I’ll use Papyrus if I want to…a.k.a. Outgrowing Art School.
How to shrug off the fear of making a mistake so you can take control of your design career.
Abstract
The various disciplines of design are too broad and too deep to be learned in two, four or even six years worth of school. This was never a realistic intent of art/design school, yet many artists/designers never attempt to formally compensate for this impossibility in their careers.
Instead, they let their careers happen to them, taking it one project, one position, one paycheck at a time. They acquire little bits of depth here and there, but never take on the full responsibility for pioneering the career they once dreamt of. Many never grow into their confidence enough to work with autonomy and instead linger in doubt, obediently working to not mess up or break a rule that was enforced upon them for a completely different reason years ago.
Still others evangelize these rules as if they are gospel and beyond reproach and reject beautiful and viable design simply because it dares to break an arbitrary rule that they hold sacred. They revere the rule more than the creativity and quality that a good design yields. I reject this way of judging design and the designers and laypeople who hold them up as sufficient grounds for judgement.. I see them as chains that make obedient slaves of the naive designer.
This article attempts to make a case for growth through learning and exploration of these rules and their roots in principles of design, craftsmanship and arbitrary professorial limits installed at the beginning of design school and never removed. My hope is to begin liberating designers from the shackles of these rules installed not to hold design students down, but to give them a chance to grow stronger by wearing them for the duration of the education. If you’ve been working and still listening to these rules, abiding by them and never daring to deviate, it’s time to put them away, breath the free air of independence and take responsibility for your career.
Note
This article has been broken into two parts. To read the section that explains the 11 design rules you should start breaking today go here.
Exit Show
It’s spring 2006, and I’m standing in the gallery where my exit show is being displayed along with 29 other designers. I have three of my favorite pieces from my time in the design program hung neatly on the wall and a hodge podge of other matted projects sitting in my four feet of table space. People are walking up and asking me questions, telling me they like my work, congratulating me and asking me what is next. I had no idea. I only knew I wasn’t ready to start my career.
I felt this way because in 4 years of art & design classes, I hadn’t learned anything that really made sense as a logical and repeatable foundation for what seemed like an ever-evolving series of subjective choices. I knew something was missing because prior to going into the design program, I’d tried my hand in the comics industry, and through that, I was exposed to practical applications of design principles in that industry that were used to judge goodness in the work. I knew there was something deeper and more rational to this profession than whimsy and taste, but I hadn’t heard it in school and I was hungry for it.
What I Learned In Comics
What is really great about the comic industry is the community and the accessibility that young comic artists have to the top professionals. Comic book conventions allow young artists to take their portfolios around to industry experts and get real-world critiques. I was fortunate to grow up in the southeast and have access to a studio based in Atlanta of perhaps the most design centric artists in the history of comics, Gaijin Studios.
Everyone in the studio was exceptional as an illustrator and each embraced a design centered approach. They were all great, but the best teacher in the studio was an artist named Brian Stelfreeze (google him, and thank me later.) Brian would spend hours at his table in artist alley talking with young artists, critiquing portfolios and giving clear and applicable instruction on how to improve the work. His lectures covered everything from line quality to color theory to positive and negative space. His teachings stayed with me and sank in quickly and like so many others, it improved my work.
Standing in the gallery at my exist show, I knew I’d produced a lot of work over the last two years but I knew that I hadn’t encountered anything that brought clarity to my design work in the same way that I had with Brian Stelfreeze’s critiques. I was still working almost purely from intuition with grab bag of do’s and don’ts and other best practices and what felt like arbitrary rules. I felt like a complete fraud.
Don’t Use Gradients: Rules and other best practices.
As I look back on my undergraduate experience, what I remember learning most is best practices. Best practices are rules that if adhered to should yield better designs and most importantly (by design school standards,) better portfolios. Some of the best practices that I remember include:
- Don’t use gradients
- Don’t stroke type
- Don’t stack type
- Don’t use more than 3 colors
- Don’t center the focal point
- Don’t use more than two typefaces, (Serif and Sans Serif)
- Don’t combine two serifs or two sans serifs.
