It’s all in how you look at it . . .

Restrictions are guidelines that someone or some group created, because they find that those elements don’t work well. It also helps to reign in chaotic or unrelated design. Restrictions can also work to help build a brand image and feel, and build unity.

It is human nature to feel comfortable with familiar patterns. If you’ve been around long enough, you may remember when e-commerce first began on the Internet. It was new, so there were few rules and restrictions (guidelines), and there were many experimental and untried methods. Today’s web pages are much cleaner, clearer, and easier to read. The audience has a general idea how the average web page is laid out, how it flows, and they know what to expect and will feel comfortable navigating it.

Guidelines or parameters give the designer a focus or a starting point. For instance, a painter can start with a square canvas, a round canvas, wood canvas, digital canvas. He can use oil paint, watercolor, or Photoshop. The guidelines or parameters will start the designer in a specific direction. There may be an expected feel for the end result from the parameters, but some talented artists can use these parameters and create unexpected results, which may be good or not good, depending on what is the desired outcome.

The paragraph above from “Eight design tips for the Web” is all but written as poetry. It’s stated from a perspective I can relate to as a static page designer. Its clear, succinct message can be taken sadly, angrily, or as an emotionless statement of fact. I see all three.

I use to think I had a distinct advantage being a classically trained designer. It certainly helped when I left design directly to pursue a career in selling and ushering in the technology via Apple, Adobe, Altsys and Linotronic in the mid-1980s. As times and tastes have evolved, I confess that I’ve not been as forgiving or open-minded as I should have been, especially when it came to web design. Out of habit, I use to see the internet as nothing more than a series of static images. The reality is that there is no limit to what dynamic image content can deliver. And it’s not only limited to the web. Now kiosk and digital signage are benefiting as extensions and parts of a completely interactive experience. It’s an opportunity for old designers like myself to renew themselves. Thanks for the great words.

They came back with absolutely nothing. They couldn’t even decide if they wanted it to be a play or a movie.

I’ve also been to see a lot of plays lately, and externally imposed limitations make so much difference. An outdoor production set Henry IV part 1 in quasi-modern day because they needed costumes that would be wearable at 60 degrees and at 90 degrees. But Falstaff as a tie-dye-wearing, washed-up hippie WORKED.

Externally imposed limitations force us to think through EVERY decision and be even more creative.

I recently had a design client who took a dislike (irrationally, IMHO) to italics. ALL italics. Working with him made me think through my use of typography and select my typefaces more carefully, knowing that I would need something even more versatile if I was denied use of the italics.

Perhaps that’s why I like limitations — they make me work even harder to get my message across.

In their book, Made To Stick, Chip and Dan Heath give two, short 15-second assignments. The first assignment is to write down as many things that are white in color as you can think of in 15 seconds.

If you want to try it yourself, then do it now before reading on. Come on — try it. Now.

(Are you sure you do not want to try it?)

The second assignment is to write down as many white things in your refrigerator as you can think of.

Most people will find it’s as easy or even easier to think of white things from their refrigerator than white things in general. Chip and Dan Heath write that concreteness is a way of mobilizing and focusing the brain.

Selecting a small number of items — like fonts, images, ideas or colors — that you allow yourself to use, or going through the steps in a list, are both methods that make an abstract and blank sheet of paper much more concrete.