How to design notes
Shaughnessy, Adrian. 2005. How to be a graphic designer without loosing your soul. United Kingdom: Laurence Publishing Ltd
pp, 134 - 147 'The Creative Process'
"The discipline of graphic design, as it is practiced today, allows a wide and generous interpretation of the word."
"A design voice, a tone, is forged by three main elements. - creative conviction:
you need to have a vision of what is good, and what has real worth. It can be either a 'philosophical' creed (I think design is about improving social conditions) or it can be an aesthetic creed (I only use sans serif fonts)
You need to have an inner confidence that allows you to trust your creative instincts
thirdly, an awareness of fashion, culture trends and history."
"As designers we often like to think that we are above fashion, but we rarely are."
"The appetite for novelty, and the tidal pull of the zeitgeist, makes staying aloof from fashion almost impossible for most designers."
"In my view originality is an overrated and misunderstood quality in contemporary graphic design."
"People who copy are the terminally second-rate and the downright dishonest, whereas the good designer freely borrows and adapts from sources in precisely the way artists have done for centuries. And furthermore, the good designer readily adamants to this 'appropriation'.
Julian House - "I don't believe in originality as an absolute. I think it's more to do with interesting twists on existing forms. Borrowing from the modernist designers of the recent past, for instance, is not plagiarism; it's more a continuation os the processes and ideas that they set in motion. I'm influenced by Polish poster art of the 1960s, which was influenced by Pop Art and Surrealism, and which in turn freely appropriated commercial art, comic book art, cinema and victorian engravings, etc.
I think the key to whether it's good or not lies in the viewer's response to a piece of design. Do they say "I've seen it before" or, "I've seen it before but not in that way"".
The brief
"The first duty of a graphic designer is to understand the brief. To do this you must research it, question it and, if necessary, challenge it. In some cases you might need to walk away from it as not all briefs are worth taking on. Learning how to say no to bad briefs is a vital judgment that all designers have to learn how and when to make." - If the author were to cite an example, I could be tempted to agree, feeling skeptical on this point - depends on what makes the brief bad
"without a brief the designer is vulnerable, and all the power rests with the client. If a client doesn't give you a written brief, you must write one yourself and send it back to him or her for approval. Writing your own brief from a clients instruction is a good discipline. It makes you think deeply about the project and it puts you into the mind of the client."
"Many briefs include attempts to pre-empt the creative process. In other words, they try to do the designers job for them. Sometimes this is an unavoidable characteristic of the job. The client knows what they want and they are saying it. But generally it is a recipe for failure."
"Assuming a sound moral and ethical base, there is no such thing as a bad brief - only a bad response."
"In every brief there's a McGuffin that unlocks the essential nature of the task. You just have to find it." - "The McGuffin was the name of a dramatic device used by Alfred Hitchcock in his movies to catch the audiences attention. The McGuffin had no real relevance to the plot."
"There is the most spectacular example of disobeying a 'wrong' brief, in the work of Bruno Monguzzi, the great swiss designer. Monguzzi was called in by the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, after a design competition had failed to produce a wining poster with which to launch the newly opened museum. Monguzzi was instructed to design a poster avoiding pictorial imagery and using only two elements: the museum logo (which Monguzzi had designed) and the date. Monguzzi describes his response:
'So here I was at home with a new brief and bagen to endlessly play around with the date and the logo, the logo and the date, getting nowhere. Nothing was happening, nothing was opening, nothing was beginning. I walked over to my books, picked up a [Henri] Lartigue album, and slowly began to go through the pages. When I came to the image of his brother taking off with a glider that their uncle had constructed at chateau Rouzat, I knew I had the answer. The fly had broken the web." ( a reference to his old boss talking about swiss design being a perfect web which only became useful once the fly had broken it)
" And here I was, back in Paris again, with Jean Jenger [the director] and Leone Nora [public relations], knowing I had disobeyed. I was using a photograph, and no image was to be used. Jenger got very upset. He said that we had all agreed that no work of art should appear on the poster. And that any-way it was not 'le musee de l'aviation'.
I said it was a metaphor and that the people who knew the logo knew what the museum was all about. I nevertheless added that the poster had to be their poster. That it should belong to them. But Jenger had stopped listening and began to talk to himself pacing nervously up and down the room. I tried to interrupt him, asserting that he did not have to convince me. He said he was thinking. My eyes met the eyes of Madam Nora, which were a bit perplexed, but very beautiful, and we sat down.
Jenger would sometimes stop, look at the poster, and then start his gymnastics all over again. I think he was trying to imagine the possible reactions of all the people he really or virtually knew. A kind of French human comedy with an unexpected end. "Monguzzi," he said, "I am so convinced that the poster is right, that I will bring it myself to Riguad" [the president of the museum]. The following day a worried Madam Nora was on the phone. The Lartigue Foundation does not allow the cropping of Lartigue's photographs. Not knowing which way to turn I asked her to try showing the project to the foundation anyway. Not only were we allowed to use the photograph as planned, but a vintage print of that shot was given to the museum. It was the fourth Lartigue to enter the collection."
taken from Bruno Monguzzi, A designer's perspective, Baltimore: The Fine Arts Gallery. 1998
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Bruno Monguzzi interview
http://eyemagazine.com/feature.php?id=32&fid=33
selections from the interview:
Thanks to Ken Briggs, whom I had also met at St Martin\\\\'s and who tried to answer my many questions, I discovered Gestalt psychology and became very involved in the study of visual perception. It is at that point, in 1961, that I started to believe in graphic design as a problem-solving profession rather than a problem-making one and that I slowly began to push away my hidden dream to became another Werner Bischof. It was also at the time that I began to understand and to love the American school: Gene Federico, Herb Lubalin, Lou Dorfsman, Lou Danziger, Charles and Ray Eames.
research 'the american school'
VB: How did your study in psychology and perception influence your approach to graphic design?
