Blind design
Disclaimer: I myself have been dedicating most of my time to learn graphic design. I recognise its importance and its value. All things said in the paragraphs below are also valid for myself, even though it may seem like a contradiction. If you get easily offended by people who criticise graphic design, just leave this page and go and do whatever you do to keep yourself distracted. You have been warned. I wash my hands from this point on.
It’s funny how most graphic designers live in their own world with their own little rules. They trap themselves into a little box filled with the only people who realise the difference between Bodoni and Didot. They spend their immense potential kerning business cards or aligning paragraphs in magazines people will never read. It’s funny how they don’t realise there’s an entire other box–a much bigger one, should I say– that doesn’t even bother to know what a serif is. Even when they do realise, they prefer to ignore this other box and keep on living only in their own.
I’ve come to the conclusion that most designers waste their talents on meaningless things. They are able to see millimetres of misalignment, but unable to see how unimportant that might be. By dedicating their careers to creating useless designs, they give up all the influence they could have in other boxes. This attitude affects the overall perception of design in society as if it’s purely about aesthetics or forms, which usually is taken as superfluous or trivial. Graphic designers have a real hard time trying to offer value that’s actually valuable to society. It’s like these two parts don’t speak the same language. This is the issue I intend to discuss today.
I don’t mean to say that graphic design is unimportant and we should stop studying it. That’s not my point and actually goes very much in the opposite direction of my beliefs. What I do mean is that graphic design is not essentially important from different standpoints. The practice of designing should be a lot more concerned about affecting a system than having a particular aesthetic. The value of design does not reside within itself but rather on how it impacts a process or system. Confusing, isn’t it? I’ll try to make myself clearer with an example.
I was at the New School from the Fall of 2014 through the Fall of 2015. While I was there, the school implanted its new visual identity, which created a surprisingly big discussion amongst the students and professors. I inevitably entered a few discussions about the redesign, which, by the way, was made by Pentagram. All my graphic design colleagues said they didn’t like it. Apparently the “w” is jacked and looks like two V’s. At first I was kind of skeptical as well. But then I got used to it. It’s just a logo. In spite of that, they were still hating it for some reason that I couldn’t really understand.
Well, the W does look like to V’s. So what? Does that make it bad? Do you actually believe we should always be strictly playing by the rules of graphic design all the time? Must I bring up, for example, Pablo Picasso, who became one of the most influential painters in the world exactly by not painting the way he was supposed to? Must I remind you that there are several other stories just like his?
The more I discussed the redesign, the clearer a few things became to me. I began to realise that this redesign wasn’t really about the logo, or misshaped letterforms. The team behind the project went to the school one evening and did a keynote in which they revealed a few very important facts about that case.
They said The New School is less known in NYC than other universities in the landscape, which is obviously a problem. They needed to create awareness knowledge around the school, because few people knew about it. The people who knew about it, though, thought good things about the school. Words like “cool” “creative” came to people’s minds when they were asked about the New School.
So now they had this challenge: how to expand the number of people who know about our school? It seemed reasonable to the administration that a solution would be to redesign their identity with one of the biggest design companies in the world: Pentagram. This is a company that employs several famous and recognised designers. Paula Scher herself was in charge of the school project. They have spent a ridiculous amount of money because of that, a really big budget was invested. All that for what exactly? For a logo? For a W that looks weird? No, of course not. That is not the reason, and here’s what designers don’t accept: logos are not as important to everyone in other boxes as they are to designers. Just to be able to say that Pentagram did the redesign of New School will bring lots of people to at least the smallest level of knowledge about the school. When you finally understand that there’s a strategy that goes beyond the visual identity, the W don’t seem to matter that much anymore. The logo is no longer so important. The thing people see now is: Pentagram, the huge design firm, did a project for the New School. Their objective is being fulfilled. Their marketing campaigns now have a stronger basis to be built on. The names of Pentagram and Paula Scher are forever associated with the school, so people interested in those will probably hear about the New School as well. Achieving this seems, to me at least, a lot more significant than having perfectly kerned words, isn’t it?
No, I do not think Paula Scher is the goddess of design, nor is Pentagram the Olympia. I’m also not comparing either of those to Pablo Picasso for that matter. My whole point here is that the graphic design portion of a project should always follow the business strategy, and not the other way around. You first set goals in terms of what do you expect to achieve, and then orient your resources towards that direction. This is why, in my opinion, strategic design is getting more attention everyday. It’s no longer sufficient to only provide your client with products, but rather services. A logo is a product. A solid marketing strategy is a service.
We often design logos for companies that we watch fail miserably in their first year. It’s very frustrating the sensation of being powerless when you know you did your best, but still your work is going to the trash can because of reasons that are beyond you. This is why I do not believe graphic design alone is able to offer a lot to society, because graphic design alone doesn’t have a systemic impact.
Finally, I would like to add that I didn’t mean anything here with arrogance, no. I can very much be wrong about my beliefs, and a lot of what was said here may be nothing but conjecturing. Still, those were a few of my opinions that I humbly shared with you today. It may not have changed the way you think about design, but I certainly hope it gets you thinking about all this.
