Graphic Design Theory by Helen Armstrong

Author:Helen Armstrong
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC
Published: 2012-03-11T16:00:00+00:00

The Dark in the Middle of the Stairs

PAULA SCHER | 1989

One morning, my snotty twenty-two-year-old assistant danced into the studio and informed me that he went to the opening of some graphic design competition and I only had one piece in the show.

“Was it a good show?” I asked. “Yeah, it was okay,” he said. “There was a lot of work from a guy in Iowa who sort of looks like Duffy Design.”

I harrumphed and muttered, “Too much style and no substance.”

I’ve been muttering “too much style and no substance” frequently for the past several years. I love muttering it and I hear all kinds of people I respect and admire mutter it. Our great designer “institutions” mutter it a lot. I’ve noticed that it’s usually muttered in relation to designers who are younger than the mutterer. “Too much style and no substance” is often coupled with “a flash in the pan” as a way of describing hot young designers who get more than one piece in a design show.

What a wonderful way to demean youth! “Too much style” helps us conceal that nagging inkling we have that our own work may be out of style, and “no substance” convinces us that our potentially dated work is somehow more meaningful, rendering style irrelevant. Sometimes, it is even true.

But what all this muttering denies is the great excitement in finding and creating style, that thrill in putting the pieces together in a way that looks new and fresh, if not to the design community at large, then at least to ourselves. These are the kind of discoveries we generally make early in our careers, when each design is a new experience for us, when problem solving seems more experimental, and some of our solutions may be true breakthroughs. This is when we are building and expanding the graphic vocabulary that will probably serve us the rest of our careers; when we are establishing our rules and parameters, and breaking them, and reestablishing them.

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