- Don’t make everything the same size
- Don’t use layer styles
- Don’t use free or highly stylized fonts (Especially Papyrus and Comic Sans)
- And a dozen or so more.
There were also a few always do’s like:
- Always use a grid
- Always create hierarchy
- Always remove one thing
- Etc.
These best practices took on the role of laws in the design classroom, and breaking these laws was grounds for excommunication from the design profession forever (or at least a ding in my perceived potential to actually make it as a designer in the eyes of my peers.) These best practices were delivered down down upon us like the Ten Commandments. In a whirlwind of subjective madness, these were the only semi-tangible examples of reason we could find. We adopted them, and we held each other accountable to these rules. They were beyond reproach. We graduated with them. They were our design education.
Why?
What was missing from these rules was a reason why. I hadn’t learned to ask this questions forcefully enough at the time. I remember asking my package design professor “what should I be considering when it comes to designing a cleaning product bottle.” Her answer was to “go and look at the cleaning product aisle.” I did this, and intuitively picked up on bold typefaces juxtaposd against highly saturated color schemes. In doing this, I learned to mimic what I saw, but I never learned to deconstruct it and understand the decisions. I knew from my time in comics that there was always a tangible reason why a rule existed. I just never found those answers in design school.
Knowing the Rules and Breaking Them.
Many of the “rules” I listed above have very good reasons behind them even if we never learned them in college. In most cases, each rule is either related to a principle of design, a craftsmanship issue or a professor imposed limitation meant to yield a better portfolio by limiting access to special effects and enforcing creative constraints. It behooves us to understand these reasons so we can work with autonomy rather than being continuously beholden to them. This means we must learn the rules so we can break them as people are fond of saying.
There are no rules in graphic design, only malleable chains of reasoning called principles.
Knowing the rules so you can break them is just a cliche’d way of saying get competent so you aren’t living your career according to a set of stupid rules in the first place. There are no rules in graphic design, only malleable chains of reasoning called principles. Even the principles aren’t set in stone. They shape and bend and morph in the context of the problem and each other. These rules that so many evangelize and revere are really just a set of arbitrary constraints set up in design school to force students to outgrow bad habits, trite solutions and reliance on software. They’re meant to yield passable portfolios, so the student can get a job after college. That’s it. Unfortunately the students never realize that the shackles come off at graduation and now these rules have taken on a life of their own in the design industry.
Principles
The principles of Two-Dimensional Design are the chains of reasoning that we use in visual/graphic/communication design to analyze and evaluate visual design solutions as good or bad. While there are hundreds of right solutions to a visual problem, there are equally as many wrong solutions and the principles of design help us analyze and judge our work to determine if it is good or bad. These principles have been wrought out across centuries of art and design making, analysis, and judgement. Practitioners discovered patterns of success and formulated principles around them and then passed them on to the next generation. Eventually, they were collected into design books of which there are hundreds now, all essentially the same at their core, but with enough differentiation to warrant a purchase.
Craftsmanship Issues
In the wake of the computer revolution, it became exponentially easier to do just about anything we want with our imagery and typography. But just because we can do it, doesn’t mean we should do it. Doing these things arbitrarily will yield a sense of poor craftsmanship in the work. For example, when we put a stroke directly on type to outline it, we actually change the shape, proportions and positive/negative space relationships in the typeface. For this reason, it is usually a bad idea to stroke your type directly. I’ll talk more about this later. Craftsmanship issues are things that degrade the integrity of the design and the communication. The rules developed as a response to these issues are put in place to keep students from making these mistakes in the short time that they have in college to develop a portfolio.
Professorial Limitations
With the computer came a myriad of easily produced special effects that were impossible or at the least, very expensive to produce in the pre-computer years of the graphic design profession. If you look at the graphic design in the years that followed the arrival of the computer and the adobe products, you’ll see an over-indulgence of special effects, filters, layer styles, and other digital trickery. In many cases, the special effects are so garish that they overwhelm the concept while others feel very dated and heavy handed. Of course, designers had to explore these new tools, but within a few years, they realized that these special effects were more distracting than enhancing, and reintroduced restraint and prescribed purpose as a pre-requisite for the use of these options, always in support of the concept rather than a means to an end in themselves.
