DESIGN DISSEC TION
S A L LY LY N N M A I E R
SA L LY LY NN MAIER
MA RYL AND INSTITUTE COL L EGE OF ART
Design Dissection A V I S UA L A N A LYS I S O F TH E ECO N O M I C S O F GR AP H IC DE SIG N
CONTE NTS
INTRODUCTION PR INCIPL E S
6
11
WHI TE S PACE
15
M ORE I S M ORE
19
LOW PRI CE, LA RGE TYPE U GLY I S I NTENTI ONA L
23
27
PROCE SS 31 SA M PLE DEV ELOPM ENT
35
V I S UA LI ZI NG WHI TE SPACE V I S UA LI ZI NG LAYERS
38
VISUAL ANALYSIS 43 I NDEX
44
BY PU BLI CATI ON
46
TA BLES OF CONTENTS S PREA DS 78 DEPA RTM ENTS E XHIBITION THANKS
103
97
82
65
36
Design is everywhere. Almost everything has been “designed� by someone.
INTROD U C T I ON
7
People who don’t know anything about design aren’t really aware of its ubiquity, and I suppose that’s fine. I am often tempted to evangelize about the importance of design, but it sometimes seems to be that not everyone needs to understand or care about everything. I couldn’t care less about business school, which seems to me to teach things that are either obvious or too esoteric to actually matter. I seem to be doing okay with that lack of knowledge, although it might explain why my current net worth is deep blood red. And plenty of outsiders feel the same way about design—we do a job that is purely decorative, a job that anyone with some extra time and creativity can get done. These people are often our clients, at least until we become educated or in-demand enough to avoid them. But the majority of working designers don’t have this choice. For better or for worse, the work created by these workhorse designers makes up a large portion of our greater visual culture, but it exists on the fringes of the design world. I am troubled by the marginalization of this “other” design. Highly educated designers know what we don’t like—a deeply discerning professor once told me that bad typography made her feel physically ill—but we don’t often consider the backstory of “ugly,” everyday stuff. The signs in my laundromat are not what anyone would consider high design, but they were clearly made by someone with technical proficiency and intent. The lower-end magazines in the supermarket checkout line were certainly designed by a professional but are unlikely to take home gold from the Art Director’s Club. When our eyes aren’t inattentively sliding over their surface, we might snicker with our fellow design snobs over a cheap-looking gradient or drop shadow. But another designer intentionally made these things, and I am very curious about the reasoning behind their intent.
INTROD U C T I ON
Before I became an MFA candidate, I was a working designer with a degree from a liberal-arts school. My design education was not nearly as in-depth as the curriculum at an art school like MICA. With my undergraduate degree, I emerged able to make things but not with a knowledge of the details that separated high design from visual rabble. My background is decidedly middle-class. I grew up in Hamilton, New Jersey, a suburb of Trenton where most people were one generation removed from a mostly vanished blue-collar identity. That identity gave Trenton its motto: “Trenton Makes, The World Takes.” Today, the motto is sadly ironic. My father was a warehouse manager and then a recruiter of warehouse managers. He later went back to school to become a special-education teacher. My mom was a social worker for the state of New Jersey. Briefly, my former stepfather owned a tanning salon. My friends’ parents in elementary and middle school mostly worked for the pharmaceutical companies that dominated central New Jersey, or else they owned small businesses or were plumbers, scrap dealers, and contractors. Much of the graphic design was in the forms of pizza menus and diner placemats, supermarket flyers and ads for McDonalds. I went on to high school as a scholarship student at an all-girls prep school in Princeton, located in a gorgeous early-postmodernist building designed by Jean Labatut, graduate director of Princeton University’s School of Architecture in the late 1960s. There, and through trips to New York with my aunt and new high school friends, I was exposed to and inspired by a higher-end world of art and design. After that, I attended The George Washington University, where I majored in studio art and concentrated in design, but I focused much of my attention on art history and contemporary conceptual art. I also sub-specialized in Miller High Life and making the most of dollar-beer night at the nearby bar. The design concentration was being slowly discontinued, so I learned how to use the Adobe suite and some design basics, but not much beyond that.
