“Design is not decoration.”
This is something one of my favorite professors would always say in college, and it’s something that Floyd also says here at EMRL. More than anything else, it’s what I aspire to in my career as a designer.
It’s an important distinction to understand. We like to think that design is about making something beautiful—and it can be—but good design is really about good, consistent communication. As the designer Erik Spiekermann would say, “One cannot not communicate.” And this is obvious to us when we think about meeting someone for the first time. Everything about that person communicates something to us: their haircut, the clothes they wear, their hygiene, the speed at which they speak, their body language, etc. In the same way, each design you see is also like meeting someone for the first time. We judge a company or a product based on the kind of font the designer used, the colors that were used, the way the designer did or didn’t use the space, the shapes they used, and so on.
Imagine if you saw a person walking down the street in leather pants, suspenders, tweed jacket, cowboy hat, and high heels. Each item may by itself be exemplary and of good quality, but together on the same person it’s all a mess. So it goes in design. A designer’s job isn’t to take a lot of fashionable elements and mash them together, to make something look “modern” or “hip” or “cool.” A designer’s job is make sure everything works together, communicates an idea, and makes sense.
My wife tells me the little black dress never goes out of style. It’s simple, elegant, and classic. It’s less about the dress and more about the woman wearing it. When we design with decoration in mind, it’s easy to design Hammer pants–something that looks cool at the time but a few years later leaves you wondering what you were thinking. When we design with communication in mind, it becomes the little black dress—less about what looks cool for a moment, and more about the company or product it’s communicating about.
Design is not decoration. It’s a tough lesson to learn, but I’m happy to be learning it.