BM: The study of perception provided the key to a less subjective reading of my own work. Most of what we get from looking at our own projects is in our mind to start with, not on the paper itself. The study of perception enabled me to construct a more objective, natural, direct view of communication – more objective because it is built up according to laws of perception that you can share without being a designer.
VB: You always seem to pursue a strong integration between words and images. How do you decide when pictures follow words and when words come second?
BM: When the results of the competition to design the poster for the opening of the new Musee d’Orsay proved to be a failure I was called to Paris. Most projects were showing works of art, or details from works of art. Others were showing the building, or details from the building. The director did not want to see the building. The chief curator did not want to see works of art. So, from a ‘picture followed by words’ poster, we arrived at a ‘words followed by no picture’ concept. The logo and date were all that was needed.
It seemed to be the perfect brief, but after I had played around with these elements for quite some time I realised that a metaphor was missing. I walked over to my bookcase, picked out a book on Lartigue, slowly turned the pages, and when I came to an image of a plane taking off I knew this was the answer.
VB: But how did you arrive at such a shocking use of the Musee d’Orsay ‘M’O’ logo? I know that the poster was four metres wide.
BM: I think that having designed the logo myself, it was probably easier for me to accept it fully and to use it with the right emphasis. As for the cropping, the possibility of using it in fragments was established from the start. I had already used it with a similar trimming in the C6/5 envelope and on the cards.
the book that definitely marked my education is John Szarkowski’s The Photographer’s Eye, published by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in the 1960s. I still use it with my students to demonstrate how images can interact.
VB: Contemporary postmodern graphic design has a density, complexity and confusion which is very different from the clarity of your own work. Are the more experimental graphic designers now behaving too much as though they were expressive artists rather than communicators?
BM: I think the problem is still that graphic design schools seem to be more involved with building or destroying formal dogmas, or aesthetic values, than with content; with the look rather than with the meaning; with the layout rather than with the message. But I doubt that the goal of the ‘more experimental graphic designers’, as you call them, is to communicate with my mother.
VB: Computer systems such as the Macintosh are already having a huge impact on the way that graphic designers are working and thinking. What are your views on these developments?
BM: I do not believe that the use of the computer has really changed the thinking of most graphic designers. Unfortunately, the sclerosis of thinking has increased due to the enormous facility and versatility of the machine, which is, of course, only as intelligent as the person sitting in front of it. Education now has to face an even greater challenge. The machine is fantastic, but not all of the typefaces or programs are as good. The designer has to catch up with the engineer.
VB: Recently you wrote: ‘I persist in believing in education and I amuse myself, as an amateur, with perpetuating those languages which the system of fashion wipes away.’ Given your commitment to education, why did you turn down the opportunity in 1989 to take over Alvin Eisenman’s position at Yale?
BM: There is certainly a selfish reason. The idea of moving permanently to the US doesn’t attract me any more. But there is also another reason. I think each culture has to build its own language. Although visual language is somewhat universal, there are peculiarities that enrich and qualify the language itself. I do not think, for example, that using Akzidenz-Grotesk for the New York subway was such a big conquest. Franklin Gothic could have done the job.
Superficial and stylish graphic designers tend to reduce their syntax to a temporary gospel and spread it everywhere on everything. Good design solutions, however, are probably timeless.
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Shaughnessy, Adrian. 2005. How to be a graphic designer without loosing your soul. United Kingdom: Laurence Publishing Ltd
(CONTINUED)
"In this account of his experience of designing a poster, Monguzzi illustrates the need to give new work time to become assimilated by the client."
"The need for brief is hard-wired into the designers psyche. In fact, although designers constantly demand freedom, they really crave constraint."
"The graphic designers mentality is suited, thanks to education, temperament and tradition, to responding to a brief. Perhaps there will emerge a new super-strain of mutant designers who have evolved beyond the point of needing a brief; but I doubt it."
RESEARCH
"Cultural awareness, when it's backed up with specifically targeted research, is the high octane fuel that drives great ideas. Careful research can open up creative possibilities that would otherwise remain locked to us. It is also vital that designers do research if only to provide rationals for their work."
"Clients have a herd instinct (many designers have too) and if you want to do original and distinctive work, you will need to break this down, and you can only do this with high-end creativity backed up by well-researched argument."
PROCESS
"The computer has revolutionised the design process. It has made the act of designing easier, and in many ways it has improved the way we design things. Yet in other respects it has made design more formulaic, and it has standardised the act of designing"
"Today, thanks to speed-of-light microprocessors and do-everything software, we all design in the same way: we sit lifelessly, only our wrists moving, as we stare at a screen. Our focus has narrowed. We rarely look at our work from a distance. We rarely look at it from different angles. We often work in miniature. We avoid anything that can't be done 'on' the computer. The screen dictates our relationship to our work - it dictates how our work looks."
"The computer is a good thing. No question about it. But with the computer has come a set of problems that, virus like, infect the actual process of design."
Neville Brody - "amount the first high-profile converts to the computer in design"
"With the ability to produce so much work, it's harder to know whether what you are doing is any good." - "Editing is the great skill of the digital era"
"Modern designers must use the gift of iteration to work towards a conclusion rather than as an opportunity to explore every known avenue." - if a client were to ask for 30 logos by 5pm, easy. but if thought and consideration is not involved "you will end up with a soup of indifferent ideas, remarkable only for their plentifulness."