The Concept of the One
Graphic designers exist for one main purpose: to communicate.
The audience for that communication can be just one person or the audience can be unthinkably large. An ad in a newspaper can reach thousands of people. A website? Potentially millions.
How on earth can we communicate with all those people? How can we ensure that a massive audience all hear and understand?
Shout!
Surely to accomplish our goal it stands to reason that we must project our voice in a way that captures the attention of that massive audience.
That's why we might be tempted to think of designing as speechmaking. There we stand at the podium before a vast auditorium of people. We know our voice has to carry. The message has to be big, broad and emotive enough to create an umbrella to hold this disparate group together.
A simple enough analogy. And it seems to make perfect sense...
Except that it doesn't make any sense at all. In fact, it's relatively boneheaded.
The people you are trying to reach are not standing in a crowd, craning their necks, trying to hear that voice more clearly. That crowd is purely an illusion. And a limiting one at that.
The magic number
The fact is that there is a specific number of people who can perceive and comprehend a design job at any one time.
That magic number? One.
Yes, one. Even when there are thousands of people on a website, just one person per screen clicks that mouse. And while that Telegraph or Herald or Chronicle flies from the news stands, it's one person holding it up and away from dipping into their latte.
No crowd?
The comprehension itself rests with the One, not the Multitude.
In graphic design, group dynamics don't come into play. Speechmakers and rock musicians can whip a crowd into a frenzy by playing on deep emotions and beliefs. And a good comedy will often play better in a packed rather than an empty cinema.
But the impact of graphic design cannot be influenced by this group factor.
It is based solely on the silent comprehension of the One.
What's the difference?
So how does this change what we do as designers?
Obviously our attitude in designing a piece changes if we direct it toward one person. Focusing our intent not only provides a richer bed of creativity to access and work from, our creative process becomes more personal, more real.
Not bad for starters.
But there's another aspect of Oneness that is perhaps more important. That audience member we've been talking about naturally sees that piece of work as an individual "One". They relate to this object One-to-One.
That's the secret there. Oneness is not just about who we are as individual human beings. It's about how we humans actually picture and relate to the world around us.
The Concept of the One
Oneness is actually central to our human psychology.
One of the most important lessons we learn as infants is that we are separate from our mother. We learn to identify ourselves as individuals. Our mother also becomes a separate individual with her own personality.
We also learn to differentiate and classify objects in the world. The world in fact becomes a series of Ones within Ones. For example, the cushion, the lounge, the room and the house might fit together like a Russian doll but they each have a Oneness.
The key here is that we look at each of these objects as a unique One in its own right.
And that's how we relate to the world, One-to-One. Our awareness, then, is primed to seek Oneness at all levels.
Personality
But the Concept of the One goes further than simply identifying and classifying objects. Just as we are individuals with purpose and intent, we seek out personality in the objects of the world around us.
And not just obvious things such as teddy bears, pet rocks and cars. We do it in a subtle way with all manner of objects. It's just that the more human-like the object, the more readily we are able to invest it with a defined personality. And when something has personality we naturally enter into a personal relationship with it.
We are so expert at this process that we eventually learn to apply it to abstract structures. Take a company, for example. Not only does it have a face (logo), a Voice and a perceived structure but it acts with the human properties of intention and direction.
So we create a personality for the company, we enter into a kind of relationship with it and, crucially, we can even become emotionally attached.
Marketing consciously plays on that process. In fact, "identity management" forms a major part of what marketing actually is. Branding itself is so powerful because it plays on this deep aspect of our psychology.
Hocus-focus
This all means that in our daily lives we perceive our world in terms of One-to-One relationships. Most of us are totally unaware of this process working in our lives.
So there it is: in order to reach that huge audience, you really have to narrow your focus.
Put simply? Create the One to speak to the One.
The unique piece that results from focussing your creative efforts will more likely connect One-to-One with each of those silently comprehending audience members.
A final word...from Rolf?
When asked his secret to communication, Rolf Harris, the idiosyncratic Australian entertainer who has been a star on British television for over thirty years, said that his method is simple: he looks down the barrel of the camera lens and imagines he is talking to a friend sitting on a couch in a living room.
His audience might be in the millions... and that's because he is a compelling individual talking directly to the One.
© 2007-9 Samperi Design. All rights reserved.
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