Do we design something “new,” or use something “off the shelf?” Do we break new ground, or stay on the beaten path? These questions are based on an assumption that I believe is false. They are based on the assumption that designers are inventors.

As designers, I believe that “standing out” is not our guiding light. Most companies don’t need to stand out. They simply need to stand. Stand strong, stand true, be real. Design, correctly applied, is not something we dream up; it is the look of the world we live in. So much poor design has been made in the pursuit of “originality,” “creativity,” and “grabbing the viewer” (don’t try this in person).

When we designers put the visual face on a business, we are not inventing the face but expressing what already exists. This is a wonder and a marvel. Every person is unique. Every business and adventure, therefore, is unique. It’s amazing (and not always difficult) to peel back the layers, get to the heart and soul of the thing, and put that on the page. Capture it, and you’ve captured the company. Express it, and you’ve expressed the company. I’m talking here to the professional. Find the heart and soul of a company, and you’ll never again worry about being derivative, because every company is naturally unique. Fail that, and your work, no matter whether derivative or “original,” is basically a song and dance. Do you see the difference?

Second is that the web site, created by MUH-TAY-ZIK | HOF-FER, is brilliantly conceived and designed, which easily explains its powerful reach. Simple icons and childlike colors respond to your touch, moving to and fro, in and out, teaching you about modern slavery and calculating your “footprint.” I especially like it on the iPad, where I first saw it.

It’s a remarkable cause made more remarkable by its design. It’s fresh thinking, not just repurposed print, and a persuasive use of new media. We’ll be seeing more of this.

Also from MUH-TAY-ZIK | HOF-FER is the similarly impressive Ekso Bionics site, which is another tight marriage of design and story.

What’s going on here?

Each of these sites illustrates the immense power of the creative story and makes it easy to see that design is fundamental in telling that story. No story, no design. No design, no story. I can’t underscore this enough. Without story, design is decorating. Arranging colors and shapes looking for something “cool.”

I don’t mean design, though, as in a job description, although it’s a fine one. I mean design as in art, beauty, visual richness, the kind of design that makes the world more pleasant to be in. The joy of the computer isn’t that it saves time but that it’s empowered us to make beautiful everything we touch, on a scale we never could before.

I call myself a designer because I make a living at it. But design doesn’t belong to a particular class of people. Beauty is one of life’s fundamentals, like love and laughter. It’s ours. We’re all attracted to beautiful things and repelled by ugly ones. And while we have our own artistic preferences — I like red, you like blue, and these preferences wax and wane over a lifetime — our sense of beauty is really quite common.

So is our need for it.

Our circulation manager once came to work in a pair of shoes that had me reaching for my sunglasses. Brilliant white, jet black, stripes all over — Nike, they said on the side. They outsell competitors that sell for half their price. Why? Design.

Arriving every day in our office mailbox is a stack of print advertising, which we sort over the wastebasket. Junk, junk, junk, maybe, junk, junk, and so on. How do we decide which to keep? Design.

A new car can cost a billion dollars to design.

Let that sink in.

Design has always been important, but today it is center stage. Its influence is impossible to overstate. It’s no longer enough to have a good product; it must be a good-looking product. It’s no longer enough to publish the news; it must be good-looking news. Good design brings to everything clarity, beauty, and strength. Good design moves hearts and minds and mountains.

What’s all this mean for us designers?

It means a lot of fun, that’s what. And because it’s more competitive, it means a lot of sweat.

What does it take to be a designer?

1) It starts with an interest. I was going to say it starts with a love of design, but I didn’t start by loving it; I started by being interested and began to love it after I . . .

2) began acquiring skills. Design can be a gratifying spectator sport, but if you’re going to make it happen you need to get your hands on it, you need to get involved, you need to work the tools.

This is what makes the computer exciting; it’s a store full of tools. With it you can set type, you can draw pictures, you can beautify photos. You can design every aspect of every page, upload it or print it, and have the results in seconds. In the old days, this took a big staff and special equipment and planning and coordination and expense. Today the whole show is in the box on your desk.

