Discussion About Design

Had an interesting discussion with a friend of mine; a graphic designer.

He considers  vague, meaningless as the measure of a success design. Even his own work is like that, don’t get me wrong, he has some good designs, but you have to really go beyond graphic to understand its meaning. He often uses the word “elegance” to describe his work. Ok, maybe he is an artist, but what is the point to design something that mass audiences can not understand. Somebody like my friend may say that’s the expression of his thoughts and his feelings, but the problem with people like my friend is that they are intentionally design something like this because they think they are artists, they are better than general public. They are intentionally looking down on the general public, in their mind, if the public don’t understand their works that’s because they are not intellectual enough, because through history all the great artists were ahead their times.

Is that true?

Today we are living in a commercial driven world, there is no denying that there are muss produced soulless graphic designs purely for commercial reasons, but that is no excuse to looking down on the public, no excuse to design something meaningless, vague, nobody can understand. Maybe some designs make scene to the designer, but it doesn’t matter how good a designer he or she is, he or she fails the first rule as a designer. Massimo Vignelli wrote these in his book “Semantics, in design, means to understand the subject in all its aspects; to relate the subject to the sender and receiver in such a way that it makes sense both.”

This is the essence of graphic design, it is graphic designer’s duty to design something that has a meaning, that is not arbitrary, that has a reason of being there, and that every detail in the graphic has a purpose. Don’t looking down to the public, because nobody or few understands doesn’t make it art, it just makes the design ignorant and foolish.

So next time if somebody looking down on you just because you don’t understand something that he or she calls art, you just tell them “You are an ignorant and foolish human being.”