Design

Two of the readings on design really stood out to me, but for very different reasons. The first is Michael Rock's "Can Design be Socially Responsible?" He writes, "Perhaps the most significant environmental impact designers could instigate would be convincing their clients not to produce half the useless printed materials they are being commissioned to create" (192). In my publishing class (English 254) we have briefly touched on "green" publishing, and it occurred to me how much paper is printed, thrown away, and forgotten about. Think about the pages upon pages of proofs used in proofreading. During my internship, all three of the interns and our two supervisors each printed our own version of the proof we worked on. That's an entire magazine printed five times--and that was just one run-through of many! But this doesn't seem to be the burden of the designer, in my opinion--it is the burden of those that access the documents. If the magazine I interned for can be considered the designer, than yes, they were socially responsible for that waste--but what about the hundreds of other people that will read the magazine and make photo copies? It is the social responsibility of all people (both makers and users) of a document, in my opinion.

I also enjoyed reading Schriver's "What is Document Design?" While reading this essay, I was reminded how much I despise trying to navigate owner's manuals and instructions. Though these are not the only kinds of documents that he was discussing, I believe they are the kinds that provide the most strife to users. Whenever I have tried to assemble something on my own, I have never found the instruction manual helpful. The text may be concise but it is often meaningless without photos--and the photos are often black and white illustrated diagrams where actual photos of each step would be helpful. Going back to social responsibility, black and white diagrams are more cost efficient and require less energy and less harmful non-green supplies (like colored inks)--but if a user cannot navigate the meaning of such illustrations, does a good mark on the social responsibility factor really eclipse bad design?

It has certainly been the case for me that a combination of words and graphics is the most useful in an instruction-based document, but again, despite having both components, many documents such as these are simply useless to a vast majority of people. As a rule, I avoid any do-it-yourself type projects where assembly is required because I hate wrestling with documents that have been poorly designed. I never realized it was necessarily the design at fault, but I now see that issues like these can be largely blamed on design.