Why Graphic Design Is Heaven For Puzzle-Solvers
You’ve never thought that graphic design would be all about puzzle-solving? Let me explain why this is the case. But let’s first wind the clock back a bit.
As a kid, I LOVED puzzles.
Whether they were in a literal “puzzle” form, or they were fun riddles, or even stuff like sudoku and word search. There were few things that brought more joy to me than putting that last piece in and solving a puzzle.
This later naturally evolved into affinity for puzzle video games (think Portal, The Talos Principle, The Witness…).
I would often spend hours upon hours figuring out how to get to that exit door using a combination of portals, cubes, lasers, and whatever else Aperture Science had on their disposal.
And then, I found the most challenging puzzle of them all: graphic design.
Why is graphic design (kind of) like a puzzle, you ask?
See, a major part of graphic design is applying the same concept to different layouts. Think merchandise, different kinds of billboards, flyers, posters, and so on.
Doing this requires you to take all the design elements in front of you — pieces of the puzzle — and keep re-arranging them to form new layouts that make sense in a given context. Sometimes you may also omit less important elements because a certain layout requires you to.
Take for example, my latest branding project, a re-brand of the biggest gaming convention in the Balkan region, Games.CON.
There, we always had four recurring elements: the blue textured background, yellow “do-not-cross” lines, the actual logo, and the event’s mascot.
The trick was to make all of them fit neatly on dozens of different applications: ticket offices, varied billboard layouts, flyers… you get the point.
The key when solving this kind of “puzzle” is to achieve seamless consistency.
If you take another look, you’ll notice that no two layouts are the exact same, even though together, they all appear like the same thing. This is what seamless consistency is all about.
Because of different contexts (a large billboard that’s mostly seen from across the street, vs. a smaller billboard that sits 3 feet away from pedestrians), some layouts had the logo in one horizontal line, some had it stacked, some didn’t have it at all. And every single application that had the sponsor logos, had them laid out in a different configuration.
Now, looking back at this Games.CON project, I’d say those sponsor logos were by far the hardest puzzle of them all. Let me explain why.
To an average person, the finished layouts below will look pretty boring and uninteresting, which ironically enough, means that I’ve done my job correctly. To give you some more context, I’ve illustrated the fact that those 30+ logos used to be individual images, without ANY pre-determined order or layout.
The only rules were: Republic of Gamers and Telenor need to have the largest logos, and each logo needs to have enough space around it.
If you notice on the above images, all the logos had different shapes, some were extremely elongated, some were completely square, and others were elsewhere on the spectrum. This bumped up the puzzle difficulty to somewhere between very hard and insane, because you couldn’t go the usual route of aligning everything in a neat, homogeneous grid.
Can’t remember exactly how much time it took for each one of those, but for the first one, I can assure you more than 2 hours were spent.
But enough about my projects. Let’s talk more about this puzzle analogy.
There is, however, one MAIN difference between regular puzzles and graphic design puzzles…
Here, most of the time you are the one coming up with the final layout (unless of course, you’re a pixel-pusher that’s micromanaged by a commanding art director).
This fact, depending on the person, may make it easier or more difficult to do the job.
Some people have gotten used to a singular, pre-decided way to completion. They see the image of the final puzzle on the box, and in their eyes, that’s the only “true” way to finish a puzzle.
All the while, other people prefer having more ways to successfully accomplish the same task. For them, building a new puzzle that doesn’t necessarily look like the box art is also considered a success. If you’re like that, you should definitely consider a career in graphic design. You’ll have a ton of fun. I promise.
But even if you relate more to the first example, I think you can agree that puzzles are everywhere in graphic design. Because this branch of design is about solving problems by arranging pieces in various ways to form the final image.
The best part of it all, people will pay you to solve puzzles FOR them. Puzzles that usually have multiple solutions. How cool is that?
I think this is one of the main reasons I’ve become a graphic designer in the first place. The thrill of solving that one problem that seemed insurmountable still runs through my veins.
What about you? If you’re a fellow designer reading this, I wanna know: what got you into design?
And if you’re not a designer, what is your profession, and have you ever wondering why you got into it?
Let’s start a discussion!
