight another day, that a client's a client and an invoice is an invoice. In the end, it's all about money, isn't it?

Well, maybe not. Maybe it's about something else, something that hasn't changed, something to do not with money but with the very structure of the relationship between designers and their clients.

Most relationships in daily life are defined, at least in part, by hierarchy. Someone is in charge, and someone is following orders. Often these relationships are immutable: Parent and child, student and teacher, employee and employer. Occasionally the roles are, more interchangeable, as in the case of marriages or partnerships.