About.

Design should be a joy to behold.

You’re a ____- based ____ focused on ____ , ____ , and filling in the blank.

I design things, many different kinds of things: things you can see and even things you can hear.

I have been doing this long enough that I can choose what I work on, and so I do: they have to be projects that are interesting and do no harm, and ideally aim to improve lives or make the world better.

If you want to teach people to prompt Chat-GPT, get rich by selling other people things they don’t need, or have written a vampire romance novel, then I am not for you.

If, however, you want to change lives, improve society, or would be happy if you managed to change just one person’s perspective, then I would love to help make the message and the design of your project as impactful as your intention.

In the beginning...

My journey into design began when I was taken under the wing of the marketing director of a large company near where I lived. I was fourteen years old. A world of brand messaging, the strategies behind ads, visual design, the personality of products, customer profiles, and the slightly disturbing usage of psychological understanding, all exploded, becoming a lifelong fascination. Design seemed integral to marketing, and my marketing mentor was also a graphic designer, so I developed a fascination for both.

For me, marketing is not the act of persuading someone to do something they will later regret - that's nothing more than selfish sales tactics. Marketing is about using clarity and honesty to communicate, to help potential users determine whether or not something is a good fit for their needs. It's about finding people who are already looking for what you offer (even if they don't know it yet), who already believe what you believe (even if they haven't realised it yet), and then showing up. It's about making change happen in the world.

Design is...

style & Purpose

In the late 1970's, the famous designer, Dieter Rams, defined design as follows:

"Good design is innovative, it makes a product useful, it makes a product understandable, it is aesthetic, unobtrusive, honest, long-lasting, it is thorough down to the last detail, it is environmentally-friendly. And, good design is as little design as possible."

Graphic and typographic design, page layout, formatting, all of these need to be visually cohesive in a brand's assets, in a book, or in a document, but they also need to serve a purpose, in fact they need to serve more than one purpose.

Great book design, for example, turns a bound stack of papers covered in text and images, into an object people want to pick up and look at, into something that is a joy to behold. Great design also brings visual structure and order to information and reduces the effort required by users to understand the message you are presenting, whether it's in a single graphic or a complex document.

structure & SImplicity

In a novel, structure is usually built into the story itself. The story will likely be broken down into chapters and there may, sometimes, even be a single level of headings within those chapters.

However, some books, company documents, reports, brand messaging, etc., need to present a lot of information in order to make their case. And, since that information is likely not part of a single narrative story, conveying it can become very complex. When looking at one particular piece of information, or brand messaging, to understand it the user may need to know what larger subject it relates to, and there may be many larger subjects connected to that single piece of information.

Heirachical structure, themes, motifs, styles within styles, even text headings, are all tools that can be used to achieve this kind of division and connection of information.

When you are in the middle of reading a complex document filled with information, or one full of new concepts and ideas, it can become difficult to see the wood for the trees, and without an overall understanding of the material, the details will become a jumble in your mind. A document can run the risk of failing to inform due to poor presentation, and I don't mean the writing. The details within the writing need visual structure, and that structure needs to be clear and easy to discern. This is true, not just for documents, but for everything that aims to communicate something.

To take the tree analogy further: this twig belongs to this branch, which comes from this larger branch, which belongs to the trunk of this tree, which is a member of this forest, which grows on this continent. When you are deep in the forest focusing on a single twig, you need the context of that twig to be obvious, not difficult to discern.

I have worked on orgnaizational brand designs, documents, and books, that were multi-layered, divided into sections, those sections divided into smaller sections, and then each of those had within them seven or eight levels of structure. An information hierarchy like that is a real challenge to make visually obvious to a user or a reader, but it is essential. If this is not done well, even the best writing, messaging, or products, in the world may still fail to impact the minds of their audience. This is because people can become visually disorientated by graphical and typographical design that has failed to portray connections and separations of complex information and messaging.

If you want to reach people, to connect with their minds, maybe even to help them grow and change, and the information you need to convey is complex, then your designer needs to take extra care to create a visual structure for that information, one that embodies simplicity.

making a positive difference

Design shapes the mediums through which human beings share understanding, wisdom, and inspiration, through which they can evoke emotions, realizations, and even awakenings of purpose. Companies, organizations, or individuals, who seek to achieve those things are touched by a spirit of inspiration, fuelled by a mission. They are imbued with deep meaning and purpose, they speak to people in ways that go far beyond words. Those are the projects to which designers must bring the greatest care and creativity. Those are the projects that can make a positive difference in the world.

Design can change people. Design can make life better.
Use design to help make a difference.

©2023 Oliver Nash