Some people just have bad taste.

I’m not talking about my husband’s affinity for bluegrass.  I get that some people like bluegrass.  It’s not my thing, but I can appreciate it as an art form.

No, I’m talking about indisputably bad taste, like Sam’s love for McDonald’s.

Forgetting for a moment that there’s a toy involved (because that would sway even the most discerning five year old), Sam is very much in love with McDonald’s.

For some reason, Dave decided to start taking him there once a week after school for a snack.  That’s weird because:

1. the Dave I know wouldn’t be caught dead inside a McDonald’s, and
2. while Sam’s been a frequent guest at Starbucks since his fourth day on earth, we’ve rarely taken him to McDonald’s before now.

Anyway, he’s under the McDonald’s spell.  So much so that sometimes he tries to trick his Dad into thinking it’s Friday even when it isn’t (which is easier than one might think).  Or he’ll ask to switch McDonald’s day to…today.  Whatever today might be.

So what?

A certain percentage of adults also have frustratingly bad taste.

There’s rarely any way to explain, let alone talk these people out of having bad taste.  There are as many reasons for it as there are people in the world.

The toy is just the beginning.

The perks of being a designer

One of the perks of being a designer is that, while you occasionally have to overhear the Allman Brothers Band* squeaking through somebody else’s headphones on the metro, I am forced into close orbit with these people pretty much every day.

Yay.

Here’s how it typically shakes out:

1. “Here’s what you should do.”
2. “Oh, you don’t like it? Let me just try to convince you why I’m right.”
3. “I can see you aren’t buying it.  Let me just explain it one more time.”
4. “Do you want fries with that?”

My wish for a new superpower

I would like a new superpower, and it’s this: I want to be able to see you coming.

*No offense to anyone who likes sitting in the dirt staring at animated mushrooms spinning around and around while the same song drones endlessly in the background.

Photo by Andreas Wetterberg

In quantum mechanics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle states a fundamental limit on the accuracy with which certain pairs of physical properties of a particle, such as position and momentum, can be simultaneously known. In other words, the more precisely one property is measured, the less precisely the other can be controlled, determined, or known. (Wikipedia)

It’s not just about quantum mechanics anymore.

Don’t you find this principle at work in your life?  The more you know one thing, the less you know another?

I’ll Give You An Example

Say we’re designing a flyer, and the job of that flyer is to get people to register for an event.

We deliver the flyer to the client and say, “Do you like this flyer?”

The more the client is thinking about liking the flyer, the less he is thinking about the job the flyer is supposed to do.  Ruh roh.

Say We Ask a Better Question

Say that, when we deliver the flyer design, we say, “Do you think this flyer will get people to register for your event?”

This isn’t much better, because our client, who is not a strategic designer, does not have the knowledge base to know whether or not this flyer will do the job we want it to do.

No matter how we phrase the question, he’s going to get distracted by the color of the header, or the fact that we used Fabio’s picture as a placeholder.

Educate them!

Should I explain to my client that the image at the top primes the reader emotionally so that he’s more likely to respond to their message?  And that the position of the headshots will pull the reader’s eyes across the page and down to the big fat “REGISTER NOW!” call to action?

Hmm, tricky.

Then the client is thinking about the mechanics of the design a little too much.  Feedback will be too focused on the nuts and bolts and not enough on feel.

Don’t educate them?

What’s wrong with letting people react to something however they’re going to react to it?  If we present a design that’s strategically flawless, and we can get them to pretend that they’re the recipient of the piece, won’t that tell us everything we need to know?

Sadly, no.  The client’s response to the piece is colored by the fact that he is evaluating the piece.

What’s a girl to do?

In the end, there’s no fool-proof way to present a design, just like there’s no good way to measure the position and momentum of a particle inside a hydrogen atom.

Photo by Bekah Stargazing

Get your pencils ready. I’m about to reveal the secret to great design:

Great design is invisible.

Think about it.  We all know what bad design looks like: clashing color schemes, too many fonts, not enough white space, boring one-size-fits-all layouts.

What does great design look like?

What’s that?  You know it when you see it?

Exactly.

Last week, Matt and I presented a set of designs to a client that, frankly, kind of knocked my socks off.  As we were preparing for the presentation, I started noticing all the little touches that made those designs special.

I realized, to my dismay, that the client could glance at any of those designs, with their perfectly placed drop shadows and carefully calibrated textures, and said, “I don’t like the photo. This one’s out.”

He would never know (or care) that the previous and next buttons on the product scroller are that shape because it lends a certain elegance to the design that otherwise would have been lacking.

He doesn’t know that the photograph he supplied, with its soft, textured background, inspired a whole design that was about his products being homemade.

And that’s our greatest challenge as commercial graphic designers – creating art that we know will be rejected, and probably for all the wrong reasons.

It’s a tough gig.

Graphic design is a tough gig, because you never know how long it will take to hit on just the right idea.

Because clients can’t see you sweating it out at all hours, they assume that the idea came to you in seconds and that you simply had to draw it out.

They don’t understand that you may have spent days feeling your way through the design, while you were fixing dinner, or changing a diaper, or buying groceries. That you’ve given over half of your brain to their project for a period of days or weeks while you weighed dozens of options.

How do you put a price tag on that?

What to do?

There’s nothing to do but to go on surrendering our brains to the project and creating complex designs that we know are destined for the wastebasket.

Because the more sophisticated the design, the less the client will appreciate its sophistication.

Because great design is invisible.

I always know we’re on the right track with a design when the client starts talking about content. It means they didn’t notice the design and that’s just what we want.

A design you notice is a bad design.  The fact that you notice it gets in the way of the communication it’s supposed to support.

So we’ll keep on adding all those little touches, even though they are unappreciated, because that’s how we create great design. We make it look easy because that’s the only way to create designs that get the job done.

We’ll just have to trust you to know it when you see it.