It’s funny, because it’s true.
Michael Beruit has a great post over on Design Observer: Does anyone devote as much energy to avoiding simple, sensible solutions as the modern graphic designer?
His post is full of some great quotes pertaining to the silly things we do:
straining for novelty
Graphic design is easy, of course, so we kill ourselves trying to make it hard.
Poor, poor Obvious. Come sit by me. I’ll be your friend.
It’s a humorous post, aimed namely at graphic designers designing for fellow graphic designers. But it echoes loudly into the industry as a whole. It seems that all too often a design firm is hired and spends much of its time avoiding the obvious. I recall early in my web career when the firm I was working at was given the opportunity to develop a large site of an HMO. I was excited for once. This wasn’t going to be a brochure site! I was thinking about learning much more about accessibility, tackling a big customer focus component, exploring the many facets of their target audience, researching content management solutions, etc. I was ready. Then, of course, came the design team meetings. I believe the first one consisted of 5 minutes of me asking about resources that we could gather regarding accessibility testing and then about an hour and a half debating the qualities of stock photograph ‘a’ vs. stock photograph ‘b’.
That’s when it first hit me that I’m a graphic designer who honestly doesn’t find graphic design that important. To be fair, I should say that graphic design is terribly important…it’s that a lot of the industry just isn’t focused on the important aspects of graphic design.
And I suppose that’s not necessarily all bad–provided a balance is kept. Yes, a big part of graphic design is the ‘fun’ factor…both for us as the designers and for everyone else, as the consumer. We just need to remember to maintain that critical balance between the obvious and the frivolous.
One Comment
So true! I find myself guilty as well at times.
It really is something that most designers are way to defensive about, and when they are called on it they use the “concept” as a holy grail of design. Concept is good when used appropriately.
To play devil’s avocate, don’t we need the ability to experiment and create variety? Do we reduce everything to a stale, bland, pale, THX1138 form of existence by removing this from a designers role?