— Paul Rand
At the risk of instantly shattering any credibility this essay may hold for the greater design community, I’ll be honest: I am not a designer. I am merely a design student. Yet my amateur status gives me a unique insight into an important issue in modern design: communication versus mere decoration. For some time now, there has been a strange new aesthetic afoot, sporting various monikers, from deconstructionist to grunge. Even if you’re not familiar with the label, you know the look: dense, chaotic designs crawling with extraneous layers, techie bitmaps, distortion, and type distressed almost beyond recognition. In my experience, this trend, spawned by modern technology, is only perpetuated by design education. Though we are taught that communication is our number one goal as designers, time and again, simplicity, clarity, and legibility fall by the wayside in favor of a slick image. In blind pursuit of a certain look, we are dabbling dangerously in the realm of pure art.
It might shed some light on my views if I mention that my college background was not in the arts, but in journalism. Though both design and journalism are related to communication, they obviously differ in many ways. A big one is the ambiguity that shrouds the actual meaning and purpose of design. People avoid defining the term like the plague. The good sports that tackle it shun any absolutes (“Well, what is art?…”), or make a point of giving safely contradictory answers (Steven Heller quips that design is “order, clarity, disorder, chaos.”) However, while I was learning the ropes of newspaper and magazine layouts, the goal was beyond clear: Journalism is about finding the truth, and communicating it as quickly and clearly as possible. Copy is typically concise and to the point. Typefaces are kept consistent. Any graphics directly support the story. Page elements are arranged in a straightforward, predictable, and recognizable hierarchy. Above all, strict rules govern the placement of almost every element, from headlines to photos to sidebars.
For better or for worse, this was my training upon entering design school. Often, it has felt like worse. I am a very organized, left-brained sort by nature, more creative verbally than visually, and being among so many artists has proven both inspiring and intimidating. But beyond frustrating is hearing the same things from so many different instructors: my designs are too symmetrical, too orderly, too balanced — not edgy enough. (Sound like a newspaper? Big surprise.) Daunted, I decided that in order to succeed in the field, I must discover the look and feel of this revered edginess… and learn to emulate it, as any inexperienced person will. So I started taking a closer look at the design all around me, in trade publications, in the marketplace, and especially in the work of my fellow students.
What I found frustrated me even more, because I feel like the edgy, grungy design of today could take a few lessons from journalism. Granted, good design should probably be more visually engaging than your average newspaper. It should push the envelope, and it should make you think — but it shouldn’t make you work. It is not meant to be a visual riddle. Such designs are more likely to confuse the general public than to intrigue them. As Natalia Ilyin puts it in Fabulous Us: Speaking the Language of Exclusion, “Playing with the forms of graphic design language is intriguing, but languages are created to carry meaning, and to deny responsibility for that meaning is to be ironic, elitist, and chicken.” There is definitely something to be said for clarity, and much of today’s design is simply not saying it.
Perhaps I should make an important distinction here, between designing for the public, and designing for other designers. (I really don’t believe this should even be necessary, which is partially why I am writing this essay.) Many things are still designed with the consumer in mind. For example, it’s not hard to understand the back of a TV dinner box: basic cooking instructions, perhaps some cute fonts, a photo of the meal (inevitably looking better than it ever will coming out of your microwave…) Maybe not ground-breaking design, but it gets the job done. It communicates. However, if you handed this project over to your typical design student, there’s no telling what you might end up with. But I can hazard a guess: random bitmapped images faded into the background; grungy, distressed display fonts layered over each other to the point of illegibility; and most definitely the very en vogue trick of pushing your text to the edge of the image so that part of it is cut off. (What the heck is that all about anyway?) Throw in some textures. Leave huge gaps of white space in some areas, while others are a cluttered mass of pictures and words. TA DA! Congratulations, you have successfully merged frozen food packaging with Raygun magazine. Prepare to have design students and instructors alike kiss your ass.
