Design and Mystery
On the unknowable nature of design and why that matters more than ever.
Dear Designer,
It’s probably time in the short history of this newsletter to put this idea out there.
We don’t know how design works.
Design theory has put forth numerous, competing, and composite ideas and frameworks as to how visual communications — in design, reduced to those most elemental objects of type, imagery, colour and structure — function. Designers, philosophers, and psychologists from Charles Sanders Peirce to Ellen Lupton have proposed numerous explanations for what design is and how it functions.
But, fundamentally, these four base elements, individually and in sum, are more magical than material. Moreover, they are vulnerable to open interpretation, which means that there is a lot of noise around design but not much signal.
(Perhaps related, fewer and fewer people are writing about design these days — and if they are, it is focused on the purely practical and the tactical.)
Not only do we not know how design works as a tool of and for human communication — we also don’t really know how designers produce the visual objects we see every day.
The putative reason is straightforward enough — design is an aesthetic act in which an inclination for subjectivity is valued in the same way that any art-making would be. We rely upon a single subject, an individual designer, alone or in concert with others, to create the criteria for a desired visual object and then to go about building that object. Designers use skills and experience to direct their attention to a solution or to create a new visual problem. But they also use guesswork, intuition, and a kind of kooky clairvoyance, which might also be called inspiration.
Part of my project here, dear designer, is to make the case that designers need to reclaim their role as artists, especially in light of the rise of template design, generative AI, and commoditized production. But, to be clear, I am not trying to assign designers the designation of artist because they need to reposition themselves as modern, mechanistic producers. I’m making the claim that designers are artists not merely because I want artists to reclaim their historical privilege and to re-assert their value, though I am.
Rather, I think it’s important to make the case that designers, as artists, recognize that their work is inherently imprecise and mysterious, despite a culture which asks for increased visual precision and a machine-like devotion in technical delivery. Graphic design as an aesthetic activity — whether creating websites or wallpaper — is inherently unstable, underdetermined, and unreliable. It is marvellously messy and messed up in the same way that a Jackson Pollock is — the chaos of our very nature depicted in strokes and strands of light and shadow. Design is about control and constraint despite its murky makeup.
In October 1930, writer and scholar Beatrice Warde delivered a speech to the British Typographers Guild called The Crystal Goblet. It became instantly well known for its clarion call to others in the quickly growing field of mass communications, an endeavour that we now call “graphic design”.
In her essay, Warde makes the comparison between a goblet made of crystal and the presentation of type on a page, both of which are meant to be invisible to their users. Words on a page strung together contain content in the same way that a goblet contains wine. Both drinkers and readers seek the same experience — enjoying the fruit of the vine is equivalent to imbibing the fruit of ideas. For Warde, users care about the glass goblet as much as they do the font in front of them — not much.
Wine is so strange and potent a thing that it has been used in the central ritual of religion in one place and time, and attacked by a virago with a hatchet in another. There is only one thing in the world that is capable of stirring and altering men's minds to the same extent, and that is the coherent expression of thought. That is man's chief miracle, unique to man. There is no 'explanation' whatever of the fact that I can make arbitrary sounds which will lead a total stranger to think my own thought. It is sheer magic that I should be able to hold a one-sided conversation by means of black marks on paper with an unknown person half-way across the world. Talking, broadcasting, writing, and printing are all quite literally forms of thought transference, and it is the ability and eagerness to transfer and receive the contents of the mind that is almost alone responsible for human civilization.
Warde makes the case that the physical act of typesetting, which fulfills about 80% of graphic design’s typical mandate, is a kind of mystery. The “sheer magic” of “black marks on paper” is not just an anomaly of modern civilization — it is a uniquely peculiar act of communication across time and space. You and I, dear designer, are having a weird, one-way conversation through this very vehicle.
What I’m trying to get at is that even at the very outset of “graphic design” (a phrase coined only eight years earlier by William Addison Dwiggins), theorists tried to rationalize and even instrumentalize design and yet could not keep their hands off its mystery.
Type, colour, imagery and structure — each of these are draped in enigma. Cognitive psychologists still don’t know how letterforms come together in words and sentences to so quickly make meaning. The brain can retrieve the gist and any associated details about a given word in less than 200 microseconds. And the same applies to colour; there are objective attributes to colour itself but our subjective and cultural interpretation of them goes beyond what any theory can coherently and accurately describe. Imagery, as you know, is a fabulation. We can’t trust our eyes to distinguish fact from fiction, illusion from illustration, idea from idiocy. And content structure? Design and designers have always made use of whatever contemporary vehicle is available; folio one day, 16:9 the next.
How all of these visual objects come together for us, across people and place, into received consciousness, is unexplained. Even in the case of generative AI, engineers and researchers are not sure how those manifold images are created and why some are more meaningful or marvellous.
All of this leads me to believe that, despite what we are being told, dear designer, we are far from understanding our work and farther from being fundamentally replaced. Design, like all artistic practice, stems from the mastery of mystery, and commands us to stay attuned to the complexity of what is before us.
Yours,
Image of the week
This is a stunning image of the Rosetta Stone. If you are ever in the vicinity of the British Museum, be sure to visit this object. The gravity and gravitas of this document is unmistakable. Carved in 196 BC (about 2,200 years ago), the stone contains three texts, the first in Ancient Egyptian using hieroglyphic and Demotic scripts and the bottom is in Ancient Greek. Found in 1799 by French colonists, it helped the west to finally decipher hieroglyphs and helped it understand the political, economic and spiritual belief systems of the ancient Egyptians. Hieroglyphs went untranslated for 1,200 years.
Quote of the week
Design is one of the few disciplines that is a science as well as an art. Effective, meaningful design requires intellectual, rational rigor along with the ability to elicit emotions and beliefs. Thus, designers must balance both the logic and lyricism of humanity every time they design something, a task that requires a singularly mysterious skill.
~ Debbie Millman
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