BFTP: Design and creativity - what's the relationship?

One space between sentences.
Robin Williams, 1990.

The first and only book on typography I've read is Robin Williams's The Mac is Not a Typewriter, Peachpit, 1990*. This 72-page book, that took maybe 30 minutes to read and digest, changed the entire way I looked at communicating through writing. 

If one wished to look professional, I realized, one needed to pay attention to not just writing style, but visual style as well.

Two spaces after a period. Underlining when one should italicize. Leaving widows and orphans on the page. Using a san serif font in the body of a text. All these and 16 other signs of typographical ignorance were inexcusable for those of us with the control over our layouts that to the WISIWYG interface of the Mac (and later Windows) now gave us.

So it was a little shocking when a Slate article from 2011 "Space Invaders: why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period" started making the rounds again last week. We'd only had 24 years to put Williams's advice into practice - and to start making our documents look professional. What's the rush?

Williams's book The Non-Designer's Design Book that came out in 2003, did for my Powerpoint slides what The Mac is Not a Typewriter did for my written work. It made my stuff look professionally designed after I internalized her four basic rules of CRAP (Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity). I love finding ways to look smarter than I actually am.

So here is a question that's been rattling in my brain lately: Does following good design principles make one more or less creative - or does it have any impact at all?

In my creativity workshops, I've argued that one can place parameters on a student's project. It's OK to say:

• Exactly eight slides in your Powerpoint.
• At least three supporting details.
• Accurate labling on the graph.
• Limericks must rhyme.

If Shakespeare could be creative following the imposing strictures of the Elizabethan sonnet, can a person be creative when required to follow some design principles?

I was gladdened to read this in Jonah Leher's book Imagine: How Creativity Works: 

And this is why poetic forms are so important. When a poet needs a rhyming word with exactly three syllables or an an adjective that fits the iambic scheme, he ends up uncovering all sorts of unexpected connections; the difficulty of the task accelerates the insight process. ... You break out of the box by stepping into shackles.

Does good "out of the box thinking" require us to place limits on what we can propose? Seems almost paradoxical.

Your experience in expecting creativity from students?


* I still have - and cherish - my copy.

Original post 2/4/14

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