Good visual design is about communicating a message
The fundamentals of design, and lint traps.
Let me start by admitting that I am a recovering germaphobe. I was washing my hands religiously long before COVID. I never wear shoes in the house. I vacuum daily. I mop twice a week. I bleach my bathroom regularly. After washing dishes I put my pans on the stove at high heat to kill lingering bacteria. One of the things I miss the most about Japan is that nearly every apartment comes equipped with its own laundry machine, which means I never have to worry about finding someone’s hair in my washed laundry.
Unfortunately I now live in a crowded apartment building where I share 2 laundry machines and 2 dryers with many people. It’s a germaphobe’s nightmare. You could imagine my horror when after finishing a washing cycle I opened the dryer door and checked the lint trap to reveal what appeared to be several years worth of fuzz, hair, and lint.
Not only is this unsanitary, it is also a safety hazard.
“Why isn’t there some sort of PSA poster asking people to empty their lint trap” I wondered.
It turns out, there was. A long plain text message all in bold, asking people to empty their lint traps and be mindful of leaving their clothes in the dryer. A sound message indeed, but it seemed to have been lost on the good residents of my apartment building.
Product Designers like to think of themselves as good problem solvers. We put that as the subheading on our portfolios under our names. I fired up Illustrator to see if I could apply some visual design principles in solving this problem.
Now, it took me about 2 minutes to design this poster. It took me more time than that to hook up the printer. However it follows several principles of visual design and psychology:
- Visual Hierarchy. This isn’t fluff. Good Visual Hierarchy allows important important information to be read and maintained at a quick glance in the desired order of importance.
- Appeal to emotion. This can be considered a logical fallacy, but only when it’s not backed up by facts. I provided statistics and a source. Emptying a lint trip to “be courteous” is good and all, but emptying it to prevent the destruction of innocent lives and most importantly one’s stuff? Priceless.
Is my poster design ready for a critique from the design elite? Aw hell no. It’s hardly what can be considered “portfolio ready”.
Sometimes “ugly” sites service their purpose well. Craigslist has remained unchanged for over a decade because of their lack of monetization yes, but also because their site works for the purposes it was intended.
I hung up my poster and waited a week. The next time I went down to the laundry I wasn’t greeted with notes scrutinizing the stroke width on my icons, how the ligature of the font I chose is passe’, or how the color palette doesn’t evoke the right unconscious feelings in the intended audience. We didn’t hold some impromptu design contest over who could create the best poster and we didn’t hold a nightmarish design-by-committee meeting where everyone was invited to give their own conflicting opinions on font choices and making logos bigger.
What I got was an empty lint trap.
On my first day in Research Methods 301, I was told we as psychologists can study behavior, we can predict behavior, and we can control behavior. If controlling, or influencing behavior is the desired effect, it’s important to have a clear message in one’s designs. Under that criteria this design serves its purpose well.
Of course I’m not saying that aesthetics don’t matter. The stakes of a multi-billion dollar brand’s image are much higher than me having a dirty lint trap. But I don’t believe that designers should get so caught up in the minutia that they miss the bigger picture:
What message are you trying to communicate?
I’d get off my soapbox now, but it makes me feel taller.
