Not Safe
Design is not safe. Or at least it shouldn't be. I find myself taking the safe road with design all too often. Unfortunately, I've got a lot of company. I spent most of my morning looking through portfolios and websites of very well designed but very safe work. So little of the work done these days actually means something (especially my own). Why is this? Fear? Fear of failure; fear of not being accepted; fear of not living up to your expectations; fear of whatever. Restraints? Your restraints, your agency's, your client's, your budget, your time, your whatever restraints. Don't understand? Don't understand your project, your client or yourself.
I just finished reading C.S. Lewis' book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Aslan, the lion-king of Narnia, returns to reclaim his kingdom from the evil White Witch. The little girl in the story, Lucy, asks a friend, "Is Aslan safe?" to which the friend replies, "Safe? No, he's not safe…but he is good." This is how I think design should be, not safe but good. I don't mean "good" as in well designed, that goes without saying. I mean for the Good. As Christians in design we should be the ones who have the most freedom to take risks without fear. After all, we are free to be sinners, to mess up and still be accepted. Sadly, we don't. This turns our design work into something that tastes and looks like Crisco. Check out the Hillman Curtis video of New York poster designer James Victore>>. He understands the power of design as unsafe and good...little "g". How can we practice design as unsafe and Good? Your thoughts?
I just finished reading C.S. Lewis' book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Aslan, the lion-king of Narnia, returns to reclaim his kingdom from the evil White Witch. The little girl in the story, Lucy, asks a friend, "Is Aslan safe?" to which the friend replies, "Safe? No, he's not safe…but he is good." This is how I think design should be, not safe but good. I don't mean "good" as in well designed, that goes without saying. I mean for the Good. As Christians in design we should be the ones who have the most freedom to take risks without fear. After all, we are free to be sinners, to mess up and still be accepted. Sadly, we don't. This turns our design work into something that tastes and looks like Crisco. Check out the Hillman Curtis video of New York poster designer James Victore>>. He understands the power of design as unsafe and good...little "g". How can we practice design as unsafe and Good? Your thoughts?
posted by fivemcclungs at 12:59 PM
2 Comments:
This is interesting but I'd disagree with the reduction of the original idea to one of freedom and safeness - if we can call it that. Bland art is being done all the time by perfectly good designers in circumstances beyond their control.
If designwork is "safe" in an unsafe world these days so be it. It is economic survival. Yes, clients are relatively cautious - I don't care. Yes, agencies just want it done fast and cheap and who am I to stop that? If I want to work at all I just need an assignment to pay the mortgage and pay bills. If it's my best, in my opinion, or good work, well that's just gravy. But when work doesn't come thru for months, and the wife needs pain medication, I don't need someone telling me about safe design.
When was the last time you felt safe? 9/10/01? The rest of the planet seems to be going to hell on a handbasket as fast as it possibly can.
Radical design? The most radical thing one can do is practice a little faith, hope and charity: faith - that I'll find a way to make creativity work, hope - that a higher power is watching out for me, and charity - that I don't forget that there are people worse off than I am.
In the larger moral sense, our choice is often between good and safe, and what Lewis so rightly pointed out is that safe and good are not equivalently valuable.
The trouble with design, as opposed to Art or moral action, is that it's most often performed to meet a need. Develop a product to be user-friendly, make a manual beautiful and readable, structure information sensibly on a page. Good design fulfills and then transcends the need, via beauty or elegance or statement. But apart from a select few designers, we can't turn all our work into statements.
I think the scrappy elegance of Victore's work is so powerful because it's unsafe and, well, scrappily elegant. I don't agree with what he says through some of his work, but his work rises to level of saying something that can be argued about.
Contrast Victore with Kinkade. Arguably, both are technically skilled. But which one's work is more powerful in the mind?
We need more Christian Victores, desigining in the image of an unsafe yet good God.
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