Design is a language like speech and music. To master it takes practice. Fun thing is, with our magic boxes we can practice a lot; we can now design everything.

To succeed as a designer, it’s important that you respect your need to learn. Give yourself room; there is a lot to know. I’m not telling you to stop short of the highest. But take pleasure in every small victory on the way up. Design is not a contest, and what I mean by that is you can’t lose, not as long as you keep at it. You may not get this job or that, but you’ll get better and better.

Give yourself room to be disappointed, too. An athlete doesn’t hurdle a seven-foot bar first try. He endures a lot of days on his back with that stupid bar on his chest.

Study. Look around. Keep at it.

I can tell you something. When I was a kid I thought there’d come a time when I would arrive. You know, be there. On top. And to my youthful mind this meant being done, on cruise control, no more work.

Shows what I knew.

Life, I’m happy to report, is too big to be done. Beauty forever beckons. That’s what I like best about graphic design.

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This editorial, slightly modified, was originally published in Before & After issue 25.

*****

Judy writes, “Who woulda thought that after all these years, landing a job interview would be so difficult? Just getting in the door to show them how cool I am is hard. It’s a tough sell in the market today.

“I hate to say that I’m old school. It’s something I hear old people say. But when I look at the tools I used as I started my career — the ones that are either collecting dust or framed in my memorabilia — I realize that it might be true. My Haberule type gauge, ellipse guides, arc templates, Rapidograph pens, pica rulers, Rubylith, dividers, color guides, stat machine and dry-transfer letters are things of the past. Who knows what all the hours of smelling rubber cement has done to my brain.

“I’ve taken the years off of my resumé at someone’s suggestion. (I am, however, not dying my hair.) Filling out job applications online has taken the fun out of presenting my work in person with a portfolio. My graphic design skills are lacking web credentials. I can’t believe I’m saying this. Print is slipping away.

“The worst part is that even though I have 35+ years in the field, no one is calling me back. I mean, forget the phone call, no one is even emailing me back.

“What now?”

—————

Hi Judy,

I’d say that print is slipping away, sort of. More like it’s morphing. The iPad, for example, is a print medium, with benefits. New Web-font technology brings the beauty and nuanced voices of print to the Web. For those of us who love type and print, this is exciting.

That said, video is hot, and it should be. It’s a more natural medium — “natural” being the way we actually experience life. Reading is the artificial thing. The surprise for me has been the speed of the advances in technology. We carry the world in our pockets now, in real time. What my iPhone will do is almost unbelievable. A short 10 years ago multimedia tied us to our desks, modems squawked, pages loaded at crawl speed and were ugly, search sucked; the whole experience was sucky.

Video is no longer a special event that requires high production values; it’s become more like chat.

Had nothing changed and print was still king, you and I would be kings, laid back, lavishly paid, dispensing with ease a lifetime of accumulated mastery, dabbling at our leisure in the new technologies. Fantasy Island.

When I was 30 and art director of the local city magazine, we hired a 50-year-old who was incredible at pencil-sketching layouts. He could whip out four pencil-sketched advertising mockups in 30 minutes, which invariably impressed clients and made our jobs easy. Problem was, this artist was stuck in the 1950s, where he had learned his skills. He’d grown inflexible, like unused muscles get. He couldn’t get his head into what we were thinking and the direction we wanted to take the design. He was of a different mind, and we eventually let him go. It didn’t help that he drank.

At the same time, we had a 70-year-old proofreader who was the opposite. Extremely skilled, curious, cooperative, fun-loving, hard-working. If we were up all night, literally around the clock, on a deadline, Stan would stay with us, proofing endless galleys of 6-pt. type (“This opening paren is five points, not six,” he said one memorable night), raising our awareness, increasing our knowledge, inspiring us with his perseverance and acceptance of only the highest standards. There’s a lot of Stan Ottowa in Before & After.

Stan didn’t have to do this. He could have accepted the world’s loosening grammatical standards and less-than-the-best craftsmanship. But he kept the bar high and in doing so called us up to it.

