Sol LeWitt’s Principle A, and the design brief

“The idea becomes a machine that makes the art”.

When Sol LeWitt wrote these words in Artforum in 1967, as part of his Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, he was accused by many of being a lunatic. As evidence, here are his instructions, shown above, for placing the 8th point on a wall, in the work entitled “The location of 100 random specific points”, at the MASS MoCA show referred to in my previous post.

“The eighth point is located halfway between the two points where an arc with its center at the first point and with a radius equal to the distance between the first and the seventh points would cross a line from the upper right corner to a point halfway between the midpoint of the bottom side and the lower right corner.” Yikes!

These instructions are simple, unequivocal and predictive, much like a well-crafted design brief  .  .  .  right?

Well maybe not. Yet how many of us have worked with instructions from a traditional design brief that include elements like this: make it more contemporary, add copy supporting the following benefits, we have equity in the existing blue color, but we need to create a color-coding scheme for the line, the logo should not be made smaller, but can be simplified, and we should retain the serif typography, we must show a photo of the product, our consumer is  .  .  .  you get my point.

LeWitt’s Principle A, “The idea becomes a machine that makes the art” suggests that his instructions set in motion a process that creates a piece of his work. Much like the role of a traditional design brief. But in his writings LeWitt claims that the outcome of his work is merely the result the process that leads to it. And the work is rigidly dictated by this process, whatever the “appearance” of the outcome.

The fundamental difference, between Sol LeWitt’s work and ours in consumer product design is that we do care about “appearance”. No one wins awards, or retains new clients, or builds market share, for simply crafting a perfect brief. The outcome is the only thing that matters, not the process.

Perhaps the problem lies in the definition. And there is beginning to be a recognition that we may have to redefine the purpose of the traditional design brief.

Peter Phillips hints at one reason for this change. In the outline for a DMI seminar he has been running for some time called, “Creating the Perfect Design Brief”, he poses a fundamental question. Should a design brief really be a ‘creative brief’?

I would argue no, and will be talking more about this in my discussion of Sol LeWitt’s next principal.

The ABCDs of Sol LeWitt and the package design brief

We seem to be living in an age where strategy trumps craft, and in a world where, it is said in most of the current writings on brand design, the project brief drives the creative execution, where beauty is secondary to intent. If this is the case, Sol LeWitt has a lot to teach us.

One of his guiding principles for over 40 years was, “The idea becomes a machine that makes the art”.

Last week I was up in the Berkshires and saw a staggering installation of Sol LeWitt’s work at MASS MoCA called “A Wall Drawing Retrospective”. It will be on exhibit until 2033, yes . . . for the next 24 years!

The installation occupies nearly an acre of specially built interior walls that have been installed, per LeWitt’s own specifications, over three stories of a historic mill building situated at the heart of MASS MoCA’s campus. The 27,000-square-foot installation, completed after the artist’s death in 2007, took nearly six months of intensive drafting and painting by a team of some sixty-five artists and art students.

Each wall drawing begins as a set of instructions or simple diagram to be followed in executing the work. As the exhibition makes clear, these straightforward instructions yield an astonishing, and stunningly beautiful, variety of work that is at once simple and highly complex, rigorous and sensual.

It is clear from his lifetime of work, that LeWitt always had a plan. And that plan drove the design, creation, and final installation of his work. Very little was ever left to chance, even if much of the work has, at times, a stunning lyricism. This is the result of the plan, not his, or an artist that may have helped him render the piece, aesthetic judgement along the way.

Again his Principle A, first described by in 1967, is simple but revolutionary, “The idea becomes a machine that makes the art”. When I read the details of this first principal it became instantly clear that, well before package designers had institutionalized the use of the design brief to drive the creation of their work, LeWitt had already begun to use this as a life-long guiding principal for his work.

As an aside, also in the early 1970s, about the same time that LeWitt created some of his most influential early conceptual work based on his principles, Benoit Mandelbrot was first publishing his theories of fractal geometry. Fractal theory, the realization that things are made of infinitely small little bits all similar in shape, also creates a kind of visual lyricism based on a very specific mathematical plan. And without it, much of the modern magic of computer animation would not have been possible.

The Williams College Museum of Art had an exhibition earlier this year that supported the MASS MoCA installation. In the catalogue for this show, Erica DiBenedetto talks about the four guiding principles that supported his work, described as “The ABCDs of Sol LeWitt”.

I think LeWitt’s principals have a very direct application to the role of a package design brief in our current business climate, and will be discussing the application of these four principals in the next week or so.

References

DiBenedetto, Erica. 2008. The ABCDs of Sol LeWitt. Williamstown, MA. Williams College Museum of Art

More than meets the “human eye”

Can package design really be as simplistic and formulaic as this new research report from a team at the University of Miami business school suggests?

Saw a short article in the New York Times today on some package design research that they will release in December in The Journal of Marketing, and it got my attention.