Young design students however, rarely have such restraint in their early work, and many gravitate to the discipline because they learned to use the features in high school art classes or in their spare time at home. Because these features create a level of craft in the work that would be hard to attain otherwise, these students come to see the use of these features as the point of the discipline. The features become a crutch to instill aesthetic quality into a conceptually barren design. Unfortunately, the lack of nuance makes them feel heavy handed and unsophisticated. As the student’s aesthetic sense develops, he or she should come to see this as well.
For this reason, professors build restrictions into their projects that force the student to generate conceptually solid work without the special effects. They present these restrictions as laws and the designers bring these rules into their practice. It isn’t a bad thing to push for conceptual value without special effects, but these tools do provide opportunities for enhancement and polish on a concept. Using them with purpose and restraint can yield a more finished design.
Why do you hate Papyrus?
Have you ever encountered someone outside the profession that like’s to poke fun at Comic Sans or Papyrus, or skoffs at the use of a subtle gradient, as if it grants them credibility and a ticket into the club. I’ve seen this phenomenon several times, where someone will write off a beautiful design as worthless because it utilizes something that was formerly off limits in design class. What’s worse is that the person will be so completely convicted of their superiority and still have very little clue why they hate it. If you ask them why, they babble like idiots trying to justify their contempt.
Saturday Night Live made a whole skit on Avatar’s use of Papyrus. When I watch the skit, I don’t see SNL making fun of Papyrus. Instead, I see SNL making fun of the very idea that people can take the use of these typefaces so seriously that it wreaks havoc on their quality of life. They’re making fun of us, the pretentious, overly emotional and utterly uninformed designers who take the appearance of these fonts as personal slights. They really could care less about the typeface.
With anything like this, where an arbitrary rule is enforced on the designer, the question for me becomes, “is it appropriate for the context it lives in.?”
Massimo Vignelli describes appropriate as:
Once we search the roots of whatever we have to design we are also defining the area of possible solutions that are appropriate — specific to that particular problem. Actually, we can say that appropriateness is the search for the specific of any given problem. To define that prevents us from taking wrong directions, or alternative routes that lead to nowhere or even worse, to wrong solutions.
– Massimo Vignelli The Vingnelli Cannon
Vignelli appears to express that solutions become appropriate or inappropriate in the context of the problem. Every problem when fully explored will validate potential solutions and scrape the rest from the plate. At that point, the designer is left to determine which solution of those left is the best path forward. This is highly subjective, and rarely ever left to a single designer. And, it’s possible that using a gradient, or Papyrus might actually be a viable and appropriate solution. The question then becomes, will they have the guts to use it when it really makes sense?
So, is Avatar’s use of Papyrus inappropriate?
This is a question better left to people who’ve actually watched the film (I couldn’t sit through it). My uninformed pre-suposition of the movie is that it has themes of technology vs. nature, advanced civilization vs. primitive, humans vs. aliens etc.
Blue is a big color in the film.
Texture seems to be important.
Things glow.
If the logo and the movie poster are meant to preview the experience the audience will encounter in the film, it doesn’t feel inappropriate. Feel free to disagree and let me know in the comments.
So we come to the actual use of Papyrus. Could another font have been chosen? Yes. Is this one inappropriate for the themes and content of the movie? I don’t think so.
There are design professionals who advocate for using Helvetica or another classic typeface exclusively. Can anyone make a case for Helvetica being appropriate here, or Gill Sans, or Avenir? The designer probably could have distressed gill sans, a humanist font and done some special effects on it like they’ve done here, and people would have been fine with it. Gill Sans is a revered fonts, but that doesn’t make it or others like it the most appropriate for everything.
