Design Formulas

You can probably tell that I’ve been reading Paul Rand over the past few days, and in the first few pages of Design, Form and Chaos he suggests two “rules” or formulas for graphic design.

The first is that the quality of design improves the further away the designer is from the influence of management.

The second is that interference from the client is inversely proportional to the design sensibilities of the client (in other words, as Rand puts it, the more knowledgeable about design the client is, the less likely he is to interfere in design decisions.

I quite like these rules. While I think they’re open to debate they certainly struck a chord with me.

Here the are graphically:

Gerontology and other seemingly irrelevant concepts

Earlier I said: “What is graphic design, and why is critical theory (embracing politics and sociology, semiotics and psychology, gerontology and any other ‘ology’ you care to mention) an essential part of studying it?”

Gerontology is, according to dictonary.com

The scientific study of the biological, psychological, and sociological phenomena associated with old age and aging.

When I mention this to students, initially I get blank stares. But after a bit of discussion it soon becomes clear to them why graphic designers (as well as all other types of designers) really should be clued up as to what things like gerontology mean.

Let me give you an example. In Why We Buy Paco Underhill discusses the fact that as we grow old our ability to perceive colours towards the yellow end of the spectrum diminishes. In practical examples, bearing in mind that Underhill’s area of expertise is retail design, point of sale etc, this means that any products aimed at, or consumed by, people of a certain age should not depend on yellows or related shades to communicate information. Put simply, no yellow labels on drug packaging and so on.

Just that simple point is enough to get most graphic design students re-evaluating their initial scepticism of the value of what Rand calls “clutter”.

Gerontology extends to early years as well. It is no accident that products aimed at very young children rely on bright, primary colours. Our eyes are not tuned in to subtle pastel shades in the first few years of our lives. Most of the world has been exposed to one of the UK’s most, er, “interesting” exports recently, the Tellytubbies and their cousins the Tweenies. Only designers who were knowledgeable of the finer points of gerontology and child psychology could have come up with the things you see there.

And what of other issues to do with colour? Colour blindness affects one in 200 women, while a staggering 1 in 12 men suffer from it. The condition is quite complex but essentially it means anything that is predominantly blue will be problematic for a significant proportion of the population, especially male. Yet blue is a traditionally “male” colour. Hence, a graphic designer ignorant of this most basic accessibility point is quite likely to produce designs that are not going to work with nearly 10% of the male population.

The following comes from Stephen F. Austin State University’s Psychology Deparmtent

“Tom” is typically an happy reader, but today he does not volunteer to read. His problem stems from the fact that the story is printed in blue with a purple background. “Tom” is unable to see the letters clearly and therefore, is unable to read with confidence. If a teacher is not educated in the area of colorblindness he or she may misdiagnose the problem, but if they are made aware of the possibility of color deficiencies, special measures can be taken to help students. Allowing “Tom” to read off of black and white copies of the story will help improve the contrast and allow him to read with confidence.

Since the effects of color blindness can be quite harmful, it is necessary to learn more about its effects on learning as well as teaching. Many teachers are not aware of the effects of color deficiencies in young children. If teachers were made aware of the potential problems of colorblindness, steps could be taken to aid the students with these deficiencies. It is often taken for granted that all children see in color. Books are printed in a variety of colors and with colorful graphics making them very appealing to the normal color-perceiving person. These publishing techniques make it difficult for the color-deficient student to see the material and to learn. Color is also incorporated with flannel boards, colored maps, transparencies, books with colored print, colored counting beads, and green or brown chalkboards (Sewell, 1983). There is no way a child who is unable to see the material will be able to process and learn it.

Problems with contrast can contribute to the learning issues of the visually-disabled student. A child may not actually display all the characteristics of colorblindness but may not be able to distinguish certain colors apart such as gray and black. This identification problem can also slow down the learning process. Many teachers have modified their teaching in order to accommodate the color deficient child. These modifications are really small considering the lasting effects they will have on the child’s future. Some of these modifications include labeling with words or symbols when the child needs color recognition, increasing the contrast by using white chalk on a black board, being aware of “trouble” areas, and by making black and white copies of colored text. By simply incorporating these techniques, a teacher can radically alter a child’s performance in academics (Lewis, et al 1990). The sooner the color deficiency can be identified the sooner accommodation can be made to help the child.

Paul Rand, as I mentioned earlier, seems to believe all the above is “bewildering” to the typical design student. How bewildering can it be to remember that as we age from infancy to our twilight years our colour perception changes, while for 1 in 12 men blue, green and in rarer cases red are perceived as grey? Not very, I would say, and hardly a burden for even the most skills-based graphic design curriculum.

mezzoblue ��� What is RSS/XML/Atom/Syndication?

I’ve found myself having to explain RSS syndication a few times in the past week or so. It’s always worth reminding myself that not everyone knows what I know (though I try to forget that the reverse is also true!) While I have long known that there are still some people out there using Netscape 4 because it never occurred to them to update it, I ignore the fact that there are people who have never heard of RSS.

Which is a shame as I really do think it has the potential to be a “big thing” for the internet, particularly for those of us who graze information like whales eat plankton.