Anyway, all this to say that while you may lack this or that credential, you have more than the 30- (or 20-) somethings, whose experience, for all of their skills, is still thin and forming, and instead of just landing a job, you might think about how to find your “more” and then find the fit for it.

What do you know about yourself at 50 (or 60) that you didn’t know at 30? How does it apply to design, and specifically to job A, B, or C?

What’s your vision? In every life God has planted the seed of something important. By 60, many of the wishes, hopes and dreams of youth have fallen away. Yet this thing persists. You may already be living it. Or not yet. What is it?

Do you have a “bucket” list? What’s on it?

Don’t fret over who might hire you, which is to cede ownership of your life to others. Think instead about what you know and have and want, and work to that. What do you do that no one else can do? Where can you make a difference that no one else can make?

My guess is that you know.

Go for that.

—————

Hi John,

Divine intervention has prevailed! I found out that a friend worked in the marketing department of a national company headquartered in my hometown. Of course, she would be happy to walk something in.

The resumé I had carefully prepared would not work — that letter-size piece of paper just wasn’t talking. What to do? Again, divine intervention prevailed. I found myself in the Hallmark store looking at the singing greeting cards. Surely there would be an appropriate song. “Cheers! Everyone knows your name,” sang out. It was the start of a great idea.

Like most of my discoveries in design, it’s a matter of relaxing and trusting. (My love of graphics started in first grade when the teacher asked me to design the bulletin board. I looked up and “saw” it — heading, picture, body. I’ve been doing it ever since.)

I went back to my roots. With photos and X-Acto blades, old rulers and pens, I started crafting the perfect resumé. The photo of me standing in a cornfield became “Judy Robertson is out standing in her field.” The story of how corn starts as a small seed became my career path. When I was done, the stock card had been transformed into a one-of-a-kind work of art. If this didn’t get me the job, I was going to find a new career.

The words, “You’re the one who sent in that singing resumé,” are a gift every time I hear them at my new job.

—————

Dear readers, talk to me.

(Thanks to Lou Brooks’ great Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies. Those of you of a certain age who click the link, don’t get lost on Memory Lane!)

“One of the optional aspects of this project is to remake the company’s logo; it’s not mandatory, but the company is willing to listen to ideas for a new logo. I’ve been reading some of the previous Design Talks and thought this could be a possible topic, and something that the company could actually use. The logos are attached. If you have any thoughts, comments, or ideas for a new logo, please let me know. Thanks.”

—————

Hi Mike,

Thanks for bringing this project to our attention; I’ve forwarded it to a few photographer friends.

I couldn’t attempt a makeover without a creative brief, which requires direct interface with the client — do they want a logo, and why, and what, and etc., etc. But here’s a 30-second crit.

The logo is serviceable as a label but visually out of touch. The dense block of bold, cap, slab-serif type on the massive black rectangle is too heavy-handed for the gentle-spirited nature of the project (“families during their most fragile time”), although I see that the rectangle is not used on their site. Its complexity, too, makes it difficult to remember,* opposite what you need in a logo.

The camera lens looks like a giant, all-seeing eyeball staring RIGHT AT ME, radiating power. It makes me want to look away. The awareness ribbon doesn’t add much, and it’s too generic for use in a logo. You want a logo to be ownable.

On the upside, it’s well crafted, and the typestyles, shapes and colors all coordinate well.

My sense is that this project requires something small, light, and low-key, probably in black & white or shades of gray, which is soft, like their site (and mission), and evokes photography. The point is not GRAPHIC DESIGN (in caps on purpose) but the photographers’ gifts to those losing someone to cancer. But without speaking to the client, I couldn’t know.

Thanks again. Keep us posted.

—————
*Is your image simple? Apply the three-second test. Look at the image for three seconds and look away. What do you remember? Try it on a friend. Or have a friend try it on you.

If your project can stand a little adventure, try this. “Connect” your initials by using a radically styled typeface in which the letters have been designed to look alike. Here are three . . .