9
After graduating, I did some local freelance and temp work in New Jersey, and I followed this with a stint as an intern at Michael Graves Design Group, the product-design division of the architect’s firm in which the products and packaging for his Target line was made. In hindsight, I think my time at this elite studio really showed me how much I didn’t know, both technically and in the culture of contemporary high design. These highly-trained designers didn’t find it impressive that I considered myself “self-taught.” They saw nothing wrong with only using three typefaces that Michael himself selected, I thought this was terribly boring given that there is a whole internet full of free fonts. They never let me use any of the cool texture files I had been collecting. I did not fit there. With what was likely mutual relief, I left for an internship at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. While there, I received great direction from Dan McKinley, and I was trained in the fairly specialized skill of designing for art exhibitions. This led to a position as a junior designer at the Corcoran Gallery of Art and College of Art + Design. My directors there, John DeWolf and Maria Habib, taught me the ins and outs of fine design. Five years of exposure to the design-education community in the college as well as working to integrate design as an important contributor to the museum’s programming changed my perspective of what design is and how it can function in society. My mixed background in both high and low culture and my interests in economic justice and critical theory inform my questioning of the class–stratification of design. In a master’s program in an art school, I live in a world where designers consider whether they want to smash Beatrice Warde’s “crystal goblet” and break out of the content-first mentality of modernist design. We know the rules as set forth in Bringhurst’s Elements of Typographic Style, have made at least good-faith efforts at spelling and pronouncing Tschichold, and have debated the
INTROD U C T I ON
merits of Michael Rock’s essay “Designer as Author.” My classmates are going off to work at tech companies and, in some cases, including my own, to teach on the university level. No one is interested in low-paying local design work, except perhaps as a social-design project. We exist in a world that is wholly separate from the designers who work inhouse at the local copy shop, even from the designers who work on our newspapers and weekly magazines. I have tried to use the tools of critical thinking to discover patterns in work generally considered to have been designed thoughtlessly. Art school educates designers in a modernist tradition, where compositions are activated through grid systems and careful hierarchies of tasteful typefaces, and white space is a tool for creating tension and emphasis and directing a viewer’s eye. Breaking the rules of the modernist fundamentals of design is a conscious, rebellious choice. But modernism is not a neutral, correct default. Bright, clashing colors and interrupters and goofy typefaces and layered cutouts and drop shadows attract attention. White space is a waste of paper if you’re on a budget. Educated purists can point to cognitive studies on readability to support their position in favor of simplicity and precision, but low-end design has the advantage of appealing to common sense and common tastes. I believe this aesthetic operates on its own set of visual principles also worthy of study and classification. This book documents my hypotheses, process, and visual research thus far. I hope it is a starting point for further investigation and might provoke some additional thought and discussion about the other design.
Other Design Principles
Placemats, the Golden Dawn III diner, Hamilton, New Jersey, September 2014
P R IN C I P L ES
WH IT E SPACE IS A LUXURY GOOD
White Space is a Luxury Good AVG. HOUSEHOLD INCOME OF READERSHIP
$166,391 / 造123.389 New York Times Style Magazine
$93,960 / 造69.677 RealSimple
$57,716 / 造42.800 Ladies Home Journal
$39,626 / 造29.385 OK! magazine
SALLY MAIER
15
I started my investigation with an examination of white space and its use across the economic spectrum. White space is a powerful part of the educated designer’s toolkit–it can be used to direct the viewer’s eye, creating emphasis and hierarchy through alternating areas of visual density and rest. However, this is can be a counterintuitive concept for value-minded clients and viewers. A visually dense layout jam-packed with a variety of type sizes, photographs, graphics, and text just feels like a better deal. On a gut-level, white space seems like a waste of paper. Woman’s World addresses this instinct right on its cover: “More for Your Money!” I tested this theory by selecting publications based on the median household income (HHI) published in their press kits. I isolated the white space in several layouts from each. The first manifestation of this process was the poster on the right, created for the Graphic Design Festival Breda’s poster competition in early 2014.
PRIN CIPLES
MOR E IS MOR E
More layers and more effects are often perceived as more design. Initially inspired by the bombastic design of many of the advertising materials and signage of businesses in my neighborhood, this principle is converse of white space as a luxury good. Powerful desktop-publishing software with tools that allow designers to easily create elaborate visual effects and the falling cost of digital full-color printing have led to what can seem like a visual arms race. Text can easily be layered on top of a full-color photograph and then outlined, beveled, filled with a gradient, and given both a shadow and a glow effect to ensure that it contrasts sufficiently with the background to be readable. The assumption seems to be that to do any less would be to not take full advantage of the skills of the designer or the capabilities of the printer. I explored this concept through separating the implied layers in given layout. My initial experiments used advertisements with translucent color overlays to highlight each layer. As my scope of research became more focused, I turned my attention to analyzing the same magazine layouts as in my white-space visualizations, creating a virtual three-dimensional rendering.
