Thoughts on Design

If I had the opportunity to give one, and only one suggestion to a young graphic designer… it would be “simplify”. It might sound too easy, and maybe it is, but that one word is a major key to design.

I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free. - Michelangelo

The most difficult aspect of the design work I do is setting my design free. I experienced a turning point in my growth as an artist while in college studying sculpture. I had built a nice, but not great, sculpture of a horse out of welding rod and wire. My professor looked at it and said, “simplify”. I was shocked by this because it was already very minimalistic. After a lot of work, I managed to take the five pieces of welding rod that defined the body of the horse, and simplify it to two. Up until then, I’d been thinking along the same path that had brought me to that point. The only untouched element of the sculpture left, was the fifty feet of wire I’d used in the mane and tail. While I could see the professor’s point, I couldn’t see how to simplify them, they defined the horse’s movement. Somewhere in that mess of wire, I had a breakthrough. I simplified that fifty feet of wire, by adding another five hundred feet! One minute it was hundreds of individual pieces of wire. The next moment it was a horse’s mane, made of thousands of individual components. I had visually unified the element, bringing apparent clutter into a unified whole.

In simplifying a design, some things need to be removed, others need to be unified. Sometimes simplification means removing, sometimes it means adding. I can’t tell you whether to add or subtract, but it’s something that we all need to consider. Will removing elements simplify the design, or will adding elements unify it? If five elements looks like too many, do you need to use two, or twenty?

So here is my opportunity to give that one suggestion… simplify, simplify, simplify.