Dear Designer… Love, Vignelli
I recently started reading The Vignelli Canon. And like a truly passionate Italian, Vignelli fills this short book with strict advice, principles and heartfelt laments for the designer. I’m halfway into the book and am compelled to share from his list of intangible design guidelines.
Pragmatics
Confused, complicated designs reveal an equally confused and complicated mind. We love complexities but hate complications!
During critique sessions in architecture school, I had a professor that would always say “if you need to explain your design extensively to me, you must go back and rework it — it’s not clear enough”. This concept of clarity and meaning is ingrained in the definition of good design.
Vignelli believes that your entire design output (whatever it may be) is useless if no one understands it. And rightly so. Design will always exist to serve a function, so if your work is incomprehensible to people, then it must be reviewed and reworked.
For Vignelli, Pragmatics in design means that there is both clarity of intent and clarity of result. He believes that how things look as finished products is a direct result of how much clarity the designer had during their creation process. And so he wisely recommends that designers “understand the starting point and all assumptions of any project to fully comprehend the final result and measure its efficiency.”
Discipline
Design without discipline is anarchy, an exercise of irresponsibility.
Vignelli has strong views on Discipline as a design guideline. For him, Discipline is the designers tool kit that facilitates consistency across process and output, and abominates fragmented implementation. It is the designer’s measure of and abidance to quality throughout their creative process.
We’ve already established that the final product of anything is the sum of all the details that went into creating it. This is also salient when thinking about Discipline because for Vignelli, if quality is lost at any stage in the design process, the output becomes low-quality and pointless.
This is quite a strict principle, but let’s think about it practically. Have you ever experienced a product that has several issues and just doesn’t seem to be as functional as you needed? Usually, products that don’t solve core user needs or flaunt seemingly unnecessary functions lack a proper implementation of research insights. Skipping all forms of user research when designing a product (no matter the time to deliver) is a low-quality decision. And according to Vignelli, that research-less product is an exercise of irresponsibility (he said it, not me).
Appropriateness
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.
The third intangible design guideline I want to highlight is Appropriateness. There are many ways to solve a problem, but there are only a few appropriate solutions.
Vignelli posits that adhering to Appropriateness helps designers filter out the wrong directions and approaches as they create. Appropriateness essentially answers the question “what works for this specific context?”. And then we can take steps in the right direction rather than force our design outputs to conform to our arbitrary whims.
For example, we choose typefaces and colours in alignment with the brand persona of the company we are designing for. Elegant typefaces are appropriate for luxury brands while a handwritten, scribbly typeface would shock the company’s customers and probably the company themselves when they see what you’ve designed. To this effect, Vignelli quips “Appropriateness elicits the enthusiastic approval of the client seeing the solution to his problem.”
Conclusively, this book is great… and I’m only halfway through. How easy is it to apply such principles to your daily design practices? I’m not sure yet, but not committing “design anarchy” is important to me, so I’ll be trying my best.
