Holla if you want a pair.

I might make some merchandise, well if the parents don’t, I might. And a ringtone as well. Oh, and a dance remix ringtone.

Now, each time a new element is introduced into the composition, the complete view i.e. what the eye has to comprehend, becomes more complex.

Consider Plato’s Theory of Forms.

Let’s say to express my concept, I need to have a character sat on a chair.

Now, Plato’s interest is not within a specific chair or any specific physical object, but within the shared idea or collective understanding of ‘the chair’

When a child draws a house it’s usually one door, four windows, a slanted roof and perhaps a chimney.

And as adults, we can all agree that a chair has a certain form that we accept in order to recognize and socially understand it’s reality. It has four legs. It maybe has a specific height. But for the purposes of this communication, the chair simply needs to be invisible. The time taken to realise that it’s a chair must be minimised because it is one of many elements that add up to provide your message.

So, because we can all imagine a chair, it is surely this ‘shared imagination’ of what a chair is, that designers must tap into in order to communicate their point quickly. However, as society progresses, this becomes more complex. Let’s say the character on the chair needs to be within an office. This could mean that the designer now has the now more difficult task of tapping into the shared idea of an ‘office chair’, still keeping it simple, perhaps it can be as easy as adding wheels to the chair.

Anyway, on a base level, this is the role of the art director. To understand how to use visual symbols to construct a composition.

But it’s infinitely more complex.

What if the composition requires expressing something more subjective. How do you visualize a criminal? Someone with a hood up? Or someone with a stripey top? Or, how do you visualize perhaps a person from Australia? Knowing that you have a very limited time to express among other things that this man is Australian?

Ethics start to come into play. Would I be enforcing a stereotype if I were to visualize an Australian as a man in a cork hat? After all it is that which is perhaps the simplest visual cue an Art Director can use and is therefore communicating a message more efficiently, but do all Australians wear cork hats? Not at all.

I guess the point I’m making is that art direction is a lot more scientific than we perhaps think. It’s just incredibly complex. Be more aware of these universal forms and remember them, they are everywhere. And they will help en route to simplicity.

I think it would be a good thing for someone like Getty images to explore. Perhaps they could do a ‘Form Search’ in which they offer up the simplest possible visual representation of what one is looking for i.e the office chair that most effectively communicates the idea of an office chair to an audience. If you get me. Like a universal design language or at least a western one anyway.

I’ll be back on this topic.

I think I’m going to start being a vigilante comment moderator. Like a kinda digital Ghandi. Perhaps the problem is that it’s all anonymous. No-one knows who you are, like I could verbally assault you now. But I won’t because I’m nice. Anyway NO time to waste… TO THE FORUMS! PEACE AND GOODWILL.