Being ‘Interesting’ Without Being ‘Good’

It cannot be overstated just how much a well-trained designer is ingrained with the concept of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ design. From the very first day of class you are coached through critical-thinking routines and tense critiques, all with the intended end result of developing a new generation of designers with good taste.

What is often ignored, however, is the fact that in a lot of cases, it’s a terribly ‘bad’ design that makes waves. Shakes up the status quo. Makes one stop and take notice. In fact, in many industries, a ‘good’ design will be the one that you don’t notice; all a passing observer takes in is what needs to be communicated, without needing to even take stock of how it’s being done. Subtle, effective and efficient. Like a ninja.

A ‘bad’ design will make a passing observer stop. They may tilt their head toward their companion and snicker about how badly the colors were chosen. They may smirk condescendingly, knowing with grim satisfaction that they knew better than THIS, and that if they were in charge they would have done things differently. They take a photo and send it to their friends, knowing that, like a Chuck Norris joke, it will be funny because it’s so terrible.

This response is, perhaps, the correct one. Design that goes against our aesthetic sensibilities should be noted; we’re actually genetically wired that way, to take note of something that seems out of the ordinary, disconcerting or strange.

Reactions vary by taste-level, as well, if there can be said to exist such a thing. Many people will walk right by a restaurant sign emblazoned with Papyrus lettering or awkward kerning, while a designer will immediately inwardly (if not outwardly) cringe and hope for a better tomorrow.

There is a science behind design in which designers are the slouchy figures in white lab coats and horn-rimmed glasses…grid structures and alignments and knowing how much leading to use for a particular typeface in a particular size and a particular line width in a particular medium. ‘Good’ designers generally make things look more appealing to a large audience, even if not absolutely everyone. They know how to make things pop, what colors represent what in which cultures and how most people will react when presented with a certain arrangement of shapes and colors.

All the same, even with advanced design sense, ‘bad,’ or ‘cheesy’ design should not be totally overlooked, mostly because of its ability to stun and offend. David Carson, for example, was a very famous designer, largely because he did everything wrong. He would always say that his designs were so interesting because he had no idea what he was doing…didn’t know the rules, so had no idea he was breaking them. He laid out an entire Rolling Stone article in Wingdings (a typeface that represents letters in playful symbols instead of Arabic characters), rendering it illegible, and another time took a chunk of a magazine article and slapped it on the cover. Why not? At the time it was fresh, interesting and horribly, horribly wrong. Now it’s normal, as are most of the horribly wrong things Carson did in his time.

The point is that, though we as designers know what we SHOULD do, constantly adhering to these rules may be stifling our innate creative abilities and leaving us open to stagnation. Part of our responsibility is not only to communicate clearly, but also to communicate in as many different ways and on as many different levels as possible, and in order to do this we will need to continually develop new and interesting ways to catch and hold the viewers’ attention.

So break a rule today. Break two. Try something ridiculously bad and against all of your aesthetic standards. You may end up with something hilariously useless, or you may end up with something totally unexpected and groundbreaking.