Keep It Simple

by Jon Edwards posted in: Commentary• on November 16, 2010

Quite a few years ago, I worked with a woman, a designer, who bathed everything she did in colorful, ridiculous descriptions that were so absurd that they distracted her audience from the complete void that was at the center of the thing she failed to create. She was masterful in her ability. She would infuse each project, whether it was a one-off logo design or an entire branding and marketing campaign, with double-speak nonsense. She managed to build such confusion about what she actually did, or failed to do, that to anyone who didn’t bother to peal back the surface, she came off as a genius.

Sure, that logo might not look impressive, but what really mattered, as far as she was concerned, was the thirty-seven page manifesto explaining how the design incorporated the teachings of Voltaire and deftly combined them with the musical stylings of Erwin Schulhoff when he was fully immersed in his Dadaist phase. What to you looks like nothing more than a swooshy mark with a little squiggle at first inspection would be redeemed if you would take the time to refer back to the pages upon pages of gibberish explaining the process. Only then would you get a real sense of how brilliant the design is… and how wrong you are about it.

“If you have to ask, you wouldn’t understand” described everything this person did to the letter. And it worked. Quite well, really. She essentially hypnotized an entire company (not the one I’m currently employed by, for the record) by peppering her speech with an array of not-quite-pertinent multisyllabic words and ill-fitted adjectives that circled back on and around themselves so rapidly that you might go cross-eyed if you didn’t look away. Most everyone worried that they would look like a buffoon if they tried to call her out on her shenanigans, so she managed to make a complete mess of things for about two or three years before her entire operation imploded.

I was one of the ones who was fooled. I admit it. For a while anyway. I’m not proud of it, but, on the upside, I did learn something from it.

Communication shouldn’t be about the pomp and circumstance surrounding the thing you create. It should instead be about what’s being said. It’s simple, really. No amount of distraction will make something bad into something good. Just as important, an overabundance of noise will often dilute the very thing that you’re trying to convey by drawing attention away from it. A website won’t be any more successful because you’ve told your audience, in painful detail, how the hierarchy of the user interface design degrades according to the Fibonacci series of numbers.

That’s not to say such explanation never matters. It does. Or at least, it can. Inspiration can come from the oddest most unexpected places, and that should be celebrated rather than shamefully ignored or denied. During the course of any given project, I might spend time explaining how a user’s eye moves through a website and why the design facilities that movement when presenting to a client so they can better understand why certain choices were made and why those choices are anything but arbitrary. I may also write two or three paragraphs about how a S.W.O.T. analysis conducted during a branding session lent itself to the finished logo in ever so subtle ways that best represent a company’s evolving brand. That information is valuable. It can be helpful. It’s sometimes even necessary. There are many volumes of books written about such things, and they can be used to further your education and understanding. There is a marked difference, though, between enriching the experience of a design through informed explanation about why crucial decisions were made and diminishing it with fakery and nonsense.

It’s worth noting and spotting the differences between the two approaches so you don’t get bamboozled like I once did. Consider the end product, then work backward from there. It’s helpful to ask questions about why certain choices were made, but be sure that you understand the answers and that they aren’t muddled and saturated with fluff. By doing so, you can get a much better understanding of why something is or is not successful. Most importantly, though, if, at the end of the day, the work can’t stand on its own, no amount of blatherskite will make it good.

Tags: clients, communication, design