This research indicated, based on a sample of 270 cracker and cookie packages, that rich full bodied food products put the image of the product in the lower or right portion of the front panels, and 66% of the time, ”light” products most often put the product in the upper left.

The fascinating thing about the article was the author’s suggestion of what the results could imply,

“These rules, which apparently spring from the way the human eye approaches an image, are not part of the conventional wisdom of marketing.”

I suggest that there is a whole lot more going on in the cookie category, and any other category, than this simple observation might imply about the nature of the human eye.

For one thing the cookie category is dominated by a small number of large companies. Nabisco has had 5-6 of the top ten cookie brands for more than a decade, and only three companies, Kraft, Kellogg, and Pepperidge Farm, account for around 70% of the branded, non private-label cookie sales. My hunch is that the design systems of these major companies may have much more influence on the overall look of the category than “the way the human eye approaches an image”.

But to be fair to the authors of the report, I will be interested in seeing more of the research when it is published. My suspicion is that there is more here than meets the human eye.

LED Spray Can

Some simple summer fun.

Paris-based designer Aïssa Logerot has created an LED spray can called HALO.

It is a fascinating visual play on a traditional form with modern technology allowing graffiti artists an entirely new medium. Shake the can it charges the light, wave the light it creates patterns and images in the air, record the patterns of light and it creates graffiti, or whatever.

Here is the Cool Hunting link also.

Venture Capital Design, or maybe Venture Design Capital

Bruce Nussbaum, in a businessweek.com article today, is calling it Venture Capital Design, I prefer Venture Design Capital. The investment of design capital, rather than financial capital into a venture deal.

Since the dawn of our industry in the 1940s and 1950s the business model has been pretty consistent and fairly straightforward. Package design firms waited patiently for the phone to ring. And when it did there was, on occasion, a client asking that we bring their idea to life with some design support. Simple.

The design firm created some great work, and the client was happy. If it was a good idea, the client lived happily ever after, and the designer went back to their desk to wait for the phone to ring. Again, simple.

But as the services that designers are providing, and that clients are asking for is being redefined, so is the business relationship, and for two very constructive and exciting reasons.

First, designers are increasingly being asked to provide both strategic services as well as their traditional design services. Or as Nussbaum calls this emerging combination of traditional design and strategic consulting, “the thinking and the doing”.

Secondly, clients are asking for more accountability from their designers. And just as ad agencies have experimented with performance based compensation for some time, package designers are also beginning to get, dare I say, creative with their compensation options. And one way they are doing this is to receive equity as part of their compensation plan.

We have done this for several years now. While we haven’t retired from any of these deals yet, I have found that there are benefits beyond just the obvious long-term potential of these financial arrangements. Our clients are truly our partners, in every sense of the word! The advice we give, and the response it receives can’t help but be different with these kinds of relationships.

And selfishly, as the owner of an independent design firm, this is a potential differentiator between us and the large, often global, design agency holding firms that we often compete against. I have the flexibility to accept this compensation model. Large design agency holding companies, often public companies with short-term quarterly financial goals to meet, may not.

I also recognize that this is not completely new. As a case history at the NC State University’s Center for Universal Design points out Smart did this years ago with OXO. They took a small advance and a 3% royalty for their work instead of a more traditional work-for-hire arrangement. And Yves Behar’s fuseproject incorporates this model openly on its web site in its description of 3 potential client business relationships; Strategic Engagements (traditional), Partnerships (entrepreneurial with equity), and Civic Works (pro bono).

This arrangement has been much more common, and for some time, in the product and furniture design world, less so in the brand design world. Its nice to see it getting some attention and I would encourage the growth of this business model. It truly makes partners of us all.

Much better than waiting for the phone to ring!

Pay the Artists, they are “brush ready”

Let’s be honest, times are tough for many in the design business right now, and we have all heard about the fiscal stimulus package going for shovel ready projects like roads and bridges, but The Atlantic Monthly has a cover story this month, called 15 Ways to Fix the World, with a better idea.

The seventh idea on the list is called Pay the Artists. Listen to the reasoning in the article written by Felix Salmon, its great,

“Arts spending is fantastic at creating employment: for every $30,000 or so spent on the arts, one more person gets a job, compared with about $1 million if you’re building a road or hospital.”

In fact the latest Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers have the median salary of graphic designers at $42,400. You could employ a lot of artists and designers for peanuts by Washington standards.

As I mention in my post on package design of the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration Federal Arts Project employed over 5,000 artists, and they did some amazing things while the government paid them between $23 and $35 a week. This doesn’t sound like a fortune, but I suspect the artists were glad to have it.

And here is a list of some of the artists supported by this program, Thomas Hart Benton, Francis Criss, Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, Dorothea Lange, Jan Matulka,  Jackson Pollack, Mark Rothko, Ben Shahn, and the list goes on.

I’m going to get in touch with the AIGA and see if we can start a movement to put artists and designers to work with Federal Funds. Stay tuned.

For more information on the WPA Federal Art Project look here, and here, and here.