(image: https://www.superdream.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/mind-games1.jpg alt: mind games)
In the studio at Superdream, a copy of A Smile in the Mind by Beryl McAlhone and David Stuart sits on one of the art director’s desks.
If you don’t know it, it’s a compilation of especially smart, witty graphic design. The pleasure in such a piece of design or illustration – the ‘smile’ – comes in the solving of it. An expanded and updated edition been published this week by (link: http://uk.phaidon.com/store/design/a-smile-in-the-mind-revised-and-expanded-edition-9780714869353/ text: Phaidon).
This new edition adds to work by the likes of (link: http://www.designishistory.com/1960/herb-lubalin/ text: Herb Lubalin) and (link: http://www.alanfletcherarchive.com text: Alan Fletcher) to include designers and illustrators such as (link: http://dutchuncle.co.uk/noma-bar/ text: Noma Barr) and (link: http://www.christophniemann.com text: Cristoph Nieman).
A Smile in the Mind is a survey of clever thinking from over forty years of graphic design. Graphic design is, in a sense a purer form of advertising creative thinking and great practitioners of it are worthy of our attention. We can learn a great deal from them in terms of working with simplicity and how to communicate effectively. Wit is a great tool to engage and the best communicators working in design and advertising have long used humour in their work.
Of course, it isn’t the only way for a creative to solve a brief, but it’s often the most powerful solution. “Humour,” says Edward de Bono, “is by far the most significant behaviour of the human mind.”
Wit is about misdirection, where you take someone from a familiar pattern to a new and unexpected one. When you perceive the sudden change, your surprise is what triggers that “smile in the mind.” This is what de Bono calls an “insight switchover.”
Our brains are inherently lazy and endlessly seek to find shortcuts to solve problems and “insight switchovers” are so successful because they momentarily trick our brains into thinking one thing, before revealing the unexpected. And that’s the moment we smile or even laugh.
This twist in a visual (or in a headline) gives us, the audience, the sense of being in on a joke. It is even flattering to us that we’ve caught a hidden meaning or subtle change in direction.
It’s work like that that everyone remembers. Once you’ve seen the arrow in the (link: http://www.divinecaroline.com/entertainment/its-arrow-famous-logos-hidden-images text: Fedex logo), you never forget it or lose the pleasure you first experienced in discovering it. And what are we here for, as creatives, if it isn’t to come up with memorable work?
(image: https://www.superdream.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/fedex-logo-900×288.jpg alt: fedex-logo-900×288)