VULGARITY OF HARD WORK

Effort Is Vulgar - Unless it is the subject

In 1999, Stefan Sagmeister announced an AIGA Detroit lecture by having every word of the poster cut into his own skin with an X-Acto blade. An intern did the cutting. It took hours. The photograph of his welted torso , dates, venue, sponsor credits, became one of the most famous posters the field has produced.

It is also a poster on which the effort is completely, gruesomely visible. Nothing is hidden. The pain is the layout. And it works , not despite the visible effort, but because of it.

It's the exception that proves the rule.

The rule: effort is not the content unless it is the subject.

Sagmeister's poster is about what design costs its maker. That is its subject , so the effort belongs in the frame, scars and all. Hiding it would have been the lie. But your poster is almost never about what design costs you. Your poster is about the lecture. Your label is about the sauce. Your mark is about the brand. And in all of those cases, visible effort is not honesty. It is vulgarity.

I mean vulgar not as a sneer. Vulgarity is the self asking for applause in the middle of someone else's sentence. It's the dinner host who tells you how long the dish took before you've tasted it. The information isn't false , it's misaddressed. It pulls attention off the thing and onto the maker of the thing, and the audience feels the pull instantly, as a small tax nobody agreed to pay.

To use the rule you have to split effort into its two species, because they look alike and are opposites.

Labor is the work the object required: the hundred rejected sketches, the sixth kerning pass, the curve redrawn until it stopped being a decision and became a fact. Labor is legitimate, and it can even show. The bite of letterpress into cotton paper, the gouge marks in a woodcut, a hand-cut dovetail , that's craft in evidence, and craft in evidence doesn't compete with the subject. It serves it, the way the joint serves the table. Nobody looks at a dovetail and feels the maker begging.

Striving is the plea for credit: the flourish that exists to be admired, the gradient that says look what I can do, the third typeface that is really a third bid for attention. Striving is always a leak . A hole in the object through which the self comes into view. The test is simple and it never fails: labor points at the subject. Striving points at the maker.

The distinction has nothing to do with how much or how visible. Labor can be enormous and on full display and still make no claim . Striving can be one unearned swash and poison everything, because a plea for credit, once heard, can't be unheard. The viewer now knows the object wants something from them, and an object that wants something has stopped being about its subject.

So the rule is this::

Never clever for cleverness's sake.

Never the designer's hand where the subject should be.