During the 1990s, design educators became caught in the pressure to teach (and learn) software, and many of us struggled to balance technical skills with visual and critical thinking. Form sometimes got lost along the way, as design methodologies moved away from universal visual concepts toward a more anthropological understanding of design as a constantly changing flow of cultural sensibilities.
Whereas the Bauhaus promoted rational solutions through planning and standardization, designers and artists today are drawn to idiosyncrasy, customization, and sublime accidents as well as to standards and norms. The modernist preference for reduced, simplified forms now coexists with a desire to build systems that yield unexpected results. Today, the impure, the contaminated, and the hybrid hold as much allure as forms that are sleek and perfected. Visual thinkers often seek to spin out intricate results from simple rules or concepts rather than reduce an image or idea to its simplest parts.
In the 1920s, faculty at the Bauhaus and other schools analyzed form in terms of basic geometric elements. They believed this language would be understandable to everyone, grounded in the universal instrument of the eye. Courses taught by Josef Albers emphasized systematic thinking over personal intuition, objectivity over emotion.
Some of them also engaged in the postmodern rejection of universal communication. According to postmodernism, which emerged in the 1960s, it is futile to look for inherent meaning in an image or object because people will bring their own cultural biases and personal experiences to the process of interpretation. As postmodernism itself became a dominant ideology in the 1980s and ’90s, in both the academy and in the marketplace, the design process got mired in the act of referencing cultural styles or tailoring messages to narrowly defined communities.
Photoshop, for example, is a systematic study of the features of an image (its contrast, size, color model, and so on). InDesign and QuarkXpress are structural explorations of typography: they are software machines for controlling leading, alignment, spacing, and column structures as well as image placement and page layout.
Before the Macintosh, solving graphic design problems meant outsourcing at nearly every stage of the way: manuscripts were sent to a typesetter; photographs — selected from contact sheets — were printed at a lab and corrected by a retoucher; and finished artwork was the job of a paste-up artist, who sliced and cemented type and images onto boards. This protocol slowed down the work process and required designers to plan each step methodically.
Likewise, while a dictionary presents specific words in isolation, those words come alive in the active context of writing and speaking.
Filtered through formal and conceptual experimentation, design thinking fuses as shared discipline with organic interpretation.
I like a lot the adage that for every problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious, and wrong. A problem worthy of the name is seldom accessible to sudden and simple solution.
Formstorming moves the maker through automatic, easily conceived notions, toward recognizable yet nuanced concepts, to surprising results that compel us with their originality. The endurance required to stick with a subject through exhaustive iteration, dissection, synthesis, revision, and representation takes discipline and drive, but this level of immersion yields an unexpected and profound return on the creative investment.
In design school students are cautioned against turning too quickly to the computer, eclipsing the ideation phase. Still, many designers engage the process of concept generation thinly, soon landing in a place that seems promising and then starting prematurely to build out that idea. The result of such a truncated development phase is dull design that, at best, seems slick and eye-catching and, at worst, appears instantly dispensable.
Top chefs remind us that a great dish depends on top-notch ingredients. Likewise, in graphic design, we must strive for excellence in each part of our design.
The rigor and momentum involved in creating a design-a-day help students build key discipline and time management skills and yield a robust body of work that develops the designer’s portfolio and process.
A line is the track made by the moving point. It is created by movement — specifically though the destruction of the intense, self-contained repose of the point.
Balance is a fundamental human condition: we require physical balance to stand upright and walk; we seek balance among the many facets of our personal and professional lives; the world struggles for balance of power. Indeed, balance is a prized commodity in our culture, and it is no surprise that our implicit, intuitive relationship with it has equipped us to sense balance — or imbalance — in the things we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch.
According to the classical tradition, the essence of design lies in linear structures and tonal relationships (drawing and shading), not in fleeting optical effects (hue, intensity, luminosity). Design used to be understood as an abstract armature that underlies appearances. Color, in contrast, was seen as subjective and unstable.
Our perception of color depends not solely on the pigmentation of our physical surfaces, but also on the brightness and character of ambient light. We also perceive a given color in relation to the other colors around it.
Likewise, color changes meaning from culture to culture.
Each hue on the color wheel is shown here in a progressive series of values (shades and tints). Note that the point of greatest saturation is not the same for each hue. Yellow is of greatest intensity toward the lighter end of the value scale, while blue is more intense in the darker zone.
