002: Be Obscure Clearly

If simple is beautiful, does that mean complexity is bad? What about complex works of art? As E. B. White once said: “Be obscure clearly.” Don’t let your medium get in the way of your ideas. You’ve got big, complex ideas… great! Just don’t let those ideas go unnoticed by fumbling the presentation. The more complex the idea, the greater the need for clarity in your design and the communication of those ideas.

Practical: More discussion about logo design. Using unique fonts in your text-based logos and making a logo memorable by creating symbols. Creating unique symbols out of commonplace symbols with Photoshop’s path operators.

Peripheral: Get Museo, a beautiful, free slab-serif font. Check out SymbolAssist, a handy unicode character map, add it as a popup to your browser’s toolbar, or read my blog article about it.

Tomorrow: Abstract vs. Concrete. Which is right for your design?

  • posted on 30 September 2008
  • by Jesse

InterAction:

1 October 20081. Jeremy Killian:

This is a great, great point regarding simplicity. I have found, in my meager design experience, that simplicity is much more difficult to pull off powerfully than flashy complexity. I think that you as a designer have really mastered this concept.

4 October 20082. Michael Ames:

As you wrapped up your episode you mentioned that logo design is abstract and dependent on a clients needs and desires. I wonder if you could distill your personal process of "gleaning your clients desires" into a six minute episode. It wouldn't be a design based episode...but I'd be interested to hear the way you would pull that information out of a client, especially a client who doesn't seem to bring much to the table in the way of seed thought ideas.

4 October 20083. Jesse Gardner:

Yeah, in fact it's hard to do anything exhaustively in six minutes. I spent much more time in ep.5 illustrating how I'd decide which path is best. Also, since all next week I'll be designing a real live logo, I'll definitely be addressing the question then. But very good point, thanks for watching!

YourThoughts?