Changes, Normandy

dirodrig.blogspot.com is now the design blog. All art-related inquiries and considerations now at flamingosilk.blogspot.com as they should have been since the beginning!

Maybe it’s self-aggrandizing, but sometimes I think of what I do as “triage design”, as in, I may not be in a position to prevent clients from putting their own horrible design out there for the world to see, but maybe I can mitigate the damage, or otherwise resuscitate the design to some kind of minimal, brain-dead state.

Don't get me wrong. I am always pushing for the best design possible, under any circumstances. But most circumstances—and this is due to the nature of my job—do not allow for the kind of creative mobility that enables truly great design. Ninety percent of the time, the client has already has a "logo", or a previous ad, and in the interest of time I must base a new ad on the old design. I will do my best to rectify any typographic or design no-nos without altering the design dramatically, lest the client think I’ve made an entirely new ad subject to a fresh round of endless approvals and decision by committee. In the end I often achieve dramatic improvements over the client’s old design, and the client loves what I've done, even though I still don’t, since there are still significant issues, like that "logo" for instance, that I cannot change.

Is there a tangible benefit to what I do? Or should there be no distinction between bad and “could have been worse” design? It's not like people seeing bad design give the benefit of the doubt to the designer. And why should they? One design, one opportunity, and it did not turn out well. Who cares about process or what might have been?

That bad design is as natural as the air we breathe is not something I am ambivalent about so much as accept. It's not even that I think, if all opportunities for design were undertaken by a competent designer, the world would somehow be a totalitarian, thoughtless place, because the world needs some measure of imperfection to sustain itself. It's simply recognizing the impossibility of a designer being available or deemed necessary for all the times people put text, images or both to paper and screens. In fact, the only way everything could be designed is if everyone were a designer. There's your insufferable world.

So is making sure the Comic Sans is not stretched kind of like flanking the enemy in a battle I am certain to lose? Is it even a winnable war, and if so, which war is it anyway? On good days it can seem like I'm in the Alamo, successfully buying time against Mexico, but other days it seems like I’m taking part in the Allied invasion of Italy, where no matter how brave I am I’m almost certain to die in vain. Sure, there will be plaques for me in Italian villages, but the popular imagination, in the future, will be with Normandy.