Then, create a motif based on the character of the typeface. For example, Van Doesburg consists entirely of straight horizontal and vertical strokes, with neither curves nor, more radically, angles. Each letter looks like a block. Take advantage of this by arranging the letters in a block bisected (in this case) by horizontal and vertical hairlines, and soften with color . . .

Finish by adding the company name; below, it’s in curvy Cantoria. Many other typefaces would work here, too, because the DRD is so different that it automatically creates contrast. Generally speaking, for readability avoid using the logotype font for the company name.

This technique has limits, obviously. The thing to remember is that wild styles can often be civilized by presenting them in conservative, low-key settings. Try it!

Van Doesburg and Planet Kosmos are free typefaces. Mojo is an inexpensive Adobe font.

For more reading on letter-based design, check out Before & After’s PDF Type bundle #1.

“I actually like that they gave me so much, because it gives me great insight into their expectations. But I’ve noticed something when clients have done this before: Client-provided materials can be toxic to new, innovative design. When I see so much of their past material, it has a huge influence on my design, and then I realize that I am just moving in the direction of duplicating their previous work. It creates a massive design block!

“My question is, how can you use client-provided material to assess their wants, needs, and expectations without it becoming toxic to your creative process? Any tips or advice would be greatly appreciated!!”

—————

Daniel,
Smart of them to bring you up to date! It sounds like they liked their previous stuff and that it worked for them. Did they ask for something new? Is their venue the same? The theme? What more do you know?

—————

John,
The client is a very large, nationally recognized non-profit doing their annual fundraiser. They’ve not really asked for something new; they seem to just want it done in time for the event in three months.

The main item is a 150 or so- page catalog of items for their silent auction, as well as information about those who have donated auction items, and about the organization itself. They’ve indicated that they really like the style of Food & Wine magazine, but that’s about it. I get the impression that they’re changing up designers every year in an attempt to get closer to their vision, which they seem to find a bit vague.

—————

Daniel,
My guess is that you’re trying to innovate when innovation is not called for, you’re getting predictably stuck, and the resulting “design block” is why you’re falling back on what’s been done before.

This is why a good creative brief is invaluable. It gets on paper what’s to be achieved in terms of message and image. A creative brief gives the project objective goals and keeps the critique at a high level. It is valuable for both you and the client.

You’ll almost certainly have to tease it out. You mentioned that their vision was “vague.” This is normal. Design is difficult to articulate. It’s a right-brain thing, more “feel” than words. And words are only part of the issue. Chances are high that your client is not entirely clear in his own mind what he wants. Explore together until it gets clear for both of you.

Be specific, too. Avoid statements like, “We want to make a good impression on our audience,” or, “We want the design to inspire readers to participate.” These are emotions, not design directives.

Instead, say, “We want our program to look like a high-end auction. To do this, we’ll use classic book margins and fine typography — serif type with wide leading — on glossy paper. Every item will be professionally photographed against a white background, with uniform lighting. We’ll give major items a full page, and minor items we’ll group four to a page. All pages will have a distinctive heading and a small, consistently placed space for auction notes. The cover will be black with thin, gold trim, and the title will be understated.”

Of course, this is only an example. Before your next meeting, you might get a copy of Food & Wine and study it. Ask what it is about Food & Wine that the client likes. Is it sophisticated? Trendy? Understated? Perhaps they like the colors or images or typography. Can they say how Food & Wine’s look applies to them?

(You’ll also need to ask yourself if you’re capable of transferring attributes from Food & Wine to the auction program without copying or losing the feel.)

Then comes the hard part: achieving your stated goals. I can’t count the times that I had a clear idea of what I wanted, but what I put on paper looked nothing like it. You’ll have to slog through this. Seth Godin calls it “The Dip.” But now, instead of defaulting to past imagery, you have a visual goal by which to measure your work — and by which the client can measure your work.

Remember, too, that you’re a team, not a lone wolf. Stay close. As you work, more will often be revealed, and new ideas, sometimes great ones, will arise.

—————
Dear readers, can you add to this? Have you experienced being influenced by a client’s past work — or your own? How did you handle it?

