The Design Guy Teachings In a Nut Shell
For anyone out there who wants a good solid grounding in the basics of design principles and methodologies you got to check out The Design Guy, aka Anthony Rotolo, a New Media Designer from Brooklyn New York. The Design guy is both an online BLOG and an a weekely Audio Podcast.
What follows is a summary of all the teachings from the Design Guy’s first series of 37 Audio Podcasts on the Principles of Graphic Design.
The Differenciater – Design is at the heart of the information that drives a business.
Design is a democracy. Tools are cheaper, information more accessible through the internet. Everyone is a designer. However if you learn only methods you are tied to methods but if you learn principles you can create your own methods. The great graphic designers of our time have created their own methods through from solid understanding of principles involved in good design.
What is Design?
Design is the act of creating order out of chaos. We all have a desire for this order. Man is forever ordering and designing his world. As designers we are constantly emgaged in integrating elements, bringing order to chaos, shape form and hierarchy to message, putting ‘extra’-ordinary in the ordinary. Enhancing understanding and meaning to everyday things. The process starts with unrelated elements and ends in a cohesive unit. Graphic Design is not Art. i.e. Fine Art. Graphic Design has a distinct purpose. It’s purpose is to communicate a distinct message. The graphic designer employs principles, methods and tools such as typography and illustration to deliver this message in the most effective way. Some more famous designers have distinct styles and are sought out for their particular style. However their work is still commercial art. It has a direct purpose, whether that is to sell a record or promote a social event.
Graphic Design in its purest form is information design.
Massimo Vignelli.
Type is our primary imagery (Typography). Letterforms (Which are negative and positive shapes) are symbols and create words that have the power to evoke imagery in our audiences minds. Type itself is powerful imagery. Typographic design is in itself a very skillful disipline of Graphic Design. A good typographer is a master of negative and positive spaces and how shape and form interact in these spaces.
We are Typographic Man.
Marshall McCluan.
How Design Begins!
Listening. Graphic design must support an objective typographic message. If there is no message there is no graphic design. The process begins with listening. Ask the right questions in the right way and fine tune your response to that question. Listen for the requirements. Requirements define our project (size, market, dimensions, deadlines, constraints, context, etc). We got to get comfortable with listening. Clients don’t always tell the full story. Often Clinets are not really in touch with there business… We gotta fill the gaps by asking the right questions. Avoid swaying the project to suit our own comfort goals. Questions should take us to the heart of the matter… the heart of the message. Avoid closed questions (YES NO answers). Leave expense out for now… Explore… get to heart of their message.. overt and covert… find out the Theme of the project… Organic and natural ideas will flow from theme… without a theme we get contrivance from lack of understanding… Get clear what the client wants… Remain vigilant… avoid funneling client towards what we can do instead of remaining open to all the possibilities for the client… ask ourselves questions.. don’t force a certain direction because you are comfortable with a certain tool… get confortable with probing your client and exploring all options.
“…get comfortable with asking questions that give birth to understanding”
Anthony Rotolo
Principles. Software comes and goes but principles remain. Timeless principles of design. listening is the key to gathering the retirements. Excavate the clients core message. Questions are to Design what picks and shovels are to archeologists. Challenge our client. Sift the junk and get to the heart of the message. Side step the confusion by laying a foundation of understanding through careful questioning and listening. Prevent ourselves from jumping to conclusions, falling into our comfort zones, pushing tools of which we are comfortable. Research. Look at competition and competitions products and marketing. Think expansively. Remain open at the start. However, do avoid ‘Paralysis of Analysis’ in your research phase. Iceberg analogy… remember the final product only reflects a small amount of what the client wants to say is…the key is to find the essence, the core the message, the tip of the iceberg… for the tip is the iceberg is still the essence of the message refined.
The Designer
We are a medium. Designers are the medium for communication. We take clients verbal language and translate this to a visual language. We bridge the gap for our clients to their market place. Clients requires someone with special attributes and special communication skills with an understanding of the Zeitgeist of our time to channel their message to their audience. Do you have what it takes?
The Designer’s Attributes.
Every design is different from the next. 1 problem shared with 2 designers could very well produce 2 distinctly different ideas yet communicate the same essential message but there are certain traits that designers should have in common.
“Among the myriad definitions of graphic design, one of the most
illuminating is by American designer and writer Jessica Helfand.
According to Helfand, graphic design is a visual language uniting
harmony and balance, color and light, scale and tension, form and
content. But it is also an idiomatic language, a langauge of cues and
puns and symbols and allusions, of cultural references and perceptual
inferences that challenge both the intellect and the eye.”
Adrian Shaughnessy
Take an interest in the world around you. Read widely, expose yourself to all varieties of cultural experience. Become a well read generalist as opposed to a specialist. Its as simple as having enough knowledge to connect to a wide and varied audience. Graphic design either informs, persuades or sells, through effect visual communication. The better we can verbalize our ideas and thoughts the clearer our overall communication will be. LISTENING is key to all effective communication. Learn to listen.
Graphic Design is a hybrid of art and craft. On one hand is intuitive almost magical on the other hand its practical with guiding rules and tools. We are creative craftsmen. Design is a community of craftsmen sharing ideas and tools and thoughts. There are established communities such as the Graphic Artists Guild GAG that help cultivate the love of the craft among fellow design craftsmen.
Getting Creative.
