Of the requests that I get for design work the one that always gives me a smile coupled with a slight stomach gurgle is “it doesn’t have to be fancy”. I’m not sure if the requester ever knows exactly what that means. It shouldn’t have flowers growing out of it? No steel belted radial tires? No hot buttered rolls. No gluing of small woodland creatures to it?
I’m not a complete ass. I know the insinuation is that “nothing too fancy” means that it will only take me 5-10 minutes to create something, rather than the 5-10 days that “something fancy” would take. It’s hardly ever the case though. Often the less, lets call them design elements, that something has the more time that it takes to place them properly.
Picture a big empty room. Your task is to put a single wooden chair into the room so that it looks “good”. You could throw it in there without looking and be done with it. But, is it functional? Usable? Is it now just abstract artwork?
Does it matter? It only took you two minutes.
Now try placing that chair in the same room, but this time the room is already nicely arranged with furniture. You simply need to find the place that the chair would work. This should be a bit easier, maybe you need to move an element or two to get it just right.
Go back to that empty room and “simply”, and with all the time you need, put that chair in the proper place “nothing too fancy”. Guidelines are that it must be functional, aesthetically pleasing and the user experience in navigating to sit down flows naturally. Afterward, defend the choices that you made.
The heavy handed point that I’m trying to make is that “fancy” does not really enter into the design world and have any implication on time frame. It’s not likely that the creators of the Japanese flag said to come up with something “not fancy” so they could knock out that project. Milton Glaser most certainly didn’t come up with the I Love NY logo out of a desire to not be too fancy.
The ancient builders of Stonehenge more than likely were not fulfilling the non-too-fancy request either. “Let’s just pile one block on top of two and be done with it. Agreed?” Of course in this scenario the person requesting the project probably forgot to mention to the designers that the design needed to function as a calendar on which the whole races existence would depend for crop planting.