Helvetica was designed to be without personality, turning it into a kind of typographical tofu, flavorless but capable of taking on the expressive quality of its context. Unfortunately, Helvetica’s over use in corporate applications has imbued it with actual semantic baggage despite its original intent to eschew any kind of innate personality or voice. It’s now synonymous with themes like conglomerates, banks, capitalism, and even corruption. Maybe someone can use Helvetica to communicate the themes of Avatar as listed above, but I suspect they’d be using it like Tofu, instead of as a typographical equivalent to salt.
Vignelli accepts that there are usually a variety of possible appropriate solutions. Perhaps the designer could have spent hours combing through derivatives of Papyrus to find one that would not be papyrus, yet still accomplish the communication goals of the logo.
In his short video Typomania, German designer Erik Spiekermann says “the appropriate typeface confirms exactly what we want to believe.”
Papyrus is an aged, textured font with callifgraphic qualities. There is a viable use for fonts like these. I wonder if the crime of the Avatar logo is that it simply used Papyrus rather than a lesser known derivative? What I mean is, do we hate hate the Avatar logo simply because it is made from Papyrus which even non-designers were told to hate. This begs the question, “why were we told to hate it in the first place?”
Papyrus is available as a system font on most Mac and Windows machines. Prior to the computer, most people didn’t have access to fonts and weren’t making their own funeral announcements and wedding invitations. When this new technology became widely available, most people didn’t go out and take a series of typography courses to learn how to use it appropriately.
So, then what happened?
Well, these naive desktop publishers monkey-fisted their productions and gravitated to the most heavy-handed communicative typefaces in the dropdown menu using them inappropriately because the average desktop publisher doesn’t have the communication sensitivity to see expressive potential in a more conservative typefaces. This was especially true in the early 90’s when this technology became available.
As a result, Comic Sans showed up on Funeral Announcements and 9–11 memorials while Papyrus shows up on wedding invites and birth announcements, and it all felts inappropriate.
Comic Sans and Papyrus aren’t any worse or any better than other highly stylized fonts, they just had the misfortune of being included in the most popular operating systems. This made them ubiquitous, and so they were used by the largest number of people inappropriately. Following this train of thought, we should also all hate Helvetica equally, but no professor ever told us to.
So we don’t.
According to Typomaniac Erik Spiekermann, author of Stop Steeling Sheep and Find Out How Type Really Works, “Helvetica Sucks.”
From his blog
“It really wasn’t designed for small sizes on screens. Words like milliliter can be very difficult to decipher. If you ever had to read or write a password with 1, i, l or I, you know the problem.”
When asked by Adobe about his position on Helvetica, Spiekermann said:
It is perfect for what it is. Helvetica was designed to have no specific character and the designers achieved that. So it is beautiful in that sense, but not suited to a lot communication tasks that require an attitude, a voice. Neither is it suited to be used small on screens because too many of its characters can be confused with each other, like l and I, 3 and B, or rn an m.
Pick One Typeface And Use It For Everything.
In college, I was told to just find one typeface and use it for everything. I believe this was an admonishment from my professors to become intimate with a typeface through repetitive use and exploration so that I could truly understand it, and in doing so gather the experience to come to a greater understanding of other typefaces as well. But without that higher goal, using and relying on one typeface as a dependable option for every typographic problem is a bit lazy and even dangerous.
Today, we have gurus with massive followings advising everyone to just use Helvetica. To me, this says, forget learning to understand and choose type appropriately and just settle for type as a passive element in your design. If we do that, I think we’ll miss opportunities for more effective expression and communication. Adopting this half-baked shortcut neutralizes type as a semantic carrier of meaning. In Communication Design, Type is half the message. Why neuter it simply because learning to understand type is difficult. It’s difficult, but well worth the effort.
It’s Sort Of The Point Of Graphic Design
The point of combining imagery and text is to create a stronger more intuitive message. Redundancy in communication is the component of the message that could be left out, but when included serves to strengthen and clarify the message. In a piece of visual communication, the text itself has meaning and so does the imagery. The actual shape of the typeface can function as a component of the imagery and carry semantic value that clarifies and reinforces. More on this later.