Perception is an active process. Human cognition simplifies an enormous range of stimuli into understandable units. The myriad colors, shapes, textures, sounds, and movements that confront us from moment to moment would be overwhelming and incomprehensible if the brain didn’t structure the so-called sense data into coherent objects and patterns. The brain actively breaks down and combines sensory input. It merges what we see with what we know to build a coherent understanding of the world. Building on memory and experience, the brain fills in gaps and filters out extraneous data.
In politics, “framing” refers to explaining an issue in terms that will influence how people interpret it. The caption of a picture is a frame that guides its interpretation. A billboard is framed by a landscape, and a product is framed by its retail setting. Boundaries and fences mark the frames of private property.
Cropping, borders, margins, and captions are key resources of graphic design. Whether emphasized or erased, frames affect how we perceive information.
Frames create the conditions for understanding an image or object.
A well-designed interface is both visible and invisible, escaping attention when not needed while shifting into focus on demand. Once learned, interfaces disappear from view, becoming second nature.
An image seen alone, without any words, is open to interpretation. Adding text to a picture change its meaning. Written language becomes a frame for the image, shaping the viewer’s understanding of it both through the content of the words and the style and placement of the typography. Likewise, pictures can change the meaning of the text.
Text and image combine in endless ways. Text can be subordinate or dominant to a picture; it can be large or small, inside or outside, opaque or transparent, legible or obscure. Text can respect or ignore the borders of an image.
Design is the conscious effort to impost a meaningful order.
Like fashion, graphic design cycles through periods of structure and chaos, ornament and austerity. A designer’s approach to visual hierarchy reflects his or her personal style, methodology, and training as well as the zeitgeist of the period. Hierarchy can be simple or complex, rigorous or loose, flat or highly articulated. Regardless of approach, hierarchy employs clear marks of separation to signal a change from one level to another. As in music, the ability to articulate variation in tone, pitch, and melody in design requires careful delineation.
Layers allow the designer to treat the image as a collection of assets, a database of possibilities. Working with a layered file, the designer quickly creates variations of a single design by turning layers on an off.
Although the layered archeology of the printed page or digital file tends to disappear in the final piece, experimental work often uncovers visual possibilities by exposing layers.
Maps compress various types of information — topography, water systems, roadways, cities, geographic borders, and so on — onto a single surface. Map designers use color, line, texture, symbols, icons, and typography to create different levels of information, allowing users to read levels independently as well as perceiving connection between levels.
As a social value, transparency suggests clarity and directness. The idea of “transparent government” promotes processes that are open and understandable to the public, not hidden behind closed doors. Yet in design, transparency is often used not for the purpose of clarity, but to create dense, layered imagery built from veils of color and texture.
Two 8-stud LEGO bricks can be combined in 24 ways. Three bricks can be combined in 1,060 ways. Six bricks can be combined in 100K ways. With eight bricks the possibilities are virtually endless.
A 9-by-9 grid of pixels can yield an infinite number of different typefaces.
Typography is mostly an act of dividing a limited surface.
Grids function throughout society. The street grids used in many modern cities around the globe promote circulation among neighborhoods and the flow of traffic, in contrast with the suburban cul-de-sac, a dead-end road that keeps neighborhoods closed off and private.
The grid imparts a similarly democratic character to page and screen. By marking space into numerous equal units, the grid makes the entire surface available for use; the edges become as important as the center. Grids help designers create active, asymmetrical compositions in place of static, centered ones. By breaking down space into units, grids encourage designers to leave some areas open rather than filling up the whole page.
Textbooks, dictionaries, reference manuals, and other books containing large amounts of text often use a 2-column grid, breaking up space and making the pages less overwhelming for readers.
Styles and motifs of patter-making evolve within and among cultures, and they move in and out of fashion. They travel from place to place and time to time, carried along like viruses by the forces of commerce and the restless desire for variety.
The secret to success in all ornament is the production of a broad general effect by the repetition of a few simple elements.
In the 19th century, designers began analyzing how patterns are made. They found that nearly any pattern arises from 3 basic forms: isolated elements, linear elements, and the criss-crossing or interaction of the two. Various terms have been used to name these elementary conditions, but we will call them dots, stripes, and grids.
A diagram is a graphic representation of a structure, situation, or process. Diagrams can depict the anatomy of a creature, the hierarchy of a corporation, or the flow of ideas. Diagrams allow us to see relationships that would not come forward in a straight list of numbers or a verbal description.