Over Design
These posters are actually good, I think because print costs keep them minimal
I’ve been doing some design work and seeing some design work, and the contrast between minimal and overdesign is striking. A lot of Sri Lankan leaflets, banners, etc are a cacophony of elements and fades and fonts ad nauseum. It’s as if someone grabbed Photoshop and shook it violently until it spewed its entire contents on the page. I think part of the problem, the dearth of minimalism, is that software removes the scarcity from design. There are no physical costs to extra layers and effects. The other part of the problem is that graphic design classes teach technique, but they don’t teach understanding. Design isn’t meant to fill space, it’s meant to communicate, and that’s hard to teach.
Scarcity
With oils or woodcuts or even the printing press, there was a physical cost associated with design. If you added an element it was A) difficult to get there and B) difficult to remove. With a computer getting and removing are easy, but no more necessary. Like our sickly tendency towards gluttony, the removal of natural limits on design has lead to corpulent communications.
Whenever I do something I do it once and then try to remove everything that can’t be removed. I also try to remember that the human mind can only hold about plus or minus items in memory at once, so I try to keep the coherent chunks down to three. The computer doesn’t let you feel the cost with all the effects and layers, but I find that laziness often keeps me true.
Meaning
Another issue is that many pieces of design say a lot but communicate nothing. They have all the colors, words and images that the clients wanted, but are impossible for a reader to understand. I’ve found that maybe one sentence can be communicated immediately if that. I’ve also found that design needs to flow from an understanding of the material, not the software. If you an Illustrator wiz and you don’t understand the audience and product, it’s pointless.
Another reason that communication gets cluttered is because many graphic designers and art directors don’t understand the concept of division in depth (3D division in a 2D space), or if they do, they don’t know how to achieve it effectively. Obviously, if a poster has to be divided into four equal spaces, there are better waays to do it thaan just quarter it.
This is anecdotal but I think a bulk of design work is driven by trying to squeeze the most amount of stuff on to the page/surface. For the bean counting type white space = wasted money. Not about emphasising the right things to transmit the desired meaning. This from hearing my boss patiently talking clients out of splattering “Call Now!!” in big bright yellow stars all over the page (web and paper).
Its likely that eye clutter on the walls gets instinctively tuned out. The whole process devolves into visual spam at the extreme case – where the quality is pretty low in every way. I remember noticing the pixels on a cheesy bill board in the city – from a moving car.
indi’s spot on about cacophony of elements thing. There’s a similar issue in the 3D (animation) side of things. Too many demos tapes by people unloading particle effects to a techno sound track. Usually at the default settings.
I’m not claiming to be a design genius. Besides the usual insecure self criticism, good design is a sensibility that has to be cultivated by doing. Harder when the clock is ticking.
Got a lot of doing ahead.
I find a good way to get lankan designers to cut down on the decoration is to ask ‘em to sketch the entire layout on a napkin. It doesn’t need to be pretty but every component must be represented.
You then ask them to annotate all the steps needs to accomplish the design. By the time they get to the third ‘open image in photoshop, select area for fade, add fade with a tolerance of thirty-two, save image and import into indesign ‘, they soon get the point.
What I find interesting about a design process that places a premium on a high signal to noise ratio is that the designer then gets involved in the best bit about design- communicating. You get to help figure out which bits the of data are even *worth* representing in a design. Often a client can be short-sighted on things like this (cerno’s yellow stars) and if a designer spends his time thinking about the dissemination of ideas rather than number of layers required to get that ‘classy’ metallic look, we’d all be better off.
In my point of view Indi makes a point clear which is so damn true.
Just because you know to use Photoshop or any such similar software does not mean that you are a great designer and make brilliant artwork. It’s like this – all of us know how to hold a pen, and almost all of us know how to use to properly and write letters, and with a combination of letters write words, and form sentences and so on. Literally any one reading this comment could do that.. but the ability to write using a pen does not mean that you are a great writer or an author or a poet or anything. It’s just that you know how to use the tool, but you don’t have the artistic idea that an author or a poet would have.
it’s kind of the same thing with graphic design. photoshop, indesign, illustrator, corel draw – all these are just tools. and there are thousands of youngsters in this country who know to use these tools very well. but what they lack is art, and getting the message conveyed through their art work.
if you see many of these rock concert posters or these posters done for Interact Club functions, all these look extremely jumbled and you’d even notice that all most all the effects in photohop used in them. so many clashy colours are used, and allmost all typography rules are kinda “ignored”. as Indi says i think that the “understanding” should be taught properly.
This spoof I found on the-benevolent-dictator.blogspot.com has an interesting take on the whole topic. Best seen than told.
haha.. yeah i’ve seen this spoof.. what if microsoft created the iPod!! lol
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