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P R IN C I P L ES
MORE IS MORE
PriceBu$ters Number of Layers: 6
21
Design Within Reach Number of Layers: 3
P R IN C I P L ES
Anthropologie Average Cost Per Item: $95.25 Estimated Average Price Type Size: 10pt
LOW PRICE, LA RGE TYPE
Kmart Average Cost Per Item: $11.00 Estimated Average Price Type Size: 54pt
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The size of the price in a layout is determined by the price sensitivity of its intended audience. Despite the rise of digital media, junk mail persists. Discount retailers produce weekly flyers highlighting their new low prices in type that is often as large as the item being advertised, while high-end stores send catalogs that are more reminiscent of fashion or lifestyle magazines, filled with elaborately staged photographs to entrance viewers with the promise of the fantasy world they can join by purchasing their products, the prices of which are barely acknowledged in tiny type. This makes sense. For a consumer with more needs than money, price is the most important factor in making a purchase. For the aspirational shopper with disposable income, there is both truth and a sense of caché in the old adage, “If you have to ask the price, you can’t afford it.” I made some preliminary forays into visually exploring this principle, but I determined that I would limit my scope to magazine editorial design for the brief duration of this thesis project. Hopefully, I will have the luxury to expand my research to include advertising in the future.
P R IN C I P L ES
LOW PRICE, LA RGE TYPE
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Photo by Flickr user javacolleen used under non窶田ommercial Creative Commons licence.
PRIN CIPLES
UGLY WITH INTE NT
Ugly design can be intentional. I began investigating low-end design with the belief that much of the work that falls outside of the elite design aesthetic is not simply uneducated or sloppy but, instead, has its own intention and method. It may be cluttered and chaotic in its exuberance but still has a semblance of polish and appeal. Some of it, however, is irredeemably ugly. I believe this too is intentional. In the physical world, a common manifestation of the intentionally ugly is the furniture store or car dealership that is seemingly perpetually going out of business. Huge signs with clashing colors and screaming text cover the building’s facade and are occasionally brought even closer to the potential customer by air-powered “floppy dancers” or people twirling huge arrows. I believe that this is an intentionally (if falsely) desperate display to convince the viewer that they, the consumer, are in a position of power over the advertiser. Even if one isn’t at all in the market for a new six-piece dinette set or oriental rug, morbid curiosity over just how low the prices might be becomes a draw.
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This dynamic is also frequently on display online. Strange ads, commonly known as “click bait,” use bafflingly crude graphics, mystifying images, and promises of “one simple rule” to compel curious viewers, against their better judgment, to click. It is also my hope to put my growing collection of these ads to use in a future project. Once you notice them, they are too common and bizarre to ignore.
Process
PROCESS
Research through making As a graphic-design thesis, this work has always been about both research and image-making. I created constraints founded in research methods to guide my work, but I allowed myself the freedom to make choices to ensure the work was also visually compelling. Selecting publications required both researching numbers and selecting for visually compelling layouts that would clearly illustrate the principles. Breaking apart complex layouts required a reliance on my personal judgment and past experience with creating such layouts myself. This project is a tightrope walk between scientific study and visual persuasion.
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PROCESS
DATA COL L ECTION
My initial vision for tracking and documenting the principles I had identified was strongly influenced by the by the website Trend List (www.trendlist.org). Trend List collects and categorizes high-end design by popular stylistic tropes. The creators Michal Sloboda and Ondej Zita state that it is not a critique of contemporary design, but their supposedly neutral names for trend categories (ex.:“Left, Right, Up & Down,” “Mickey Hands,” and “Wiggles”) seem to highlight how silly and repetitive high-end design can be. Trend List’s database of examples is in the thousands, and I initially (foolishly) aspired to build a similarly comprehensive collection. But I also intended to use labor-intensive techniques to collect quantitative data and create visualizations for each entry. Given the difficulty in drawing conclusions from small pool of entries that has not been intentionally balanced, I realized I initially needed to create a discrete set of layouts to analyze. I decided to limit my research for this year to editorial layouts in magazines. Using the median household income data listed in press kits available online, I created three broad income brackets and chose three publications to represent each, with an eye to representing the relative diversity of all available publications. The site I developed for this project is based on a simple but powerful backend that will allow future additions to my dataset. Nine publications can hardly represent the diversity that still exists in print, but with additional data perhaps we can start to draw conclusions about design trends beyond hypotheses.
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P RO C ES S
WH IT E SPACE
Wired, Table of Contents. September 2013 Median Household Income: $175,968
For the purposes of this data set, I only included layouts that had “true” white space—the spaces around the type, graphics, and images were filled only with the white of the paper.
In other layouts, what I referred to as “white” space could be another color or even a photograph. “White space” is negative space, the area between elements, the ground rather than the figure.
