In last class, we learned about serious and solemn. They are two different kinds of design. Serious designs are more playful. They don’t follow the traditional rules. They might be imperfect. And they always emit the sense of rebellion. Solemn designs are more about perfection. They usually follow the rules that have been set up by predecessors or rules that created by human behavior.
I learned that serious and solemn are related. Serious happens when you are not qualified for the job. So you would play around at the beginning. They called solemn designs “socially correct work.” They are what the right-minded designers and clients trying to achieve. Solemn might happens after you done the serious designs again and again, at the point you want to perfect your works.
But for me, I think I started as a solemn designer. I always did the formal things. I tended to follow what others already done before. Eventually, my works came out formally. Then I decided to be a serious designer. I try to seek for originality. I really want to create something new and even something against the rule.
In last class, I learned that Paula Sher is well known for her serious design. She played with work for the Public Theater. She didn’t like the Helvetica font and the formal format they used for the poster and related medias. So she decided to play with all the elements again. She used the fonts and created format in an untraditional way.
Paula Sher also said that something might be dead when it becomes popular. I totally agree with that. Especially in the design field, if we keep doing the same thing over and over, then there would be no point for hiring a designer. This field would be dead. But still, either serious nor solemn can’t be omitted. I think the best way is to understand the connection between serious and solemn and to find the balance between them.