Okay, perhaps that’s a bit of an exaggeration — but probably not as much as you think. Naturally, everybody claims that concept is more important than pure aesthetic. The look of a piece, while important, should play a supporting role. Yet more than once or twice, I have seen some of the same instructors who espouse this idea swoon over student work that admittedly looks really cool, but would probably leave the average person scratching his head in bafflement. (A perfect example would be a party flyer that a fellow student designed and put up around school. It was so chaotic and dense that everyone got lost because no one could properly make out the directions.) Despite the contemporary credo to supposedly challenge the viewer, make her an active participant, change the way we read, etc… Well, I don’t know about you, but if I’m walking down the street or flipping through a magazine, and I can’t decipher a poster or ad in about 10 seconds or less, I’m moving on, no matter how cool it looks. In The New Typographer Muttering in Your Ear, Kevin Fenton points out, “We are less literate and less likely to read than ever before. To speak of �challenging the way we read’ seems almost naively optimistic … I am disturbed by the penchant of contemporary typographers … for creating confusion in a world which already seems sufficiently confused.”
This is not a simple case of “Less is more.” After all, a spare, reductive style does not always suit the concept of a project. I’m not advocating pure minimalism. But as Milton Glaser would say, “Just enough is more.” And I believe a piece can be busy and contain many elements, if need be, without detracting from the message. It just takes some finesse. Erik Cox, partner in C2: The Creative Capital Network, remarks, “The best designers understand the timing of communication. Just enough to draw you in, and then you get the pay-off of the message. It’s a difficult skill to teach.”
Perhaps that’s why many instructors who constantly stress the importance of visual communication still seem satisfied with a slick, overly complex, ultimately empty image. In fact, some actually encourage it. I recall a day when a teacher, whom I know to be very talented, showed us a CD cover he had made while learning some software. Enmeshed in the track listing was a faded duotone of (by his own admission) a random industrial building, as well as assorted unrelated diagrams, creating that familiar grungy, techie feel. Well, wait a second, you may say, maybe that look supported his concept. Maybe — if the band had not been completely made up for the exercise. Very early on, I got the message that regardless of concept, this is how good design is supposed to look. This is what you do if you want other designers to eat up your work with a spoon. Case in point: in another class, frustrated by my peers’ effortless forays into this deconstructivist aesthetic, I started sticking random lines and other elements that had nothing to do with the subject into a class exercise. I didn’t know whether to be proud or disgusted when the instructor said it was some of my best work yet.
After being told more than once that I was “close, but just not getting it,” I did some investigative research. I was surprised and vindicated to find that many successful designers share my views — and have some solid theories about what is happening. Basically, this trend of chaos is in essence a reaction to modern technology.
First, there’s the whole issue of “fast food culture.” As Marshall McLuhan is fond of writing about, the electronic revolution has triggered a major shift in our culture away from linear, mechanistic thinking and toward a more all-encompassing, visual-and-tactile-oriented sensory experience. How can designers compete with the overwhelming buzz of television, cell phones, computer games, and the Internet? Novelty is king. A simple, clean message will never do, some people think. So they throw together an equally overwhelming cocktail of graphics and type, hoping the puzzle will hold the public’s attention long enough for them to decipher the message (assuming there even is one). In Soup of the Day, Veronique Vienne writes, “Today, type designers like David Carson … are worshipped by those whose job it is to capture the attention of a visually overloaded public … Their victory leaves the rest of us to sift through the visual wreckage — tangled headlines, blurred letters, floating pull-quotes, and distressed imagery — unable to figure out what an article is all about.” So much for communication.
Of course, technology is also increasingly accessible in our lives as a tool. It’s no secret that designers loathe the rise of the casual desktop publisher, that 20-something with a Mac who lives in his parents’ basement, cranking out half-assed promotional flyers and the occasional business card with little or no formal training. Who needs training when you’ve got good software? But as Jeffery Keedy says in The Rules of Typography According to Crackpots Experts, “Diversity and excellence are not mutually exclusive; if everything is allowed it does not necessarily follow that everything is of equal value.” What’s more, since there is no one to beat the notion of concept into these people, aesthetic rises to the forefront. After all, desktop publishers are generally hired not for their ideas, but for their technical expertise. Ellen Lupton, curator for the National Design Museum and director of the Maryland Institute College of Art’s graphic design MFA program, notes, “Drop shadows, Photoshop filters, and the like are often performed because the designer doesn’t have a strong idea, so they try to make the surface of their piece more �interesting.’ This rarely compensates for the absence of an idea.” So much for concept.
While the age of the self-styled “designer” has certainly contributed to the decline of communication and the rise of decoration, the design community’s reaction to these wannabes hasn’t helped matters. In an effort to prove their superiority to desktop publishers, real designers set out to create work that not just anyone could do, effectively eliminating simple design. In Towards the Cause of Grunge, Tobias Frere-Jones writes, “tension and noise are the new goal. Album covers, magazines, commercials and posters shiver and twitch with entropy and decay … Grunge becomes a seductive method of self-identity.” Dense, layered, chaotic work became the mark of “good” designers — and set the trend for the rest of the industry. So much for a clear message.
