Rules & Context
"Among the more counterintuitive characteristics of art and design is the fact that these endeavors are governed by rules. The rules of artistry (and therefore design) are inviolate and unchanging. If you don’t obey the rules, your results will be boring, uninspiring, uncommunicative, and less than compelling. In short: poor art or poor design." -Andy Rutledge
Also, there's a good bit on art versus design...
(Full article)
3 comments:
i don't feel that he made a concrete argument about how context alone in a way allows you to not follow the rules. there seems to be other elements in design that contribute to "escaping" the rules. or maybe not, but he made me feel like there should be because his argument on context in design doesn't seem as convincing as i had wanted.
and i wouldn't necessarily say that "reversed type is not as good as regular type" and "images are visually more compelling than text" are considered "rules" that one has to follow for it to be good design. they're more like observations of human perception that designers would consider when working on a project. yes, while i don't disagree that context plays a role in using reversed type and having text more powerful than images, they're still not really rules. what i consider a rule in design is more related to a particular brand's preference on a color or style. The most recent iPod and Apple campaigns use Myriad Bold. The Economist (the magazine) uses red background and white serif type in dead center for their advertising. UC Davis uses a particular yellow and blue for their official branding.
back to his definition of rules, while i somewhat agree when he claimed that design has rules and that by not following them, your design is less compelling, he seems to have mistaken or not have considered "bending the rules." maybe this is just me and my current philosophy on rules of design, but i strongly feel that you really need to know the rules before you can bend them or even break them. bending or breaking the rules to your liking without reason DOES make your design less compelling. but if the very act of bending or breaking the rules get your message across, that is excellent design.
agree? disagree? i know i've left some loopholes in my argument but i can't seem to clearly elaborate the difference between his definition of rules and mine.
First, a quote to respond to the quote:
"Rules are used as a substitute for skills of observation." - David Cabianca
Here's my rub with the article. If design is art within constraints, my feeling is that more often than not you have to break "rules" of design to fit within the constraints of the client. It would be great if our clients needs always fit within the rules of design - actually, scratch that, life would be really boring then. But the fact is that clients, who, almost by definition, lack a knowledge of the rules of design (that's why we're the designers and they're the clients), often ask for something that would be impossible if you followed all the rules of design.
Hence, when we design things, we must choose which rules to rigidly adhere to (personally, I'm partial to very accurate alignment, a grid system, and typography that's nothing if not clear and legible). Herein lies the skill of the designer - the judgement of which rules to follow, which to bend, and which to break. The best designers use their judgement to bend/break rules that are appropriate to the context - but knowing the context is not a substitution for good judgement, as Rutledge would have us think. Judgement is the skill of the designer, and it is applied to context as it is applied to so many other aspects of design - color, form, type, space, balance, etc.
For me, design education is about learning to listen to that little voice in your head, that feeling that's barely perceptible at first that says "that looks wrong" or "that needs to be moved just a fraction of an inch" or "that's unbalanced" or "that's too literal" or "that's too vague". Often, when I design something I'm not quite satsified with, I find that the parts of the design that give me a very slight uneasy feeling are the ones that other people point out as not working as well. I may not be able to say what's wrong about it yet, but if I pay attention, I know that there is something wrong. I've learned over and over again that the feeling of uneasiness is what I need to learn to pay attention to and percieve if I want to continue to improve as a designer. And I think that great design has much more to do with learning to hear that voice than simply putting together rules and context.
Thanks for posting this, trish. I like how there is dialogue going on.
I probably never think about these so-called design "rules" when I go through my process. While I recognize that there may be preferred ways of doing things, the article makes it sound like we will all fail at design if we aren't thinking about rules constantly (at least, that was my impression after reading how he believes that fundamental human behaviors, habits, and perceptions are unchanging...). Thinking about "rules" should not be a conscious part of the design process, but an unconscious one. It's sort of like government laws: you know it's there, but you go on and enjoy your life without worrying about them. Sometimes, you might even need to break some laws to enjoy life (yeaah?).
Learning the "rules" is somewhat problematic because, as the article suggests, its case-by-case, depending on context. The only way to acknowledge these so-called "rules" are through the actual design processes, through critiques, and through failures and successes.... your experiences, basically. So if that's the case, why worry about what the rules are. Designers should design according to those experiences. I usually have little bite-sized design memories previously stored in my head. Visual ideas flash through my mind when I try to imagine a layout. While that's going on, I'm not thinking about rules... nor do I want to. That's just going to get in the way.
With that said, one of the toughest responsibility for a designers is to explain to someone else why something "works". So it would be nice to know your gestalt principles and typography language to be able to talk about your design. But that still doesn't mean you need to be thinking about rules when you design. Its more of an objective look at what is going on rather than explaining how you followed the rules.
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