Hiding Behind Design

The Send button in my email program gawks at me as I type a few lines worth of comments to a client. Attached to the document is a PDF proof containing artwork that is sandpapered and wrenched to perfection – each vector carefully chiseled and every pixel neatly aligned and cleverly related to their digital neighbors. The type faces sing their settled song from their perch on the page as the taut layout elements poise themselves to bounce the onlooker’s eye around like a pinball.

Several hours have elapsed, several sketchbook pages covered with scratchy marks, several Bezier handles nudged this way and that, and I feel the burn of the button in the upper left corner of my screen as it dares me to click it. A digital piece of my soul now hurtles through an ethereal and intangible network of who-knows-what, weaving its way to the inbox of the client.

This person on the receiving end will perform a couple of quick tasks including a double-click of the mouse, a sip of cold coffee, and a glance at the minute hand of a clock as she waits for her PDF reader to render the digital data into something viewable.

What happens in the next twelve seconds or so will become the fulcrum on which the rest of my week hangs. The judgments assessed in this brief span will either move the project forward into revisions and then production, or it will send it spiraling down the toilet and relegate me back to the empty canvas.

There is a strange and often disconcerting disconnect between the quantities of time, energy, and emotion poured into the creation of a conceptual design and the brevity during which it either destined to become a product on a printed page or a wad in a receptacle. The question to which I am yet to find a satisfactory answer is this: How does the graphic artist pour fitting emotion, thought, and passion into the commissioned design, and yet remain sufficiently detached from the conceptual product to be unaffected by its acceptance or rejection.

Our work exists in the space between art and product, and it is a bit tense in the gap. To design from a posture of detachment can only yield mechanical emptiness, but creating from a stance of passionate, soul-searching inspiration can produce a temporarily immobilized designer (in the case of a harsh rejection).

I have clicked the dreaded button, and I tap a nervous beat on the arms of my chair as I consider all that is about to transpire. Hiding behind my design you will find a slice of me. Somehow weaving their way into each graphic decision are all of the tough phone calls I have fielded this past week, all of the joy of last weekend’s events, all of the agony of suffering loved ones, all of the stress that comes with owning a business… Look closely at the PDF – it’s all in there.

The hash marks are collecting as the years go by and the portfolio becomes overstuffed with hundreds of samples. Though my ability to handle this is not perfected by any means, I am working hard to dial in on breathing life into my designs from the depths of my soul, and then completely cut them loose, entrusting them into the eye of the commissioner. There is something therapeutic about this process; the lesson that is ours for the taking is that even our most grand and carefully crafted output should be viewed as humble and small. No matter how talented we are (or think we are), we must ultimately view ourselves as servants of others and find comfort in knowing that our tiny sector of the world will be touched by our humility.

Accepted or rejected? We’ll see…