Contemporary designers’ desire to differentiate themselves from the mainstream through overly complex designs fits in well with the modern trend of making the viewer “a more active participant.” The responsibility for the message is shifted off the creator and onto the viewer. �migré — “the magazine that ignores boundaries” — is a perfect example of this. They claim that universality of message is not their goal, because new forms must reflect new technology, as opposed to “antiquated” ideas. Therefore, legibility is not their problem. This kind of attitude is fine when it comes to things like movies and novels. After all, that’s entertainment, not design. But it isn’t antiquated or heavy-handed to make clear what we are trying to say. That’s what design is all about. If you want your work left open for interpretation, I have news for you: you’re an artist. Book a gallery and knock yourself out.
Not only is freedom to interpret not well suited for design purposes; overworking the style and text of a piece can actually take away that freedom. Instead, it forcibly imposes the designer’s interpretation on the viewer. Perhaps Fenton put it best: “the new typography denies the reader the opportunity to experience the text for himself. It feels like someone is standing over your shoulder while you read, underlining some passages, italicizing others, muttering through yet others.”
In the end, the industry’s reaction to modern technology comes back to me: the student. As I mentioned earlier, if you’re inexperienced with something, your natural instinct is to jump on trends and emulate the more experienced. So consider the poor newbie designer, confronted with a plethora of design applications, techniques, software, movements… She may have a basic art background, but this is a whole new world. How can she prove in just a few years that she’s worthy of a top-notch design job? Flustered, she hits the ground running, and tries to soak up everything around her that people deem “good.” She is still struggling with concept and communication, so the simple solutions of masters like James Victore elude her grasp. The thought of her ineptitude so nakedly displayed on a plain white background mortifies her. They’d laugh her right out of critique. So instead, she turns to design icons like David Carson. She may never be that talented, but by imitating the right look, the right balance of complexity and ambiguity, she can mask the emptiness of her message. She won’t fool everyone. But she’ll probably get some projects on display at the end of the quarter. After all, when people come in for a tour of the school, they’re not going to stop and ponder the message of every piece they pass. They’re just going to be wowed by aesthetic technique and ability — which is, of course, just what the school wants to advertise. But the big picture is that design students who skimp on content and message will probably become professional designers who skimp on content and message. “Designing for designers is easy,” says Tan Le, creative director at Young & Rubicam Brands. “Designing for the average consumer and client can be incredibly challenging, and is the real test of a designer’s intelligence and talent. Design experimentation is relatively simple compared to the real-world criteria of market impact and sales.” Too much freedom can be a bad thing, and there is sure to be less of it on the job than in the classroom.
I’ll be the first to admit that it is very difficult to resist the temptation of simply decorating instead of communicating. Just the other day, I advised a fellow student to take a certain aesthetic direction with her poster because “You know it’s what they want to see.” Likewise, when it comes to my own work, it’s very hard to focus on how well my design solution solves a problem, as opposed to whether it looks cool enough to make it into the school display case. After all, many of us are stuck somewhere between too busy and too lazy, and it’s just easier to make pretty pictures and follow trends (as opposed to working to become the trendsetters). Luckily, I’ve got a stodgy, communication-based journalism background to rely on. I’ll be the first to admit that I do have a good ways to go in terms of perfecting my sense of aesthetics. But many of my peers — and, I daresay, much of the design community at large — have a long way to go toward perfecting their concepting and communication skills. Make no mistake; design should be visually engaging. As Steven Heller puts it, “aesthetics attracts the bee to the flower.” But design is not meant to be pure art. Today’s designers — and especially design educators, who essentially hold the future of design in their hands — would do well to remember that in this field, form follows function. At the end of the day, we are communicators, not decorators, and clarity is key.
Robin Fuller is a student at Portfolio Center. This essay is the first in a series by PC students who took part in Bryony’s long-distance Design Thinking class during the quarter of winter 2005.
Word. More than once I've been called "too blocky" "too constructivist" "not loose enough". Fortunately web design is a somewhat special medium, simple decoration doesn't work, so I can do what I like better...
On Mar.22.2005 at 07:10 AM