photo: stack

The CS post from Feb. 15 ("Questioning the Cult of the Sketch") happened to coincide with a lengthy thread on Core77's discussion boards about the necessity of sketching. It's always gratifying when coincidences like that occur, allowing us to entertain the idea that we've tapped into some universal subconscious of the creative professions.

This time, though, I'm simply cribbing what's already out there. A thread started last week asking whether a cover letter was really necessary when applying for a design job. The answer is that of course it is, and responders quickly concurred on this point, offering some excellent advice on why it's important and what to say; readers seeking tips on cover letters would do well to give it a look. What's curious about the exchange is the assumption that prompted it, or rather the lack thereof; it's hard to imagine such a question even being asked in most other professional fields.

There was a time when facility and even eloquence with the written word was expected of just about every professional--creative or otherwise--and a lot of non-professionals too. Reading letters and business correspondence from the early part of the 20th century is a gently humbling experience, imparting pangs in the reader who realizes that a request for additional tacks by a carpenter in 1910 was written more elegantly than most correspondence between executives today. There are a range of reasons for this apparent decline -- literacy rates are higher now, for example, and so the upper-class association that the written word once held has faded -- but this is a larger, more academic question than I'm trying to answer here.

More to the point for creative professionals is that writing these days is seen as a nearly optional part of our training, and consequently of our jobs. It wasn't always the case. The Liberal Arts ideal has held sway in Western education for a long time, such that even technical disciplines like architecture and illustration included the expectation of fluent written and verbal communication. A quick comparison of the words of a few notable mid-century designers with those of today is pretty convincing in this respect.

The problem with most modern design programs is that they are professional degrees, and therefore largely exempt from the requirements of a traditional liberal arts education: instead of digging into humanities, philosophy and literature, we sketch, model and render. These are crucial abilities, but in the long term a successful designer is more than just a packet of skills; she is a critical thinker and an analytical problem-solver. That capacity is not granted through graceful line-quality alone.

I sometimes wonder if design schools do their students a huge disservice by not requiring them to get really good at things like writing essays and giving speeches. There's a recognition of the need for preparation and coherent narrative that comes from such pursuits, and it's fantastically useful. There's also the opportunity to master the only truly universal communication method in the modern professional world: writing.

One of the great advantages of writing is that everybody does it, even if they do it badly. A text document is a truly agnostic medium, that everyone--absolutely everyone--has at least some ability to produce, interpret and modify. While a sketch, model or rendering can come down from on high as evidence of the designer's vision, a written document is an approachable, modifiable entity.

It would be a fine thing if the "sketch talk" could be a two-way discussion, even with marketers, engineers, and executives, but it's not. Lamentably, visual communication is seen as frivolous within many fields, among them those that interact with designers in the process of getting projects done. What often results is a peculiar form of miscommunication, with two groups talking past each other: designers create visual documents, and complain that their non-creative counterparts don't know how to read a sketch, or assume a rendering is a finalized representation when in fact it's just a step on the way to project completion. Everyone else writes emails, briefs, project definitions and bullet lists, and the communication rift deepens.

Designers do engage in written correspondence, of course, but the relationship is often fundamentally different. For most professional disciplines, the written document is the controlling entity; an object to be sweated over, exchanged, critiqued and perfected. It is a reference point for discussion in the same way that a pile of sketches or a quick digital rendering is for more visual disciplines, and in a similar way it serves as a tool for thinking and problem solving. For many creative professionals, the written document is a necessary evil, to be dispatched as quickly and cursorily as possible.

In light of the slow revolution in design's perception over the last few years, verbal and written communication may turn out to be among the keys to breaking out of the style ghetto. There's been plenty said and written lately about the need for designers to broaden their scope and reach; to apply their creative viewpoint to strategies and philosophies. Visual expression can address part of this need, but alone it's not enough.

Adrian Shaughnessy quotes the book and art critic John Carey in an excellent Design Observer essay from 2006 on the primacy of literature among the art forms:

For Carey, literature is the pre-eminent art form: "unlike the other arts," he writes, "it can criticize itself. Pieces of music can parody other pieces, and paintings can caricature paintings. But this does not amount to a total rejection of music and painting. Literature, however, can totally reject literature, and in this it shows itself more powerful and self-aware than any other art."

This awareness, coupled with universality, makes the word as indispensable to creative thought as the line is to creative expression.