(Ray)
(Fogra 29_WF)Job:08-28858 Title:RP-Writing & Research for Graphic Designers
#175 Dtp:225 Page:64
056-091_28858.indd 64 8/30/12 4:44 PM
(Ray)
(Fogra 29_WF)Job:08-28858 Title:RP-Writing & Research for Graphic Designers
#175 Dtp:225 Page:65
056-091_28858.indd 65 8/30/12 4:44 PM
Writing & research for graphic designers
(Text)
64
Everyone who cares about language has a list of personal offenses.
Among mine are irregardless for regardless, lay for lie, like for as, criteria
for criterion, less for fewer, plus words or phrases that are superfluous
because we already have adequate ways of saying the same thing.
Expertness, for example, was always a perfectly good expression.
Expertise adds nothing more but a suffix with pretentious roots.
At this point in time is no improvement on now, but sounds more
precise and scholarly; perhaps it originally entered the language as
a way of distinguishing time from space.
Between you and I makes me cringe, suspecting that the
speaker learned (or thought she learned) from a grade school
English teacher that I is right and me wrong, and has ever
since felt secure only by avoiding me whenever possible.
Rules are not really made to be broken; however, they are
designed to be breakable. Many of us have our favorite violations.
Steve Heller, the dean of design writers, refuses to stop using
irregardless, even though he knows there is no such word, “be-
cause I like the irrrrrr sound.” As for me, I happily give poetry a
pass. One of my favorite hymns is the so-called “white spiritual”
“I Wonder as I Wander,” with lyrics that ask plaintively:
Why did the Lord Jesus come down for to die
For poor orn’ry sinners like you and like I?
That doesn’t make me cringe, but it would if corrected. The
solecism, forced by rhyme, is beautiful there. Allegiance to
grammar would ruin it. So I have to remind myself not only
that rules can be broken, but that language, being alive, changes.
But while we know that language changes, we don’t always
know when it’s happening. An exception—a change
occurring before our very ears—is the tendency to use a
singular verb in a contraction, even when the noun is plural.
“There’s three preferred typefaces.” That’s not a genuine
quote, because I don’t know that anyone has said it. But if
someone had, it wouldn’t have bothered us much. On the other
hand, people have said: “There’s three reporters on every story”;
“There’s a great many things for Obama to consider”; “There’s
several problems with nuclear energy”; “There’s two bills on
the table”; “There’s a few ways of looking at this”; “There’s too
many things going on right now.”
That doesn’t trouble us either, and I guarantee you’ll hear
the locution today if you listen to the radio, watch TV, attend
a meeting, or talk to a neighbor. The speakers you will hear it
from are not illiterate. They would never say, “There is too many
things going on.” But verbs in those ungrammatical examples
are all contractions, making the breach of grammar acceptable.
Why? Maybe because, when speaking, it is easy to forget how a
sentence began. I think it more likely, though, that it represents
the present tendency to relax formal standards in language,
whether written or spoken.
Should any of this concern designers? At first it may not seem
so. But, after all, graphic designers devised standards manuals to
keep corporations from violating the structure created for them.
Long before that, usage manuals for writers were created for
CASE STUDY:
orn’ry usage
rALph CApLAn
Ralph Caplan is the author of By Design and Cracking the Whip.
(Originally published April 6, 2011 on AIGA Journal, www.aiga.org/ornry-usage/)
(Ray)
(Fogra 29_WF)Job:08-28858 Title:RP-Writing & Research for Graphic Designers
09-C67944 #175 Dtp:225 Page:64
056-091_C67944.indd 64 9/22/12 11:25 AM
section 2
surveying the diciplines
(Text)
65
occurring before our very ears—is the tendency to use a
singular verb in a contraction, even when the noun is plural.
“There’s three preferred typefaces.” That’s not a genuine
quote, because I don’t know that anyone has said it. But if
someone had, it wouldn’t have bothered us much. On the other
hand, people have said: “There’s three reporters on every story”;
“There’s a great many things for Obama to consider”; “There’s
several problems with nuclear energy”; “There’s two bills on
the table”; “There’s a few ways of looking at this”; “There’s too
many things going on right now.”
That doesn’t trouble us either, and I guarantee you’ll hear
the locution today if you listen to the radio, watch TV, attend
a meeting, or talk to a neighbor. The speakers you will hear it
from are not illiterate. They would never say, “There is too many
things going on.” But verbs in those ungrammatical examples
are all contractions, making the breach of grammar acceptable.
