Oct 3rd, 2018

Nhi Vuong

Reflection 3

A book designer Chip Kidd has a funny talk about his experiences in using the techniques in his career. The talk was about how he use clarity and mystery to catch an audience’s attention. He shared some examples of other designer and also his own designs. Besides that, he talked about his thinking of what’s clarity, what’s mystery, when to use clarity and mystery.

So, what’s clarity? Clarity is making clear of something. It’s blunt. And when you should be clear? He showed a design of an instruction on an airplane as an example. It has to be clear so you understand what to do when it is in an emergency situation.  Another example he showed is a meter with countdown second for the pedestrian. In a busy city like New York, this is very helpful. People always in a hurry. The sign help to calm them down and express the time so they know when to run. Clarity can be used in case you want your audience to understand and get to the point things express.

Then, what’s mystery? Mystery is something difficult to understand, more complicated. It’s blurry.“Mystery demand to be decoded”. The next question will be when to use it? An example was a code in World War II. When it is a secret, things that you want to hide away from others. Another example that I impressed is a book cover he designed for  David Sedaris. It is hilarious of how he used the fortune message as a design to a book. He thought they are similar because the message doesn’t mean anything but it is very mysterious and seems to be very deep. The cover of the book is just a message without an image of a cookie, but you still see it as a fortune message because you are similar to it. This is an example of visual vernacular. Visual vernacular is “the way we use to seeing certain thing apply to something else to see it in a different way”. When you use visual vernacular you give your design a mysterious look but a clear message. A useful mysterious can help you catch your audience attention and curious at the same time, make them want to see more.