Wildly Appropriate
Posted by: Dan Klyn
Q’s Graphic Design Ethos and The Nature of Information Architecture
Every so often I’m sent a comment or a question from a person on the Internet who I’ve never met, wondering about the name of my blog. I love getting this question, because it allows me an opportunity to reminisce about the time during the early 2000s when I was working at Q.
Originally hired-in to write HTML code and produce graphics for the web page layouts Q designed for its clients, I was delighted to find that there was plenty of work I could chip-in on and do that fell outside of my title and “official” role. One of the most exciting categories of beyond-the-job-description work I was allowed to collaborate on was naming. And even though there were few (if any) ideas of mine that would end up being selected and then set up in type for actual production, being in the conference room for a naming brainstorm with Tom and Jeff and Christine and Todd and Jocelyn ... it was exhilarating.
During one such brainstorming session around the headlines and taglines for a leave-behind piece of collateral that Q would use when pitching new business, I was stricken with an inspiration and threw the tagline “Wildly Appropriate” up on the wall. I thought it described Q perfectly… and it stuck there for a while, but then ultimately it slid back down and out of contention. I got over this rejection pretty quickly though, because what the Q team landed on instead of “Wildly Appropriate” was simply a better choice for this particular application. The piece needed to accomplish certain things, and what I had suggested—while clever—was not as functional as it needed to be in order to win over the hearts and minds in that Q conference room.
What I experienced back then was and still is, I think, an anomaly: graphic design professionals who were willing to subordinate the desire to be clever and the need for looking good in favor of the performance and effectiveness of the communication. Desiring that the solutions they committed to print or published on the Web not just look good, but be good.
In the years since I exited the Q collective, I’ve taught and continue to teach a graduate course on Information Architecture at the University of Michigan School of Information. And over the years I’ve noted a progressively muddled understanding of information architecture on the part of practitioners and colleagues who self-identify under the broad classification of User Experience Design. I’ve spent some time over the past 12 months ranting about this devolution of the meaning and misunderstanding of the nature of information architecture among some User Experience folks from my blog. A blog which I ended up naming… you guessed it: Wildly Appropriate. I think even Christine and Tom would agree that the name works pretty well for me as an ardent reader of Oscar Wilde whose ideal world is one where limits are tested and where ultimately, the most fitting idea or solution - the appropriate solution which offers the best performance - is the one that “wins.”
During the past few months I’ve been working on and giving a talk, writing a book, and planning an exhibition all under the title, The Nature of Information Architecture. This project stems from ongoing research into the life and work of Richard Saul Wurman, the inventor of Information Architecture. As I’ve been digging into Mr. Wurman’s writings from the 1970s, and into the press coverage of his work in the 1980s and 1990s, one of the dominant patterns that I see is propriety. This is something that I think corresponds directly with Wurman’s sense of “performance” and with his dogged insistences upon not just looking good but being good. It didn’t take too many expeditions into Mr. Wurman’s well-documented life’s work of making the complex clear before I realized that my graphic designer colleagues at Q were the first Information Architects I’d ever worked for and with.
The day before I gave this talk at a conference in Ann Arbor in July, my wife and I visited Q and were treated to an informal review of the identity design work Q is doing for the UM School of Nursing. Christine showed us the iterations she and her colleagues had been working through with the name and with the mark, and some near-final designs that indicated an approach to photography. And, as I was seeing this work and understanding how it came to be I kept coming back, again and again, to this word “appropriate.” Sure, the work looks really good, but more than anything, Q’s work is appropriate. And it teaches me, once again, about the “nature” of information architecture. Whether it’s an approach to photography or the choice of words in a tagline or the proportion and relation of graphic elements in a mark, the work Q’s done on this project informs and communicates because it’s rooted in the desire to perform well, not just look good. Its propriety enables understanding, and I find it to stand as a compelling test-case in information architecture.
Dan Klyn, Q guest blogger, is an information architect, adjunct faculty at the University of Michigan School of Information, and Qlumnus (2000 - 2004). His academic background is in librarianship and creative writing, and many of his past and present clients are online and multi-channel retailers. Dan lives in one of the fertile Dutch farming communities inbetween Lake Michigan and Grand Rapids with his highschool sweetheart and their three children.