37
Graphics and cut-out photos were traced in Photoshop, converted to paths, and brought into Illustrator. All type was simply covered with black bars.
After the vector visualization was created, it was returned to Photoshop to analyze the percentage of white space present on the page using the selection measurement tool.
P RO C ES S
LAYERS
The New York Times Magazine, Table of Contents. March 8, 2015 Median Household Income: $175,968
In a simple layout, the layers are just photography and type.
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Each is isolated into a Photoshop layer, imported to AfterEffects and animated to expand and rotate.
P RO C ES S
LAYERS
Woman’s World, “Add a Touch of Leopard for Instant Glamour!” November 2014 Median Household Income: $50,192
top layer
A more complex layout requires judgement to analyze and tease apart the illusion of layers created by the original designer.
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bottom layer
This scrapbook–like effect allows a designer to create a dynamic layout using existing photography instead of commissioning a custom photoshoot. The cost of a photoshoot is instead converted into hours spent by the design team meticulously clipping images in Photoshop.
This is perceived by the client as adding value to the design, even when to the discerning eye the results are of dubious aesthetic merit.
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Visual Research
INDEX
PU B LICAT ION SAMPL E S
Median Household Income
Woman’s World $50,192 People $69,050 Time $70,682
Wired $91,083 Bon Appetit $92,951 Real Simple $97,026
New Yorker $112,394 Wallpaper $131,779 New York Times Magazine $175,968
WH IT E SPACE
45
BY P U B L I C AT I ON
WH IT E SPACE
Woman’s World $50,192
Median Household Income Less Than $74,999
47
BY P U B L I C AT I ON
WH IT E SPACE
People $69,050
Median Household Income Less Than $74,999
49
BY P U B L I C AT I ON
WH IT E SPACE
Time $70,682
Median Household Income Less Than $74,999
51
BY P U B L I C AT I ON
WH IT E SPACE
Wired $91,083
Median Household Income $75,000–$99,999
53
BY P U B L I C AT I ON
WH IT E SPACE
Bon Appetit $92,951
Median Household Income $75,000–$99,999
55
BY P U B L I C AT I ON
WH IT E SPACE
Real Simple $97,026
Median Household Income $75,000–$99,999
57
BY P U B L I C AT I ON
WH IT E SPACE
New Yorker $112,394
Median Household Income over $100,000
59
BY P U B L I C AT I ON
WH IT E SPACE
Wallpaper $131,779
Median Household Income over $100,000
61
BY P U B L I C AT I ON
WH IT E SPACE
New York Times Magazine $175,968
Median Household Income over $100,000
63
TA BLES OF CON T EN T S
AN ALYSIS
The table of contents is said to set the tone for an entire publication. The visual and statistical data seem to bear this out, with the exception of The New Yorker. As a historic publication bound by tradition and focused on long–form writing, features a slim, center–aligned, type–only table of contents, and dense blocks of justified text in its inner spreads.
TA BLES OF CON T EN T S
Median Household Income Less Than $74,999
WH IT E SPACE
Woman’s World $50,192
People $69,050
Time $70,682
24% this page 18% overall
21% this page 22% overall
54% this page 46% overall
67
TA BLES OF CON T EN T S
LAYERS
Median Household Income Less Than $74,999
Woman’s World $50,192 People $69,050 Time $70,682
11 layers 11 layers 4 layers
69
TA BLES OF CON T EN T S
WH IT E SPACE
Median Household Income $100,000 and up
New Yorker $112,394
Wallpaper $131,779
The New York Times Magazine $175,968
86% this page 47% overall
66% this page 51% overall
70% this page 62% overall
71
TA BL ES OF CON T EN T S
LAYERS
Median Household Income $75,000–$100,000
Wired $91,083 Bon Appetit $92,951
6 layers 5 layers
Real Simple $97,026
5 layers
73
TA BLES OF CON T EN T S
WH IT E SPACE
Median Household Income $100,000 and up
New Yorker $112,394
Wallpaper $131,779
The New York Times Magazine $175,968
86% this page 47% overall
66% this page 51% overall
70% this page 62% overall
75
TA BLES OF CON T EN T S
LAYERS
Median Household Income $100,000 and up
New Yorker $112,394 Wallpaper $131,779
1 layers 5 layers
NTY Magazine $175,968
2 layers
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S P R E AD S
AN ALYSIS
Feature spreads proved to be a challenge to select and to analyze. I had decided to choose feature spreads as another vital component of capturing a magazine’s essence. But I quickly ran into the issue that many opening spreads in magazines across the spectrum use full bleed images. The lower–end publications often also had text layered on the images, but for the white space analysis, the photographs challenged my methodology. Nothing would be revealed if every sample was 0% white space. Finally, in compromise, I allowed myself to work with the second spread of a feature when necessary. These interior, often more text heavy pages also give viewers a sense of a publication’s aesthetic. The outlier in this grouping was Bon Appétit. These spreads are actually fully photographs, with a subtly textured white tablecloth as a background. I decided that this still functioned as white space in the context of the composition, and proceeded with the analysis.
