A man walks into a bar. When he steps up to the bartender, he asks for a glass of water. The bartender suddenly reaches underneath the bar, pulls out a shotgun and points it into the man’s face. The man pauses and then says, “Thank you” before walking out of the bar.
What happened? Obviously this story is incomplete because it raises more questions than it answers. Why did the bartender pull out a shotgun? And why did the man say thank you? What really happened?
As many people will know, this story is an example of a Minute Mystery, a conversational game that requires you to unravel the mystery based on incomplete and somewhat ambiguous clues. You are given a scenario and must deduce what has happened, and you are limited to asking questions that can be answered with a simple yes or no.
The sense of discovery is an essential storytelling device — not only in mental games but also in literature and art. That’s why one of the characteristics that best define a work of art is allusivity* — the idea of working by suggestion rather than explicit mention. This idea suggests that art can never be, and has never been, simply an imitation of reality — something art historians call mimesis.
Or as Virginia Woolf has so bluntly stated, “Art is not a copy of the real world. One of the damn things is enough.” Even if the work of art is a realist painting by Edward Hopper or a documentary photograph by Dorothea Lange, what makes it art is that it carries with it this quality of allusion. It suggests, or hints at, something beyond itself.
By extension, the most compelling graphic design is much like a jigsaw puzzle. When readers are invited to solve a visual problem, the communication is more powerful. Without sacrificing impact or clarity, the goal of the graphic designer is to illuminate by providing the reader an opportunity to participate.
The most compelling graphic design portrays content as experienced, as engaged, as discovered. Much more than sterile information is passed along. Instead, the mind is engaged to see and to imagine:
- Design can evoke an emotional state — feelings like anger, pain, joy or fear.
- Design can evoke a psychological state — sensations like tranquility, depression or anxiety.
- Design can evoke memories — experiences like the feel of cashmere or the warmth of the spring sun or the smell of a newborn baby’s head.
- Design can evoke ideas — concepts like “progress is good” or “everything is subject to decay” or “love triumphs.”
Edgar Degas has famously said, “Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.” In other words, what you help others discover.