Why? Maybe because, when speaking, it is easy to forget how a
sentence began. I think it more likely, though, that it represents
the present tendency to relax formal standards in language,
whether written or spoken.
Should any of this concern designers? At first it may not seem
so. But, after all, graphic designers devised standards manuals to
keep corporations from violating the structure created for them.
Long before that, usage manuals for writers were created for
somewhat comparable reasons. Because language changes,
the manuals do too, becoming updated almost as soon as
they are printed, raising the question of why they should
be printed at all. (They may not be for much longer.)
The best-known and most popular contemporary usage
manual is The Elements of Style, E. B. White’s revision of
the textbook written by his college English professor
William Strunk. The book’s popularity stems from
White’s highly reasoned updating and his loving de-
scription of encounters with the book and author. I love
reading it, and when asked by students to recommend
a manual, I encourage them to buy Strunk and White’s
book in the 2007 edition enhanced by Maira Kalman’s
splendid, wayward art, because it is a book they will love
and should own. But I suggest that they use whatever
manual is used by the school they attend or the company
they work for, which is likely to be either the manual
of the University of Chicago or The New York Times,
and to turn to the Internet for anything more recent.
In a talk to SVA students recently, Michael Bierut
pointed out that design has moved from an exclusive
concern with the appearance of type on a page, to
participation in content. Certainly the design community
is richly loaded with designers whose writing matches
the standard of their graphics—Bierut himself, Milton
Glaser, Bill Drenttel, Paula Scher, Maira Kalman, Ellen
Lupton, Abbott Miller, Lorraine Wild, Brad Holland,
and many others.
While standards are less rigid than they once were,
even in an age of texting and tweeting they are still
essential to designers of communication. Because words
express content, certain principles of construction are
necessary to frame their delivery. At the very least we
need an armature to support ideas until they are stable
enough to make sense on their own. Even if it must in
the end be discarded. Like the goldsmith’s wax, rules
may not just be broken, but lost.
Otherwise we’re condemned to a world of poor orn’ry
sinners like you and like me.
Why do you feel it behooves a designer to develop good writing skills?
For the same reason it behooves anyone else to develop them: Life goes better
for those who can communicate clearly. But designers in particular need such
skills because so much of design is itself a form of communication. Also, design
today invariably involves collaboration. That means participation in meetings,
an activity in which persuasive clarity is almost as useful as obfuscation.
Who exemplifies this and why?
As my “Orn’ry Usage” piece points out, many graphic designers do. Two
I didn’t mention are Jessica Helfand and Deborah Sussman. Many product
designers do as well—Gianfranco Zaccai, and the late Bill Stumpf, for
example—and architects, partly because they are more likely to have been
educated traditionally. This is especially important because the design
process, for reasons I deplore, requires continual explanation.
Do you generally write for the ear or the eye?
Both. Most readers are equipped with both, and assimilate information through
whatever organs are available for the task. In his commencement address at
Stanford, Steve Jobs attributed much of his personal style to the calligraphy
and fonts he encountered in the only formal class he took at Reed College.
So he knew the importance of a sensitive eye. Poets like Dylan Thomas and
Theodore Roethke acknowledged the role of sound in their writing. So they
were aware of how much comes in by ear.
How useful is humor as a writing tool?
As a rule, if it is seen as a tool, humor is more dangerous than useful. The
weakest speakers are those who think a joke is always helpful as an instrument
for winning over an audience. Humor is generally effective when used by writ-
ers who are genuinely funny. Everyone who has successfully written humor-
ously, from Mark Twain to Nora Ephron, has been able to do so because humor
is intrinsic to their personalities and their work. Designers like Milton Glaser,
Paula Scher, and Maira Kalman are able to incorporate humor into what they
write and say because they don’t have to; it is naturally part of their content.
Tools are devices used for particular jobs. Humor is, or isn’t, part of who we are.
What traits should a design writer have that may be unique to the genre
of design writing?
I don’t think any are unique to design writing, but some are more important
in that field than in others. All writers should strive, as Henry James urged,
to “try to be one of those on whom nothing is lost,” but the admonition is
especially pertinent to writing about design. Noticing details is crucial. Design
writers need to be especially sensitive to how things are made and to how they
look, and to the relationship between the two.
Ralph Caplan Talks about Writing Skill
PART THREE : BUSINESS
(Ray)
(Fogra 29_WF)Job:08-28858 Title:RP-Writing & Research for Graphic Designers
09-C67944 #175 Dtp:225 Page:65
056-091_C67944.indd 65 9/22/12 11:25 AM
..................Content has been hidden....................
You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.