Overdesign and Missing the Point

I think two of the client's general misconceptions are (1) that audiences are generally stupid and (2) that audiences care about the subject of the design as much as the people who commissioned it. As far as #1 goes, there's a tendency to want to beat the audience over the head with a message to be absolutely, positively sure that there's no conceivable way that they might not get it...That's what I thought of when watching the stop sign clip, which designers at my job circulated with glee. The value of subtlety or of something evocative is totally underestimated, and along with that is lost the value of a simple message that is communicated one way at a time, rather than 6 ways at a time. I wonder if today's emphasis on political correctness might be partly to blame: trying to appeal to all people equally at all times and overthinking the project as a result. What we (the public) end up with is garbled messages. What we (designers) end up with is a whole committee of clients for one simple job...personally I always wonder why they bother to pay us to do something that they clearly think they can do better themselves.

As far as #2, working in a university, we often have to design, say...posters for esoteric academic conferences on stuff like string theory or the impact of the spur on the course of modern warfare. I'm always amazed how much information clients want to jam on there: The title of the event, the people presenting papers, the titles of the papers, the people's affiliations, the blurb describing the history of the conference and logos for all of the universities that have ever participated, the photo of this and the illustration of that, etc. To the client, these bits of information are interesting. To the average passer-by, they're a deterrent: When you have 8 logos and blocks of 6-point type, no one's going to stop and read.

I'm realizing now that this post has the potential to become twelve paragraphs of Designer Gripe, but the point is that overdesign is not just poor design, nor is it all the fault of Bad Marketing Man and his management-speak. It's a combination of the information-saturation internet age and of a general misunderstanding of how a message is effectively and pleasingly conveyed. At least Marketing Man has given that some thought, as annoying as his catch-phrases may be. My bigger concern is how to open the dialogue with clients on this subject.