Current logo:

My comps:

—————

Joe, keep in mind that an old logo is filled with personal meaning, regardless of its aesthetic qualities. While your new design is technically sound, it doesn’t pack the history, tension, or emotion necessary to overcome their attachment to the familiar (and beloved) old one.

By discarding the old one completely, my guess is that you took away too much. Try a simpler redesign that incorporates one element (at least) from the old — the Long Island silhouette or the target (called a “house,” I believe), and possibly keep an older-style, serif typeface.

—————

Dear readers, I wrote about this topic in Issue 33. An excerpt . . .

As a designer, you most likely think first in terms of aesthetics — this image is prettier than that — or about what each element “symbolizes.” But be careful. What an image symbolizes to you has no bearing on what it means to the client. To the client, it’s the old logo that has meaning.

Why? Because everyone who works for a company has to some degree adopted an identity. We bring to a job our education, abilities, ambitions, and take from it income, friends, lifestyle. We identify these experiences with the company and infuse its logo with personal meaning, whether the logo is artistically attractive or not.

The logo is not “just a graphic” any more than a flag is a piece of colored cloth.

That’s why it’s so hard to design. You’re working on sacred soil. I’m exaggerating only a little, but I’m not kidding.

Thing is, a client asking for a redesign will not be aware of this — that what he knows and values about his company is attached to its logo, and that he’s asking you to replace it. He’s asking for a new flag.

Advice. If you feel qualified, do the job. Before unveiling it, prepare your client. Tell him he can expect to feel uncomfortable at first, because you’re replacing what he knows with a foreign thing. Tell him to not look for his familiar symbolism in it. It is being changed. But assure him that once his choice is made, his old meaning will gradually be transferred to the new logo.

Then show him your best work.

The modern mind thinks in terms of data: “The storm was third wettest in 1996.” But the ancient mind thought in terms of story: “I will send you rain in its season.”

Larry King once asked Ed Bradley if he could explain the longevity of CBS’ 60 Minutes, the most successful program in television history. Mr. Bradley replied that it was because founder Don Hewitt’s guiding directive had been, “Tell me a story.” So storytelling (Once upon a time . . .), not reporting (Heat wave claims six), is what 60 Minutes has always done.

A novel is nothing but story.

A movie is nothing but story, either. And to see it, we spend millions.

One gets the impression watching the news that data is what matters (Rogers’ QB rating is 129). But data is mainly for statisticians, and not real. Story is how human beings actually experience life.

And what is a story? It’s a life lived. Story is about risk and hope and fear and struggle and love and loss. It’s about heart and soul and the real reasons behind things.

What’s all this have to do with design?

Everything.

As a designer, what are you doing on your sheet of paper or screen? Why are you involved? What’s your role?

You may say that you want your page/product/idea to “look good.” And, of course, looking good is preferable to looking bad. But what do you actually mean?

What you should mean is that there’s a story to be told, and that your part is its visual expression. “Looking good” says blue and green go well together. The story is in what blue and green together say.

I’ve placed a familiar object at the bottom of this page. It’s simple, symmetrical, balanced. You’d say that it looks good. But I did something funny: I moved its shadow. Now it’s floating, or so it appears. How can that be? We rub our eyes. Maybe it’s falling. No clues are given.

To leave the question unanswered is to begin a story. The reader’s engaged. He’ll look for what’s next. That’s what you want.

Think about this. That typeface you’re using  — why that one? Its form might be voluptuous or ratty or rigid. Each in context could be correct and beautiful — or not. White space can be a pause, a break in time. It can also organize, separating this from that. It can convey purity, vastness, emptiness, desolation — each different, dependent on context.

In evaluating your design, before asking, “Does it look good?” ask, “What story is it telling?”

Design — visual expressiveness — is not something plotted on a chart, measured, compiled, compared. It is, rather, the face of life, a window to the soul beneath.

————–
This article was originally published in Before & After issue 36, page 16. It’s available in print and on the Master Collection DVD.