Testing their wings
March 5, 2008
By Elizasmom
Note: I asked several of my clients, colleagues, and friends who work in fields related to design if they’d be interested writing for my blog. This is the first of a series of guest posts. Elizasmom is my good friend, chocolate winner, fantastic client, and wonderful freelance writer. I’m thrilled to be posting her thoughts. — Leslie
Hello! I am not a designer, but I was smart enough to hire LT to do the work for me, which means that I have excellent taste. Also, her expertise is rubbing off on me and the font I am using to type this up in Word right now is kerned ALL WRONG.
See: Big Designer words: I haz dem! Obviously, I am qualified to post here.
To get to the point, I thought it might be instructive to write about an experience I had with young designers at Big Nameless Institution Where I Work (henceforth: BNIWIW).
My department at BNIWIW is one that interacts with the community by presenting performances which are advertised in part by posters. We’ve come by the poster designs in a variety of ways, professional and un-, with predictably uneven results.
Several years ago, casting about for a good, low-budget way to handle this problem, I found a graphic design professor who was interested in giving his students real world experience and who agreed to incorporate into his curriculum the creation of 4 of our posters.
About 7 weeks before each event, I visited the class with members of the creative team assembling our performance. I supplied the graphic designers with information about the nuts and bolts — deadlines, text, logo information. Meanwhile, the creative team described the performance, including any helpful visual cues.
About 3 or 4 weeks later, we came back to the class, where each student presented his or her work. Then, we took all the posters back with us, spread them out on the floor and walked back and forth, gradually eliminating the weaker contenders until we had decided on the best one. To help the designers learn from the process, I sent the class an evaluation explaining why we chose the design we did and what its best points were, as well as what we liked about some of the other strong designs.
Although each performance was different, there were patterns to the process, the first being that beginning designers who were short on inspiration tended toward the alarmingly literal. If asked to illustrate, say, The Name of the Rose, they would have come back at us with a red flower wearing a “Hello, My Name Is: ___” sticker. OK, bad example — that would be funny and I would think about using that poster. But you get the idea. In my armchair psychologist’s opinion, this has to do with not yet trusting one’s creative impulses enough, or not yet knowing it well enough to trust it, perhaps.
I also have to lay the blame partly at our feet. In many cases, the creative team members were still learning, both about their craft and about how to express what they do to others outside the field — without boxing the graphic designers in. The most skillful of our creative teams elicited the most envelope-pushing entries.
There were always a few designers whose work was surer, bolder. One student, asked to illustrate a presentation whose subject matter included angels, cropped in close on a pair of feet, floating, and then added a single delicate, soft, pink feather just below them. Understated, witty, gorgeous.
Another woman listened to the presenters of that same piece and made a conceptual leap based on our descriptions of an important visual element of the performance — red cables — and a key theme — interconnectedness. Using slim, clear plastic tubing and water with red food coloring, she created an art installation that evoked variously a web, blood, an IV stand and a Jackson Pollock work, then photographed it and handed us a darkly gorgeous piece of art. Our winner.
Brilliant as that piece was, its original version illustrated another common quirk of the new designers: They tended to get so caught up in the visual elements of their design that they neglected the text, wedging it into weird little corners, making poor font choices (SAND!), and worst of all, introducing errors into the text.
To the very end of the year, I was unable to convince some of them that a poster about a performance should not have the ticket information in 12-point font.
In the case of the designer I mentioned above, she had actually heard me on the size thing, but her text was riddled with typos and was plunked over the most interesting part of the photo. There were other posters that had text with fewer errors, but this image was so right for us that we had to try and make it work.
I emailed her with our concerns and offered as guidance that she think about stacking her text into an interestingly-shaped chunk of negative space, but that we had to have a corrected poster within 48 hours or we would go to option B.
I had it on my desk, immaculately typed and perfectly arranged, in 12, and that turned out to be the third thing element I noticed during this collaboration. The best posters were always by a student who had bothered to come to class (instead of leaving it with their teacher), who had made an engaged presentation, and once her/his design was chosen, was prompt and thorough about whatever changes we wanted to make to the final piece.
It was a brilliant experience — 13 posters to choose from! What a luxury! And some of them were smashingly good. Like, write-down-her-name-because-she’ll-be-famous-in-the-industry-someday-good.
