The Eyes Have It

"It Has Little Feet": Explaining Graphic Design

Came across a quote worth sharing and worth keeping in mind during every client interaction. It's from Make It Bigger by Paula Scher, a partner in the design firm Pentagram :

"Shortly after I joined Pentagram I saw a presentation by my partner Michael Bierut that explained the typographic system for a corporate packaging project for a large technology firm. Bierut had pasted a black-and-white printout of the typeface Times Roman to a piece of foamcore, and over the alphabet slugged the headline: "This is Times Roman. It is a serif typeface. It has little feet." I picked up the board and laughed. Then I realized it wasn't funny. In that instant I understood what I had been doing wrong in client situations for more than twenty years. I had assumed that clients had come to me having the background to make value judgments about what they were looking at. When they picked inferior design, I assumed it was because they were philistines bent on keeping down the American taste level. From Bierut I learned that clients were "just normal people," and that normal people have a reasonable understanding of things based on their cultural environment—and are often directly influenced by some very specific milieu in which they operate. I was the one who was not normal. I had a graphic designer's understanding of things. "Most people don't understand what a graphic designer does, let alone what they see," Bierut explained. I had to learn to explain design in lay terms, in human terms. "Little feet" demystifies serif type. It explains a visual difference.

"The ability to explain graphic design is fundamentally different from the ability to create graphic design, and it relies on different faculties. In the explanation process, the designer must deconstruct his or her work and place it in a logical sequence so one can understand its components and see how they collectively create an entity that has a specific idea, spirit, and look. The act of designing is more ephemeral; it is an intuitive process informed by external forces that direct the intuition. Whereas a solution can be explained, the process that created it can never adequately be understood. That's why the process is so mistrusted, misunderstood, even resented. It is not scientific or democratic, cannot be learned by following an appropriate course of study, and cannot even be equally understood or appreciated by people of similar intellects and levels of education.

"Whereas the act of explaining design requires specific order and logic, the act of creating design involves a form of disorder, with outer stimuli thrown together into the mixer of the human brain. The result is something that is various parts intellect, inspiration, and obsession. Too much intellect smothers obsession, too much obsession smothers intellect, and too much of either smothers inspiration."

I think it's safe to say the second and third paragraphs can be applied to just about any creative activity.

[via curiousLee]