OUGD403 - Vignellis Canon - Book

 After the lecture, Vignellis opinion really inspired me to read into his book Vignellis Canon. In his book he talks about before starting a graphic brief on a company, you must first look at the semantics or in other words the background of the company. His book states that without this prior research to a brief your work will become shallow, empty and without any meaning or concept behind it. Personally, what I have taken from Vignellis Canon is that you cannot just throw lines or shapes in your work for no reason and that as a graphic designer it is my job to question my own work and question why i have done what i have done. Why i have decided to place text to the right instead of the left or why a certain shape is the size that it is. As a young designer, Vignelli tells me to look at every aspect of the present, past and environment of a company in order to have a concept and some expression behind my work.
Vignelli also talks about syntactics and how the components my work must have a relationship with each other. Every piece of text, heading, image, illustrations and overall structure of my work must work in harmony and he explains that some essential tools for any graphic designer are to use grids, margins, columns and modules to keep consistency in my work.
Vignelli then goes on to pragmatics and he explains that even if our work has concept behind it and it works as an image harmoniously together, it is useless if no one else can understand what you are trying to portray. This has really made me understand the importance of working collaboratively with other designers and criticizing each others work. I will now always ask for other another designers opinion on my work and see if they can easily see the exact message which i am trying to portray. There is no point of me publishing, what i think to be, a brilliantly clever piece of art if my audience cannot see what i see and cannot understand the purpose of it.
The book also explains about discipline and basically tells me to be a perfectionist with my work as every singe detail matters. This is reassuring to hear as i have quite bad OCD with my work and must have every single small detail perfect already.
His chapter on Appropriateness was quite straight forward as it explained that everything that you do in a brief must be appropriate to the subject or the company's genre. For me this seemed quite obvious but it is still a very important rule to live by as a graphic designer.

His chapter on Ambiguity was quite confusing and i used a dictionary and the website http://www.gdbasics.com/html/figure/figure.html to really understand what Vignelli was explaining. In the end i understood that he was explaining that in some cases being quite subtle and vague in your work can be very effective however, it is a technique which can be hard to use and some of the outcomes can cause unpleasant results. I find the example above which Vingelli uses as a very successful use of this technique as it almost grabs the viewers attention more and makes you concentrate on the image more to read the distorted and hidden writing. However, i can see where this technique can go wrong but it has still intrigued me to experiment with different materials and possibly extremely small writing to attempt using this ambiguous technique.
Vignelli talks about how all areas of design are important and how as a graphic designer, if someone came to you and asked you to create a building or a spoon, you should still be able to use your creative mind to successfully create an outcome. My father is an architect and some words of wisdom which i will always remember is that a company is looking at how many different ways i can be an asset to them so it is important to learn as many different pieces of software as possible or to be a successful photographer or a successful painter. This advice links in with Vignellis book and explains that all design is connected. I believe that this is not my strength to use other materials or manual ways of creating art however, in the past i have been asked by my A level 3D Design course to design and build a model for a building. I found that this project stretched my creative mind to the limit in using sketching, drawing, 3D computer design and manual design however the project explored my creative thinking in no way which conventional digital graphic design could do. I have learned in first hand experience that i should try as many different ways of design as possible to expand my ability's which is what i intend to do on this graphic design course.

Even though Vignellis book is based on graphic design, he puts across one main message which is that an appreciation of all design is essential to become a successful creative thinker. He talks about Intellectual Elegance in all forms of art from the Greek statures to the Renaissance Paintings and architecture down any cultural line of history. It has become clear to me why i must research the history of graphic design and the history of design as a whole in any creative field. It is important to look back at what makes these pieces of art timeless and try to replicate this lasting technique in my own creative designs.