yo ho, and…

Hello, I'm Kevin. What more can I say after David's grand introduction last Friday?

A few weeks ago I was in California outside San Francisco seeing a friend. We decided to get some rum and, not long after I had been ranting at length on how "all 'premium liquors' are a scam", we settled on a bottle of premium '10 Cane Rum'. I convinced him that the exquisite bottle design justified the expense and that I had wanted to try it since first seeing it a few years ago.

Several hours later, after about a third of the bottle had been expelled, I took the opportunity to praise its design — the seal printed directly on the bottle, the minimal use of color and paper, and the unconventional placement elements. Basics that I thought were done well. So I was surprised when my friend sort of …scoffed at these claims. Let me clarify — he's not a designer, but he's smart and current enough to know the value of design. He's my closest friend, of ten years, and has a huge respect for design and art. Yet, out of nowhere, he suggested, "Well, it's nice, but not brilliant. They made a cool, trendy-looking bottle. Some marketing guys probably said:

'Here, we want something sorta trendy, so let's put like a crest here in the background. Then lets make the paper a solid color, with type so it has a sort of vintage look to it. Keep the printing very minimal, and go with a color that the other rums aren't using — orange. Angle the label to make it more modern. All the designer did was carry out those instructions.'"

He completely, and unknowingly, belittled the entire concept of creative design. He reduced it to formulaic order-taking, no different then solving math or working in an assembly factory. I was too stunned to really respond, mostly because I was a bit intoxicated and partly because …he had a point. It made some sense. I'm unclear about what he defines as these 'marketing guys' — be it marketing people on the client end or strategy people on the design end — but really, does it matter? He ignored the Creative Director/Art Director/Designer relationship and broke it down, oversimplified, to: The market forces decide the look, and the designer merely carries it out. That's it. And while I place an understandably high value on how it is carried out, I couldn't argue with much of it. What people like my friend don't understand is that the disparity between a 'bad', 'good', and 'utterly fantastic' execution is far bigger than most people can imagine. Whether he is wrong or right (I'd say a little of both), I guess it reminds me that design is not as big as we sometimes think. To me it's a reminder that we need to look at the larger picture, think outside of just design, and try to be aware of what outsiders think we do.

I promise this will be the longest thing that I post, it's just been weighing on my mind for a few days!

Comments

[Dick Madeley]

Interesting point but isn’t creativity always dictated by rules? It’s a modern and not necessarily correct concept that art is all about transgression, being unique, thinking outside the box, being inspired from some transcendental realm. From Da Vinci who modelled so much on nature, Michelangelo who was inspired by the human body, right up to the best modern films which usually skirt with genre and novelists writing within an established canon: being creative doesn’t always mean that you’re not following rules. There’s so much freedom inside the rules that the craft is knowing how to apply them correctly. In fact, so much bad art is produced these days by ‘artists’ who don’t understand their own medium.

[Kevin]

Great point Dick. It's easy to fall into the modern trap of thinking that creativity means pulling original things out of thin air. I like the way you put that the craft is knowing how to properly work within the rules; I fully agree.

I've noticed that as I've become a better designer in the past 2 years (since I left school), it seems to have gotten more difficult to make some design decisions, because my mind is opened to so many more possibilities. Elements/treatments/solutions that I would have accepted as simply doing one way before, are now choices I have to make with a plethora of options filed away in my head. So to hear someone so bluntly discount all of that and tell me 'design is easy: follow the rules' shook me up a little. Made me wonder if maybe I'm overthinking it!