Departika, a graphic and web design studio

Art and Design

Fail-Proof Design Process

I have been noticing a pattern in my designs—not the kind that I use as a design element, but a pattern in my design process. When I start a design, I have all these ideas swarming around my head, I start sketching, then quickly get to the point where I want to start implementing. Hours go by, I continue to dump all the stuff from my head into the design. Frustration sets in—because my brilliant image isn’t quite working out in real life. Years ago I started using this trick to bring me out of my design hole—it always seems to work. When I hit the point of frustration, I’ve learned that if I bring it back to the very basics of design, all of a sudden, everything comes together and I have a successful image to show from it. What I mean by the basics is, using those elements and principles of design that I learned in my very first art classes—balance, unity, alignment, repetition, contrast and white space. I repeat something which results in texture/pattern, or create contrast by making one of my elements HUGE.

I know what to do when my design is in trouble, now what I wonder is, why do I keep going through the same process of hitting the point of frustration before I decide to take a step back and apply my fail-proof approach? Apparently I have the unconscious need to apply one of the principles (repetition) to myself in order to consciously apply them to my work.

My latest in the recurring episode of the Katie Design Process took place a couple of weeks ago when preparing our gallery wall for the Friday Night Artwalk. I was milling around the office one day and realized how many dead electronics we had sitting around: an ipod, coffee maker, keyboard, monitor, record player, mouse, phones, CDs… useless, but somewhat hard to throw away. I thought it would be great to paint all of these dead things and display them in some interesting way as our electronic graveyard. The idea evolved as the other Departikans chimed in with ideas of putting name plates to the “art” telling how each item died—example: iphone, death by drowning (Corey went swimming with his iphone and was never able to resuscitate.) This was brilliant! Then we were able to get a hold of a bunch of old dusty macintosh computers to add to it—this was going to be cool.

We got all of this stuff into the gallery area and started to arrange this motley crew. Hours passed. It started to look like Bob’s Discount Computer Dump instead of an artful electronic graveyard. After feeling really horrible about the mess I had created, we decided to stare at the wall for many silent minutes… then we decided to simplify. We had spray painted a bunch of old cassette tapes and started hanging them on the wall side by side in a straight line with all of the tape pulled out hanging in a pile below. This looked great, but the rest of the stuff had no order and looked repulsive. Although it was very difficult to let go of the original, seemingly cool idea of the graveyard, and the hours of work which went into bringing it all together, I just knew we had to remove it all and continue to hang the tapes. There they were, the basic principles of design screaming at me. The tapes created this lovely repetitive pattern, the rest of the wall was empty, creating nice white space. What was even better was that we got to tie a piece of our original idea back into the newly ordered design. We placed a name plate above each tape, stating the name of the tape, band name, and the date of death—when that particular album was released onto CD.

Surely designers’ methods vary greatly. Hopefully, few struggle through the same retarded design process that I do. My story about the gallery wall is just one example of how applying the basic principles of design can pull you out of a design rut. If you Remember to include these fundamental ideas in your process—the results will most likely be successful.