There are a few explanations of RSS out there, some very technical, but this one over at mezzoblue today looks a good place to start if it’s new to you.

I really do recommend getting hold of a news reader (I use NetNewsWire in its free version on my iMac and swear by it). I actually think I’ve stopped watching the news on TV and buying a newspaper now, because my RSS subscriptions to the BBC and Guardian newspaper seem to fulfill all my needs. I also subscribe to a lot of design-related blogs. Now I just double click on a headline and intro that grab my attention and away I go.

As mezzoblue puts it:

“What if there were … some way to have your list of bookmarks notify you when the sites you read have been updated? You wouldn�t waste time checking those that haven�t. Instead of loading 30 sites a day, you might only need to load 13. Cutting your time in half would enable you to start monitoring more sites, so for the same amount of time you originally invested in checking each site manually, you may just end up end up following twice as many.”

If you’ve not tried it, give it a go. And if you’ve got a blog of your own, publicise your “feed”. For what it’s worth, my feed is both traditional RSS and the newer, but at the moment less widely supported “Atom” format.

Why Critical Theory is Important (Part 1)

Paul Rand, in Design, Form and Chaos (1993) writes:

“To make the classroom a perpetual forum for political and social issues, for instance, is wrong; and to see aesthetics as sociology is grossly misleading. A student whose mind is cluttered with matters that have nothing directly to do with design, whose goal is to learn doing and making, who is learning how to use a computer at the same time that he or she is learning design basics, and who is overwhelmed with social problems and political issues is a bewildered student. This is not what he or she bargained for nor, indeed, paid for.” (page 217)

That this comes at the end of a book in which Rand discusses, among other things, sociology, politics, and business is strange enough. But unless there has been a seismic shift in attitudes among students in the ten years since that was written, Rand has got it wrong.

There are several points on which I would take issue with the above comments. Briefly, they are these:

1. Higher education’s raison d’etre is to observe, comment upon and change politics and society.
2. A mind full of understanding of the world is not a cluttered mind, while a mind devoid of them is empty. A graduate who is ignorant is not a graduate, and a designer who is bewildered by the thought that his or her design not only exists within, but contributes to, a politically complex society will not, at the end of the day, be a particularly good designer.

Students entering higher education are more intelligent and demanding than people think, and if Paul Rand spent five minutes with any of mine he would, I am sure, eat his words. Overwhelmed? bewildered? No. Conscious, thoughtful, intelligent, dedicated, socially aware individuals, several of whom I wouldn’t be surprised to see running the country within ten years? Most definitely.

There are several angles from which to attack Rand’s statement. Pedagogically, a convincing argument can be made for why any course that calls itself a degree should make the things he argues against a central part of their syllabus. The fact is, any course that does otherwise should be stripped of its degree status. It’s bad enough the British media labelling us “Mickey Mouse” subjects without people actually suggesting that’s what we should be.

Educational debates aside, the strongest argument against Rand comes from the subject itself. What is graphic design, and why is critical theory (embracing politics and sociology, semiotics and psychology, gerontology and any other “ology” you care to mention) an essential part of studying it?

Rand appears to take the view that graphic design is something you do, but don’t think about. Thinking about graphic design is something that critics and historians do, but not the producers (the authors). Therefore the study of graphic design must follow one of two strands: training in how to do it and education in how it works. The two shall never meet…

This divide between those who practise and those who critique is quite common. Yet oddly, teachers who teach art and design act as critics, and the “critique” is an integral part of most courses. Yet Rand, a famous critic, believes we should not teach the skills that develop the ability to critique – how odd. And how odd that students should allow themselves to be critiqued by people who have no formal training in how design works…

Graphic Design is not just an activity, it is a cultural text, because it stems from the need to communicate. This is something that Rand makes quite clear at the start of his book, but later forgets, and something I use to differentiate Graphic Design and Art as disciplines.

Communication theory tells us that all messages have authors and readers, and that in between these is “noise” that acts to disrupt the channel of communication. In order to ensure effective communication, the medium/channel used has to tune out, compensate for, or utilise the noise. This is as true of the graphic designer as it is for the television broadcaster, the telecoms company, the internet service provider.

Noise consists of lots of things, from the physical distance between sender and receiver to more conceptual problems such as generational distance (a 33 year old designer experiences noise when designing for 3 year olds and 73 year olds), and cultural distance (whether in terms of East v West, American v British, or high v popular culture among many others). Because most graphic designers will spend a lot of their time communicating with people who are not themselves, they will always experience “noise”. For their design to work, that noise has to be tuned out.

There are two ways a designer can do that: only do jobs that are within your limited cultural horizon, or expand your cultural horizon so that you have a greater understanding of what makes the world, and the people within it, tick.

A designer who opts for the first option, either voluntarily or because they haven’t been given the education they deserve, will quickly run out of steam. It’s something you see a lot in some students’ work – an obsession with whatever is faddish at the time (skateboard culture, tattoos, copying the style of designers of favourite CD covers and so on). This obsession has no context and no future. When the fad fades they will be busy playing catch-up with whatever new one comes up. But they will never innovate, never be the designer who the next generation of students copy.