Making-Original-Products-presentationzen

The Art of Working with
Restrictions
My friends at Universal Studios Japan—Jasper von Meerheimb, senior art
director, and Sachiko Kawamura, senior environmental graphic designer—
gave an excellent presentation for Design Matters Japan on the issue of how
restrictive conditions put on creative projects can lead to inventive solutions.
In their presentation, they talked about how to develop concepts and
implement them under constraints such as limited time, space, and budgets.
For professional designers, creating great work under a thousand constraints
and limitations imposed from the outside is simply the way the world of design
works. Whether constraints are good or bad, enabling or crippling, is in a sense
irrelevant; constraints are the way of the world. Still, as John Maeda points
out in The Laws of Simplicity (MIT Press), “In the field of design there is the
belief that with more constraints, better solutions are revealed.” Time, for
example, and the sense of urgency that it brings, is almost always a constraint,
yet “urgency and the creative spirit go hand in hand,” says Maeda.
Using creativity and skill to solve a problem or design a message among
a plethora of restrictions from the client, the boss, and so on, is old hat to
designers. They live it. Daily. However, for the millions of nondesigners with
access to powerful design tools, the importance of constraints and limitations
is not well understood. For those not trained in design, the task of creating
presentation visuals (or posters, websites, newsletters, etc.) with today’s
software tools can make users frustrated by the abundance of options or giddy
in anticipation of applying their artistic sensibilities to decorate their work with
an ever-increasing array of colors, shapes, and special effects. Either condition
can lead to designs and messages that suffer. What you can learn from
professional designers is that (1) constraints and limitations are a powerful
ally, not an enemy, and (2) creating your own self-imposed constraints,
limitations, and parameters is often fundamental to good, creative work.
Self-imposed constraints can help you formulate clearer messages,
including visual messages. In the various Zen arts, for example, you’ll find
that careful study, practice, and adherence to strict guidelines (constraints)
Chapter 2 Creativity, Limitations, and Constraints
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