“If you learn only methods you are tied to your methods but if you learn principles you can devise your own methods.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The first step in the creative process, after listening to the client and devising a creative brief, is the data gathering stage. Sometimes ideas come to us effortlessly other times we get stuck and get performance anxiety. Don’t panic. Relax. Forcing matters does not work. Step away from the problem. Loosen up. Stretch. I step into a quiet space for 5 minutes and do a sun salutation (a quick and refreshing yoga posture). Switch the mind somewhere else and return later. Creativity is a process. Sometimes it might even feel nonlinear and frantic but it is a process none the less. Ideas are an output of a mental process. An idea is a new combination of old elements. (See article on A Technique for Producing Ideas). Don’t Panic. Don’t think you are a fraud. It does happen. We are only human after all. This creative process is a curious thing. Staring at a blank canvas is scary but in we are fearful and stressed it only produces a strained and fearful atmosphere that is counter productive to what we are trying to achieve. So the first rule is to relax. Stop forcing.
Information feeds our creativity. Therefore information gathering is essential to the creative process. The more information we gwt from the the client the better even if they think it might be unnecessary, or someting they dont like. Knowing what they don’t like and don’t want is as importnat as knowing what they do. There is always an attempt to communicate in graphic design and the key to good design is to find the most effective way to craft this communication to an audience.
A Technique For Producing Ideas
Over 60 years ago James Webb Young introduced a classic technique for Producing Ideas.
It all started with one question “How do you get ideas?”
Having been thrown a curve ball to come up with fresh ideas for an advertising agency James Webb Young found himself perplexed by this very question. There had to be a formula.
What follows is his conclusion to this soul searching exercise to find a formula. Firstly here are some keen general principles he observed supporting his conclusions (what he called principles of the technique)
THE PRINCIPLES:
First PRINCIPLE.
NEW COMBINATIONS. An idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements.
Second PRINCIPLE.
RELATIONSHIPS. The capacity to bring old elements into new combinations relies largely on the ability to see relationships.
With these principles in mind he observes, “when relationships are seen they lead to extraction of a general principle. This general principle, when grasped, suggests the key to a new application, a new combination, and the result is an idea… A habit of mind which leads to a search for relationships between facts becomes the highest importance in the production of ideas”.
THE TECHNIQUE:
GATHER RAW MATERIALS.
Don’t sit around hoping for inspiration to strike. Research. Browse. Investigate. James suggests gathering ‘general’ and ’specific’ materials. Specific refers to gathering information on the product, on the target audience, on the client, on the subject in question, etc. Where general is more about building ourselves as rich mediums for communication. Its an ongoing material gathering vocation. Its about you. Your interests, your broad knowledge of subjects, interest in the world and its affairs, the arts, culture, etc. In our search for raw materials ” if we go deeply enough or far enough, we nearly always find that between every product and some consumers there is an individuality of relationship which may lead to an idea”.
MASTICATION.
This is the process of digesting all the raw materials.”What you do s take the different bits of material which you have gathered and feel them all over, as it were, with the tentacles of the mind… you bring two facts together and see how they fit”. What you are seeking now is the relationship. The synthesis where order will come to chaos and you will start to see relationships in patterns. Put pen to paper when little ideas start coming forth. The mind is chewing over all the information, computing and looking for relationships. This is sometimes considered the ‘day-dreamer’ stage of the process. This leads us to the next stage.
CLEAR THE MIND
. This does not mean forget everything you just digested. Its quite the opposite. Its a deliberate detour of the conscious mind while the under layers of the mental process digest further without conscious interference. You are essential turning the job over to the subconscious while you consciously engaged in something else that stimulates your imagination and emotions, or even sleep, as we have all heard the expression ‘lets sleep on it’.
EUREKA
. Having followed the first 3 steps will lead to this moment naturally. The idea will appear to you all of a sudden out of nowhere. Like divine intervention. “This is when ideas come: after you have stopped straining for them and have passed through a period of rest and relaxation from the search”.
REALITY CHECK.
This is where we take our idea out into the real world. The litmus test as such. See if it stands up in its own right. Test its effectiveness to the job at hand. “It requires a deal of patient working over to make most ideas fit the exact conditions, or the practical exigencies, under which they must work”. This is the critique stage. Seek opinion and constructive criticism. “when you do a surprising thing will happen. You will find that a good idea has, as it were, self-expanding qualities. It stimulates those who see it to add to it. Thus possibilities in it which you have overlooked will come to light”.
This is a great publication, if not to educate, to remind us there is a process involved in producing ideas. James Webb Young presents his technique in a timelessly simple manner and it is indeed effective. You might find you have been using a technique all along and you are quite happy with it. However the technique James presents is founded in his life long experience producing ideas for the advertising industry and its an industry that requires quick thinking.
Thinking For a Living
I recently discovered a small publication on the excellent design book resources section of the website youworkforthem.com called Thinking For a Living.
It was originally produced for the Dallas Society of Visual Communications 3rd Annual National Student Show and Conference by Duane King and BBDK.
Its a tiny tiny publication but contains hundreds of references to all kinds of wonderful books and blogs relating to design. Its pages are peppered with useful quotes and articles and lists of highly recommended readings. I totally recommend this little publication and encourage you to check out the official website listed below.
REFERENCES From “THINKING FOR A LIVING” by Duane King and BBDK Inc.:
The Official Thinking For A Living website. http://thinkingforaliving.org/
