One of my students (bravely, excellently) asked me recently if art and design needs to have a concept, or if it can just look cool. This is a regular topic of discussion in our critiques and in my conversations with designers, so let’s explore it here.

(NB. I am using the word “designer” but this can mean artist, illustrator or creative in general. Also, these posts will normally arrive on Fridays, but my excitement for Dan Lockton’s Design Toolkit trumps my schedule!)

What is Cool?

The first question is how do you define cool? In order to reach a conclusion that a thing is “cool” there must be some criteria at play. Is it the palette used? The innovative combination of forms? The approach to the problem? It’s critical that a designer/artist be able to define the criteria by which she is judging something to be cool. By developing an awareness to these sort of conceptual decisions, you can better articulate the intentionality behind or within your own work.

Cool is a word that stops the conversation. It’s a label. So, when a designer/whatever says, “I made this composition because it was cool,” this means of explanation fails because our individual definitions of cool are subject to our own experiences, age and culture.

What are Your Goals as a Creative?

Even in graduate school, much to my surprise and disappointment, work shows up on the critique wall with little or no conceptual foundation. But it looks well-composed, well-crafted and trendily designed. So what? All this tells us is that the designer is a good interpreter of design trends. It’s like riding the wave versus being the wave. If your goals are to make nice-looking work (again, a term or idea subject to trends, time and culture), then this is perfectly fine. It’s about scale, really, and to what extent you want to reach people.

Dan Lockton’s Design with Intent Poster.

The designers that are interested in affecting change are the most compelling to me. Like Dan Lockton of Design with Intent, who just released the initial version of his Design with Intent Toolkit (!). Lockton, who I first learned of after reading the book Designers, Visionaries and Other Stories, has created a tool which any designer can use to help make formal choices about her designs which will influence behavior.

One facet of the Perceptual Lens examines the concept of contrast.

Lockton has come up with 8 lenses through which to examine your design, ranging from Errorproofing to Cognitive, and each lens has a series questions to help the designer improve her work. In the example above (Perceptual Lens, question of Contrast), Lockton cites Britain’s Royal Mail as having switched to red rubber bands in order to see them better if accidentally dropped. A simple and logical choice that improves an experience on a small but important scale (reducing litter and waste).

In this example, our designer is considering the field of design on a large scale, causing us to reevaluate our own perceptions of the craft and what it can do. All of this is based on deep research, broad thinking and a solid conceptual foundation. More importantly though, is that I can engage with the work on a cognitive level rather than a superficial one, causing me to connect not only with the ideas within the work, but the designer. This is, I think, the goal of design: to connect.

(In an interview with Sight Unseen, David Alhadeff talks about the intersection of design and “abstract artistic meaning”. I think concepts need to go further than abstraction though.)

How Do You Develop Concepts?

So then, if we can agree that design/art/illustration/whatever needs to be grounded in intelligent concepts, how do we arrive at those concepts? Or, how can we conduct research?

Seth Godin talks about the importance of passion and I agree with him. You need to find something you’re passionate about, for any project. For instance, when I was asked to design Sonora Review, I was passionate about integrating the illustration/visual component with the writing, rather than keeping them separate as had been done in the past.

Different projects require different research methods, as well as the invention of these methods. For Sonora, research included reading the essays, stories and poems to be published. Additionally, I examined the approach to design/art of other literary journals like Black Warrior Review and Ninth Letter. Over several months, I let this information percolate and came up with designs that I felt fit my goals as well as the journal’s theme.

Here is a list of research methods that might apply to your projects:
// Write a list of questions you want to answer
// Read about your subject
// Read about what others have to say about your subject
// Conduct interviews
// Find and review public records
// Write out your ideas to gain clarity
// Draw out mind-maps to gain clarity and organize your thoughts
// Talk to people about your ideas and listen to theirs

Research deepens your own understanding of a subject, necessarily creating a more comprehensive/cohesive design, and this extends to the audience. So, while it depends upon your goals as a creative, I do think developing a conceptual foundation is critical to successful, effective work.

To conclude, let’s brazenly pull a quote from a book I’ve just finished, John D’Agata’s About a Mountain, in which it is noted (in an entirely separate context) the importance of complexity:

“A complex message will leave less room for vagueness and more opportunities to countercheck our intentions…It has to be something that’s multilayered, a mixture of different communicative media that people…will have to work through…using the natural functions of the cognitive mind. In short, we have to give these people a problem to solve” (D’Agata 121).

More Resources:
Jessica Helfand’s Prisoners of Logic
Seth Godin’s Are You Rational?
Study Partner
The Dream Job Project