Recently, flipping through a design magazine, I was stricken by an advertisement for sun shades:
The pictured element does not look "right". In fact it looks bad. The problem with these shades is that they find themselves at an undesirable mid-point between two desirable modes of patterning. (Now these particular sun shades are not themselves important. They merely serve as an example and, potentially, not a very good one.) The two aforementioned desirable modes of patterning are:
1. Rational order
and
2. Irreducible complexity/textural evocativeness
These sun shades are somewhere in-between. They appear to misbehave (and probably are, to the designer's credit), defying an intended order, yet not with enough complexity to defy comprehension, à la the pleasant irreducibility of nature. Their haphazard behavior would be excusable if, perhaps, they were rendered instead as a great number of thin strips, a more convoluted arrangement appearing as texture rather than object, effecting pure visual interest, an evocation of sensual-memory. If this is not to be achieved, then the shades should be reigned in and brought to behave. Ordered, controlled, deliberate, designed.
Again, this is only to serve as an example in making a point. The guidelines I've presented are obviously not to be "proven"; their validity is no more than a matter of intuition. I can hope only to make them clear and explicit so that others, already in subconscious agreement, may be served by bringing the preference to consciousness.
Nevertheless, I assume that I am appealing to self-evident psychological constructs: If not order, then beautiful and true incomprehensibility.
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