IN PRAISE OF THE IMPERFECT
Although a flagrantly rebellious design can be just as rigid as a technically perfect one, somewhere in the middle is an innocence of error that is not only charming, but downright beautiful.
While some designers view the kind of design that seems to threaten the unravelling of all design with understandable trepidation, others are drawn to the idea like kamikaze pilots to a battleship. In the punk period, people used to talk excitedly about a phenomenon sometimes called "anti-design" or "anti-style." For the initiated, the rejection of craft rules, aesthetic proportion and stifling good taste was proof positive of the work's authenticity. It wasn't a ruse or an image, it was the thing itself, a genuine expression of what its makers felt.
A
few years later, Cranbrook Academy of Art designers such as Ed Fella
and Jeffery Keedy used the term "anti-mastery" to describe their aims.
This was the intellectual version of anti-design, hip to mind-bending
French critical theory, and it was lobbed, as a calculated act of
provocation, at the received wisdoms and comfortable complacencies of
the design profession. Eventually, the idea filtered down to every Joe
Schmo and his PowerMac that there is no such thing as "good design,"
just your own opinion, and therefore, anything goes.
This
wasn't great news for the designer who sincerely believes that "real"
design has something special to offer both client and audience.
Nevertheless, the idea of a form of design healthily free of the
impurity of added professional slickness soon found a place in the
design pro's cabinet of styles and concepts. A book about the late
Tibor Kalman neatly captures the paradox in its subtitle "Design and
Undesign." Just as the famous exclamation, "Thank God, I am still an
atheist!" attests to an enduring belief in the almighty, so "undesign"
as a design strategy depends on the continuing existence of design to
make it plain to us exactly what it isn't.
The great
attraction of punk was that it didn't give a damn what the profession
thought about anything (it barely understood that there was a
profession). One problem with the sundry rejections, repudiations and
academic re-evaluations that have followed is that they so obviously do
care. This type of work is simply too knowing to escape from the
massive gravitational pull of Planet Design. Ed Fella is a case in
point. His typographic inventions are some of the most self-aware,
deliberate and truly inspired rule-breaking of recent years -sheer
unfettered creativity- and in the late 1980s they were so far from
registering on the profession's radar that his work did indeed seem to
be a profound, semi-secret affront to the very nature of typographic
design. When professionals stumbled across it by chance, they didn't
know whether to be baffled, outraged or both.
Looking
at the section on Fella in Radical Graphics/Graphic Radicals, a recent
design book from Chronicle, it was striking how familiar his work now
seems. The more we see of Fella's flights of extreme and unpredictable
virtuosity, the more we know exactly what to expect. Anti-mastery turns
out to be an alternative form of mastery, and now that the initial
shock has worn off, it's been painlessly absorbed by a graphic
mainstream that apparently regards "radical graphics" as a genre in its
own right.
But there is another area of "undesign" that
hasn't attracted the same labels, theories or attention, because it is
much more ordinary and, as a result, much closer to the heart of our
everyday experience of design. What I have in mind could perhaps be
termed "flawed mastery," though "imperfect design" would be more
direct. Observing my own unpremeditated behavior as a viewer and
consumer of things that happen to be designed (as opposed to being a
detached design watcher, a "critic") I find that imperfection is a key
source of pleasure in design, a quality that often draws me to a thing.
I don't mean to suggest by this some camp or ironic "so
bad it's good" way of seeing. Nor do I mean design that is so lacking
in saving graces that not even the most dedicated ironist could tease
any humor from it. It is something much subtler than that: a line of
type slightly smaller than it ought to be; a contrast tried for, but
not quite achieved; an area of unwarranted over-emphasis; a feeling
that some aspect of the design hasn't been as well-articulated or
resolved as it might have been; an air of probably unintentional
strangeness in the choice of type, image or the way they are brought
together. Any, or all, of these things can result in a design that has
about it the almost indefinable quality of animation that the British
designer Paul Elliman, who teaches at Yale, once described as the
"breath of life."
This is most definitely not the kind
of design that wins all the prizes. Whatever their style, award-winners
almost invariably radiate the sense that everything has been perfectly
judged and is in precisely the right place. However, like the
proverbial model with the flawless looks who finds it hard to get a
date, because only the most supremely attractive have the nerve to ask
her out, absolute perfection is not always the most engaging quality in
a design. Designers with a commitment to traditional notions of craft
tend to assume that achieving a state of visual perfection must
necessarily mean that a design will communicate more effectively. But
there is rarely any solid evidence that this is the case, and
approaching communication from this angle can often lead a designer to
miss the point.
I saw this happen with a favorite
British band (not well known) that produces a strange hybrid music that
somehow fuses rock, dance rhythms, bright easy listening and hypnotic,
minimalist chants and drones. The group has released a series of CDs
with bold but slightly peculiar covers. The parts don't fit together,
in a technical sense, yet the effect is strong. In one of the best
covers, a coiled element spirals up from a sun-like semi-circle on a
graphic horizon against a background of horizontal lines. For no
particular reason, the title is placed in a ribbon-like device at the
top, and the band's name is rendered in an odd, custom-built font whose
centrifugal turning movements recall glimpses of washing in a tumble
dryer.
There is a design credit of sorts, but it isn't
clear who created this or most of the other covers. The following year,
the band turned to a design company with a recognizable name and the
results were immediately apparent in a CD cover that boasted a series
of archly minimalist Op-Art variations on a circle. The record label's
daffy molecular logo was re-branded into a cluster of exquisitely
balanced blobs and a sinuous "space-age" typeface was pressed into use.
Suddenly an operation that had seemed innocently weird now looked like
a calculated exercise in pseudo-corporate image-building. No question
it was "better designed," but it was also arid and lifeless.
For
designers, self-consciousness is an occupational hazard. The designer
is by definition someone with hyper-sensitive feelers for what is
fashionable in both society and design, and this can be deeply
inhibiting. Some of the most engaging instances of flawed mastery and
suggestively oblique image-making come from people who seem relatively
immune to these concerns. What led the cover designer of a recent book
of Jean Baudrillard's photographs to match a widely letter-spaced,
modernistic, 1930s-looking typeface with one of the theorist's
pictures? For design purists it is an obvious faux pas, yet it makes a
much more unsettling and memorable cover image than the standard little
dab of Helvetica hiding in a corner that would no doubt have won
instant reflex approval from fashion-conscious proponents of the
neo-modernist revival currently under way.
Designers
who allow space for the wayward, the imperfect and, sometimes, the just
plain "wrong" set in motion a process and create the conditions for the
viewer to have truly unexpected encounters with design that are one of
its keenest pleasures and a large part of its point.
About this article
The above article is reprinted from Graphis magazine, with permission.
About Rick Poynor
Rick Poynor is a writer specializing in design and the visual arts. He
founded Eye, the international review of graphic communication, and
edited it from 1990 to 1997.
He has contributed to Blueprint, Frieze, I.D., The AIGA Journal, and many other magazines, newspapers, and catalogues. His books include Typography Now: The Next Wave, The Graphic Edge, Typography Now Two: Implosion, and most recently, Design Without Boundaries, a collection of his journalism and criticism, which was reviewed in a recent issue of Graphis. He is a visiting professor at the Royal College of Art, London. Rick's column, "Found Image," is a regular feature in Graphis.
About Graphis Magazine
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