As a communication designer, my job is not to communicate. I want to make your head explode. My primary objective is to make strong, surprising, and memorable statements that teach, inform, inspire, or even confuse. To do this, I have to ignore logic and stop making sense.
The American artist Edward Ruscha devised a simple rule for distinguishing between bad and good art.
Bad art makes you say, “Wow! Huh?”
Good art makes you say, “Huh? Wow!”
Looking at bad art is like eating fast food. You’re excited about the thought of it, but when it hits your stomach, the relationship ends quickly. Good art is seen, but not immediately understood—“Huh?” Then comes the “Aha!” moment when the subtext, the real meaning, unfolds and our mind expands. Comedy also uses this principle. A joke sets up a logical story, lets you formulate what would be the obvious ending in your head, then destroys the original premise with an alternate and, hopefully, humorous ending.
The visual arts are an intellectual field, and the visuals we use are the teaspoon of sugar that helps get larger ideas across. There are pathways to communication and understanding other than the brain—the heart and the groin are both equally good. You don’t have to feed your audience information they already know in a way they already expect. Play with their senses and tease their rational way of thinking. Trust your audience’s curiosity. Whether they confess it or not, the public wants to be intellectually challenged, not spoon-fed a common, boring, or “right” answer. To surprise and enlighten your audience is to give them a gift.
My mentor and friend Henryk Tomaszewski summed up this idea beautifully: “All my life I’ve tried to find signs that everyone can understand. A designer’s work comes down to a continuous search for new associations, symbols, visual paradoxes, the construction of deliberately wrong, illogical areas. This game demands a sharp eye and an infallible perception, but it also involves getting the message to the viewer. And sometimes you miss.”
