You know that book in which the only place where the word anomaly appears is the index, on page 362? It reads: anomaly, 362.
My blog entry for this week, “Hare today…”, is on my agent’s blog, Crowe’s Nest. If you came here from there, please look around. If not, you can get there from here.
For every created piece—whether it’s for visual arts, musical, written, or multimedia—
form is an essential consideration. Form does indeed, or should, follow function. Function determines the shape of things. Just look around: a phone’s length is determined by the distance from ear to mouth; the passenger jet has its birdlike design because that is what’s been proven best for horizontal flight; and looking down from those technological birds, we see that most cities are riverside or lakeside, established when the need for access to drinking water and water transport were primary. Carry this approach into the creation of art and the solution to the need becomes natural, a naturalness that is readily accepted by all who see it or experience it. It also becomes unique, and that uniqueness has an attractive quality that validates it.
Milton Glaser’s I ♥ NY, for example. Here is an internationally recognized icon that I would bet has been accepted by the high percentage of those who have seen it without a thought that one genius of a graphic designer conceived and produced it. Witness its horrendous adaptation over the decades, no thanks to the multitudes of copyright violators who have obviously not given it a first, much less second, thought. (The most recent version of this kind of rip-off is the LensCrafters ads, in which the eye—“I”—of a happily bespectacled person is followed by “♥ LC”. You can see the ads in Time magazine.) This multiple adaptation only proves how unquestionably unique and natural Glaser’s solution was. He achieved this purity by paring down a project—that of promoting a city in need of a better image—to playful, austere essentials. Like New York itself, it hits you. It’s immediate. No reams of hype.
Another example: Moby Dick, the book. A BIG book, exhaustive. With big words, like the 20-letter long, uninterpenetratingly. A big book for a big subject. A leviathan of a book. That was not accidental on Melville’s part.
You can apply this principle to anything created, as I said in the beginning: whether music or drama, film, sculpture, architecture, painting, graphic design.
Without belaboring the point, here’s one more example, one of my own. When asked by a local self-employed house painter to design a new business card for him, I cleared my head of all I knew about the ubiquitous “business card”, and got down to the essence of the matter. It came to this: aesthetic choice. Each customer selects a color, a selection that suits the individual’s tastes and the needs of the habitation. Hence, the essential paint swatch. Hence, a business card posing as a paint swatch.
As you create what it is you’re after, allow the subject to dictate a natural solution.
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The card is scored to be folded in half to the common busness card size of 2×3.5,
an option that the client requested.