FE AT U RES
WH IT E SPACE
Median Household Income Less Than $74,999
Woman’s World $50,192
People $69,050
Time $70,682
24% this page 18% overall
21% this page 22% overall
54% this page 46% overall
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DE PA RT M EN T S
AN ALYSIS
Departments vary widely between publications. To create a bit more consistency between the diverse magazines, I choose regular sections that fit into two categories: reviews (of both products and books), or food. Statistically and visually, departments were generally consistent with the rest of their respective publications. The one notable exception was again Bon AppĂŠtit, which featured a playful and heavily layered composition.
DE PA RT M EN T S
WH IT E SPACE
Median Household Income Less Than $74,999
Woman’s World $50,192
People $69,050
Time $70,682
13% this page 18% overall
15% this page 22% overall
47% this page 46% overall
85
DE PA RT M EN T S
LAYERS
Median Household Income Less Than $74,999
Woman’s World $50,192 People $69,050 Time $70,682
6 layers 8 layers 3 layers
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DE PA RT M EN T S
WH IT E SPACE
Median Household Income $74,999 to $99,999
Wired $ 91,083
Bon AppĂŠtit $92,951
Real Simple $97,026
66% this page 47% overall
39% this page 51% overall
56% this page 62% overall
89
DE PA RT M EN T S
LAYERS
Median Household Income $75,000–$100,000
Wired $91,083 Bon Appetit $92,951 Time $97,026
6 layers 5 layers 5 layers
91
DE PA RT M EN T S
WH IT E SPACE
Median Household Income $100,000 and up
New Yorker $112,394
Wallpaper $131,779
The New York Times Magazine $175,968
34% this page 47% overall
66% this page 51% overall
35% this page 62% overall
93
DE PA RT M EN T S
LAYERS
Median Household Income $100,000 and up
New Yorker $112,394 Wallpaper $131,779 NTY Magazine $175,968
1 layers 5 layers 2 layers
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Exhibition
E X HIB I T I ON
IN STALL DAY O NE
IN STALL DAY T WO
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Thanks
THA N K S
MICA G D MFA 2015
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Thank you to my fellow members of the Maryland Institute College of Art Master of Fine Arts in Graphic Design class of 2015: Alex Jacque, Daniel Khang, Iris Sprague, Katrina Keane , Lolo Zhang, Nate Gulledge, Shiva Nallaperumal, Wenjie Lu, Winnie Kuo, Yu Chen, Yushi Luo, and especially the angel and devil on my shoulders, Amanda Buck and Michael Bonfiglio.
THA N K S
MEN TORS
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Thank you to my teachers and critics over this long but rewarding year and a half. Thank you to Abbott Miller and Andrew Losowsky for their invaluable feedback and guidance. Thank you to David Barringer for his enthusiasm for discussing my weird ideas and patience when I struggled to put them on paper. Thank you to Kristian Bjørnard for helping me realize my vision for my website and to realize that I needed to pursue what I wanted how I wanted. And thank you and love to Ellen Lupton and Jennifer Cole Phillips. Ellen, for helping me discover and believe in this big idea, and Jennifer for helping me make it small enough to beautifully materialize.
THA N K S
FAMILY
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Thank you to my family and friends for being understanding during this two-year disappearance. I hope to see you outside of Facebook or Instagram soon. Thank you to my mom for listening when I needed to rant and reminding me that I am capable, even when I struggle. Thank you to my dad for his support and for telling me to “Hang in there,� when I was exhausted. Thank you to Abu, for being my nearly constant companion, my number one fan, my social crutch, and warm and fuzzy. He has been more patient and flexible than I could have asked, and I think, despite my growing reputation as a crazy dog lady, he also made the studio and classrooms a little more fun for everyone.
COLOPH ON
Printed by Blurb www.blurb.com
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Typeset in Lato by ﾅ「kasz Dziedzic Playfair Display by Claus Eggers Sﾃｸrensen
Contact Sally Lynn Maier sallymaier@gmail.com www.sallymaier.com
ﾂｩ Sally Lynn Maier 2015