Telling A Story

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Whether designers know it or not, they are story tellers as much as authors are. As a designer you must paint a picture not only to your clients, but also to their potential customers. With words and pictures you can tell an entire story from start to finish and convince the customer that this product is what they need.

Much like writers, designers have an outline process, the actual creative process and then an editing process. The difference is in the names, but the core concepts are virtually the same and like writing the process for creating a design can be long and arduous, and like most artists they are also often perfectionists.

But there are some things, that could do well to translate over between these two ideas. For instance, one of the core concepts of design is KISS. Not the band, or even kiss in the romantic sense. It’s an acronym meaning Keep It Simple, Stupid. Writers often fall into the habit of overcomplicating things. Getting overly descriptive or trying to use more complex words in order to either sound smart or make their readers feel dumb, whether subconsciously or not. I’ve read a great deal of writers blogs that suggest there’s no need to pull out a thesaurus to look for a ‘better’ word when a simple one would suffice just as well. But there’s more to ‘keeping it simple’. For instance, in Elmore Leonard’s Ten Rules of Writing, he explained that a writer should, “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.”

I’ll leave it for you to decide what exactly he means by that, but the main point of his entire ten rules can be summed up with the KISS acronym.