Design Thought Leader

I believe that good design is good communication, finding the best way to communicate an idea or a concept. This allows designers to take a huge part in making change happen in the world. That’s some of the appeal that data visualization has for me—being able to show something, to tell a story that is hidden in raw data. … one must be as concerned about the data being shown as with the intention of telling its story. Sometimes, it takes a certain degree of aesthetics in order to draw the audience into your story. Other times, you need to keep away from aesthetic approaches for the best result.

Pedro Monteiro
Art Editor

Good design must become an essential value. Good design permeates society spontaneously, often anonymously and without paraphernalia. It becomes vital, essential for the society that uses it, whether in the form of a typeface or a chair.

When we refer to design as an added value, we are focussing solely on the aspect of profitability, ignoring its social value.

It is clear to see that we designers, and the institutions that represent us, have fallen into the trap of an unconscious use of the term ‘added value.’

What happens with design, with good design, is that it becomes what in medicine is the autonomic nervous system: in a nutshell, it operates without having any apparent consciousness, automatically, like the heart or the kidneys. And we only become aware of its existence when it suddenly goes missing. In the same way as we only realise how vital a kidney is when it fails, we only appreciate the importance of design when it doesn’t work, when, for instance, an airport has no direction signs, a chair is impossible to sit on or a book is illegible. If we take it for granted that a signposting system has to be infallible, a chair comfortable or a publication intelligible, then we cannot talk about design as an added value: we have to talk about it as a value in itself.

It may now be time for all of us to search for other ways of asserting our presence in a society that is already complex enough without having to assimilate still more ‘added values.’ Design will be essential, or it will not be.

Pere Alvaro
Co-Founder, Bis

Firstly, ‘Don’t mistake legibility for communication’. Type design shouldn’t be about striving for legibility; it’s about communicating a message, or an idea, or a feeling. I think I first came across this maxim on a piece of typography by Phil Baines in the late 1980s. It was true then and it’s still true now. It also goes hand in hand with, ‘We read best what we read most’. However, a great source of amazing advice can also be found in one little book by Brian Eno called A Year with Swollen Appendices. Apart from his ideas on Axis Thinking, which suddenly opens up any field of endeavour into an almost limitless expanse of possibilities, I really love the story he tells about encouraging his kids to draw (at least, I think it’s in this book). Well, my version of his story is that he opens up a huge tin of felt-tip pens that are in a rainbow of colours, offers them to his kids and says, ‘choose three’. I love this. In a world with so many choices and options presented to us, sometimes the best thing to do is to self-impose limitations.

Jon Forss
Designer, Non-Format

As a director, you make a thousand decisions a day. Mostly binary decisions, yes or no, this one or that one, the red one or the blue one, faster or slower. It’s the culmination of those decisions that define the tone of the film, and whether or not it moves people. The only way you become a better director is by watching the result of those decisions, and understanding how they worked—and if they didn’t work, how to make them better. And over the course of the past six years, as I’ve directed more features and commercials, I’ve become better at articulating exactly how I want the audience to feel.

Jason Reitman
Filmmaker