Ballet and mental design
I got my hands on three of the most famous Edward Tufte’s books—The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information and Visual Explanations— and reading them has been a great experience.
There’s this point I’d like to highlight in this post, but I’m sure I’ll be writing on his ideas again in the future.
On Envisioning Information, Tufte brings up an analogy concerning the design of rich data graphics and the view on dance of Russian ballet choreographer George Balanchine, quoting Lincoln Kirstein’s 1972 essay ‘Balanchine’s Fourth Dimension’:
A committed Balanchine dancer (with a small ‘d’) comes to realize that Personality (with an enormous ‘P’) is a bundle of haphazard characteristics frozen in a pleasing mask for immediate identification and negotiable prestige. No matter what is danced—and it makes little difference—stardom dims the dancing. What is danced is perforce secondary. There are two types of ballet companies: those interested in selling stars and those occupied in demonstrating and extending the dance, as such…
I had a great discussion weeks ago with a few designer friends about what we were calling ‘intellectualized’ or ’strict’ design, which is, more often than not, what is considered to be the discerning point between great designers and the average.
That notion that the one that chooses a font for typesetting anything because of the very history of the typographer’s life, or that emulates the visual structure of the work some important designer long dead simply because it is mentally considered to be what’s good among designers, in my opinion, comes very close to this concept of stardom in ballet.
Design is an industrial craft, rooted in aesthetic principles inherited from art, but geared towards production, consumption, objective communication.
The notion that the work that should be exalted is the one that uses visual resources that appeal only to a very strict and design-educated audience, mainly designers themselves, as opposed to the wide appeal that a user- or consumer-oriented approach might result in, at least for me, seems very wrong.
I believe pushing the boundaries of visual design forward is not about exploring personal taste and hermetic visual concepts: it’s about managing to achieve the practical goals for which the designer was called upon with the greatest rate of success possible.
This is thought in progress, and most probably will come up again soon.
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