I'm not wanted – apparently
Today I heard one of the strangest comments I’ve ever heard about what I do. I’m not sure if it was meant as a criticism of the quality of my work or the principle of what I do.
The comment came from ‘Yoshi’, out of the blue in the middle of a discussion on the recent London Olympic pictograms on the Creative Review blog. The comments was this:
“What the world doesn’t need is more of this…” followed by a link to my home page.
Strange that this conflicts with the view of most people I talk to. People are exceptionally enthusiastic to the principle of what I do because they can relate to it. Everyone has their own personal horror story of a set of instructions they couldn’t use or a map that got them lost.
Still, in ‘Yoshi’s’ defence, his generous donation of a link on a very prominent website has seen nearly 400% more visitors than on any other day in my website’s existence (and it’s a Sunday). So on the basis that most of the visitors will live in a world where they would like things a little simpler, this serves as evidence that ‘there’s no such thing as bad publicity’.
I’m one of the visitors who followed the link to your site from the CR blog. What he said doesn’t make any sense as surely if anything we need more of this. All the forms and instructions you have worked on are much much clearer than they were previously. I hope the next form I have to fill out has been designed by you!
Maybe he is more interested in ‘creative’ design so your work just wasn’t to his liking. Saying that, I think information design does require creativity – just a different kind.
Thanks for the feedback Pete
I assume, like me, you’ve never come across anyone who wants their life made more difficult?
I agree with you about the creativity needed for information design. I have to admit I sometimes refer to myself as ‘not doing creative stuff’ but that’s really as a point of differentiation from the crowd, particularly when talking to non-designers. The nature of the work I do has so many rules to make it effective that there is an obvious lack of what could be termed ‘visual creativity’ so the creativity comes in working round problems rather than just going with the obvious and easy to do solution.
If the next form or set of instructions wasn’t created by me feel free to submit them to http://www.makethissimple.com
Best wishes
Robert