As graphic designers, we frequently talk about the works that make us happy. Inevitably, we could generalise the works out there into two categories

First, the aesthethically driven, well crafted pieces that demand our attention and make us want to possess them. These are the works that we look at and say, “hmmm, nice!”.

For example (click on the photos to get to the source):

Then there’s this group of works which thrives on “ideas”, the sort of works that make us go “Wow. Nice idea.”

We like to say that Spin‘s works are “nice, nice”, and Johnsonbanks’ are “not as nice, but wow!”

From the recent furore over the lack of “D” in D&AD (also read D&AD and graphic design: what next?), it is easy to notice the division between the “ideas” camp and the “functionalists” people. The advertising folks are notoriously known as the ideas people. The obsession is typically with generating the big idea (otherwise clichedly know as good concept), before looking for art directors/designers to “visualise” the big idea. I suspect they would have easily brushed off Spin or Sea or Josef Muller Brockman as “all style and no idea”, but yet they would be equally comfortable with borrowing / plundering the “Why Not Associates style” to visualise their big idea (under the nice terminology called styling).

But graphic design is a different animal, and judging graphic design is a complicated affair.

Place a SEA designed book for GFSmith on the table with, for example, a “concept-driven” book done by Guy Robertson (online version here), they would generate different experience. The Guy Robertson book would perhaps make you think (and laugh), while the other would make you want to pick up the phone and order some paper. Or compare a witty Sagmeister poster together with Warren du Preez + Nick Thornton Jones projects. Maybe compare a Cahan(TM) idea-driven annual report with this. Is is possible to compare good ideas with sheer visual impacts?

How can one say an orange is better than an apple?

As much as I appreciate the importance of good ideas in communication works, I do think sometimes, a functionalist approach with a strong emphasis on visual strategies and graphic applications (for example, this) is more important. And I have to admit that it may be impossible to have a happy marriage between the two.

The point is, the designer should not be too obsessed about one and crucify the other.

As for how advertising sees graphic design, that is a totally different issue.

(For thoughts: Bob Gill (from Forget All the Rules about Graphic Design) famously declared that a good idea is so important that the designer should be able to describe it to a client over the phone, and the client should be able to get excited without even seeing any visuals. This is however from Robin Kinross, in his preface to Karel Martens‘ amazing Printed Matter – “The danger of idea-based design is that it produces simplistic one-concept pieces, which, once you have got the point, become merely irritating.