Autonomy and Mastery
To reject something simply because someone else told you to reject it is to be a cow in a herd. It is to sacrifice your autonomy. We see too much of this kind of thought in the current world influenced by influencers who’ve built their brands on superficial understandings, rather than methodical exploration and reconciliation of the concepts. This spans every discipline and category.
Working with autonomy means working with self-governance to make the right decisions regardless of the “rules.” To do this you must develop a level of mastery that doesn’t come easy. It means reading and synthesizing the seminal books in the disciplines recognized cannon, rather than their derivatives. It means transcending the the shallow, easy to digest blogs that spring up like weeds to stand on the shoulders of giants, including this one.
If you aren’t working this way, instead relying on rules you learned in college to “keep from making mistakes,” then you are working from a position of fear. This almost never leads to anything with impact. You are subjugating yourself to your professors who are not necessarily out in the world, working in the contexts that you are. You’re letting their voice lead you long after it should have become irrelevant. You’re keeping your voice weak and timid and operating in a state of being afraid to screw up. And at the end of your career, you’ll wonder where that time went and why you still have so much left to say.
Autonomy and mastery are things designers must earn for themselves through scholarship, application, analysis, judgement and synthesis. We must ask why and then go and answer that question through rigorous study every time we encounter it in our work. It isn’t something done in a couple years after college. It requires humility, curiosity, tenacity and a fierce devotion to learning.
I’m Not Afraid
In my career, there may never be an opportunity for me to use Papyrus or Comic Sans in a way that is truly clever. I’m certainly not going around looking for these opportunities. I may never encounter a design problem where one of these typefaces is a clever, and better yet, appropriate choice.
But what if I do?
What I know, is that if I ever do encounter such a situation, I won’t shy away from that opportunity because of some arbitrary rule I learned 16 years ago when I didn’t understand anything. If that day ever comes, I’ll embrace this choice and use it appropriately and be ready for my detractors with the question “is it inappropriate?”
Conclusion
Obviously this is not comprehensive and maybe I’ve missed some important points. I’d love to hear about it and have a conversation with you. Through out this essay, I’ve worked to communicate the importance of appropriateness in design. Anything is viable as long as it is appropriate, but if you’re gonna break these rules, break them with the confidence that comes from having a strong rationale behind your decision.
It’s much easier to be critical of a design than it is start from scratch with empty space and toolbox full of elements. Many times we don’t know the constraints that people are working under and our social media driven world serves to bring out the worst in us and give us a platform to show it to the world.
Keep that in mind as you grow in your career and give feedback. Your first question should always be, does it feel appropriate? If it does, then it’s ok to be gracious and supportive. If it doesn’t, you’ll do the designer more service by helping them understand why it isn’t working. Always do this with generosity and care as your motivations rather than some self-serving need to feel superior.
If there is a rule you learned in school that I didn’t cover, reach out to me on Linked In and let’s talk about it. Maybe I can help. I’ll look forward to those opportunities to be of service. Thanks for reading this far. Please let me know how this article can be better.
About Me
Jason Walker is the Creative Director for Covenant Eyes and a free-lance designer for Tektonux LLC. He began his career in 1998 when he walked into a small local sign shop with a stack of illustration boards under one arm, and asked for a job. Since then, he’s worked for screen printers, newspapers, dot-coms, magazines, agencies and public school. He even drew caricatures on River Street in Savannah GA for a year.
Jason holds an M.F.A. in Graphic Design, and an M.A.T. in Teaching and Learning. He’s a Certified Brand Strategist and a Certified Brand Architect through the Level C brand education learning track. He also serves on the Advisory Board for the Executive Education: Customer Experience Certificate Program offered through the Z-School at Georgia Southern University.
His mission is to help designers elevate their professional esteem and their pay by learning to be more effective in the context of buisness. He lives in a small remote town in Georgia (where he can only get satellite internet) with his amazing wife of 14 years and his two adorable daughters.
