Explanation: Crutch or Catalyst?

Should a designer stick an explanation in the design itself?

I’ve done it at least four times: all four times on covers for books of fiction, and I wish I’d done it on at least two more. Once, I wrote a fake quote on the back cover. I intended it as a placeholder for a quote to come, but I didn’t want to drop in nonsense. So I wrote a brief myth about the illustration I’d done, in effect explaining the design to the client. Turns out they liked it so much they kept it, and of course in my heart of hearts, I craved this all along. Another time, I snuck in a poetic introduction on the rights page that set out the themes embodied on the cover. I did this because the client needed me to explain my cover, and so I thought his readers might appreciate an interpretive boost as well. Again, the client liked it and kept it. The other examples are more of the same. Sometimes the explanation is on the cover itself, that is, literally within the design, and sometimes it resides nearby, in a note or introduction.

Is this humbly helpful or artistically arrogant?

I think it’s artistically helpful, but whether it’s humble is debatable.

As a writer who designs, I am more comfortable receiving my complex messages in a words-and-symbols combo rather than just as symbols. It is what I’m used to. It is what I want. And so the more words there are helping me interpret a set of symbols, the happier I am. Incorporating an explanation into the design of a book cover, then, may operate as a means to reach an audience. (Ha! A marketing explanation for a design explanation. I love it. How much more self-serving can market theories be?) Design explanations might be dimly uncontroversial in this narrow case.

Explanations outside the design itself are commonplace. The existence of a monograph as inspiring as Martin Venezky’s It Is Beautiful...Then Gone depends on the premise that designers enjoy explanations of designs. Essays, interviews, confessions about the joys of experiment and process: it’s all there. And it’s all, more or less, explanation. The unresolved tension between design and explanation is one of the most interesting paradoxes embodied by design writing. How many times have you seen a magazine undergo a complete redesign and not explain itself?

Here’s some of my thinking about explanations within the design (I really should come up with an epithet for this. Organic explanations? Word droppings? Forget it). The controversy for me lies more in the gratuitous use of explanations or, perhaps, the uses that more explicitly relate to artistic interpretation—the relationships between symbols. Art, since at least the time of Duchamp, has depended on explanations external to the artwork for its meaning. Without explanations, a viewer can’t really appreciate the art, can’t locate the work in some kind of context, some kind of historical relationship. Without gallery guides, critical essays or art history classes, I would have little means to grasp the significance of the last 60 or so years of art. Without this foundation, I see only pretty colors or ugly dogs, washes of light or scraps of paper, same as I see when walking down the street.

The audience for design is unlikely to put in hours of reading and study in order to get the point of a book cover, website or package, which hard-earned understanding is then supposed to influence a consumer choice. Explanations within a design might add more to the design itself while responding to the right-here-right-now demands of its audience. Explanations are not new, not crazy, not unheard of. I feel I have to say this to preempt the designer’s instinctive objection that design is not art and that any design that needs an explanation has failed. My own sense is that explanations, in some figurative, poetic way, can free the designer to realize some more complicated, sophisticated, ambivalent, and probably more artistic means of expression. It might be that “explanation” is a misleading term suggesting some dry block of 7-point type in the lower right corner. I mean something more sophisticated than that. Perhaps poetry, myth, allegory, a quote, a joke, a subtitle, a panel series in a comic format, maybe something worked in like collage or a reference to another work, something that might even expand the meaning of the work rather than explain it. It should be more like a candle of suggestion rather than a hammer of finality.

I’m also suggesting that meaning can be severed from the object (book, movie, event, product) and nested in the design (cover, website, poster, packaging). With the book covers that incorporated my explanations, I was not trying to depend on the content of the books for meaning. I may have began there, but these were only starting points for inspiration. After that, I was bolstering the designs themselves as semi-stand-alone carriers of meaning. Whether or not I have succeeded does not detract from the worth of the intent; losing a race doesn’t make racing bad. If I wrote up an explanation of a design and the explanation was simplistic and dull, then I could be free of that design, toss it out with its lame explanation, and start again, designing toward a more interesting, vibrant explanation, embodying a more complicated story. This process of explaining serves as self-editing, but its utility can be transformed into a cousin of art by its expression within the design. Read the book, don’t read the book. The design still means something (if only to me, but isn’t that always doomed to be the case?).

This is, perhaps, what is most controversial: incorporating explanations into a design not to reach an audience, not to embody another’s message, but instead to assert an independence of meaning for the design itself. And is this at bottom a spiteful means by which I assert my independence? Am I declaring mutiny on the bounty of the client/designer relationship? Am I even describing design anymore?

Should a designer incorporate an explanation within the design itself? Is this humbly helpful or artistically arrogant?

Explain yourself.