Hasta La Ideas

The wild cover design of Design Disasters: Great Designers, Fabulous Failures, and Lessons Learned forced me look to the back of the book to get the precise wording of the title, commas and all. Perhaps that’s what cover designer James Victore intended when he spilled half the title off of the front page and presented such an obfuscated grid on the back cover that I had to run down the page with a ruler to try to locate the baselines. Ultimately I found the title written in its full Library of Congress form upside down and aligned with a nested set of bullet points for the contributor credits on the back cover. While I’ve never been a fan of guessing author or artist motive, the overall effect amounts to making a pleasing harmony out of a relative mess, which actually fits the book’s themes pretty well.

Design Disasters collects stories of failure (along with the titular lessons learned) from luminaries such as Stefan Sagmiester, thinkers like Ralph Caplan and Henry Petroski and Core’s own Allan Chochinov. Perhaps Steven Heller explains the logic behind the cover in his introduction, which states, “If I were the joking sort, I would just make the type from here on unreadable as an example of failed design.” I’m glad he didn’t because such an omission would have denied the reader the opportunity to hear the stories contained within. Heller himself describes the creative process with a special emphasis on success through failure. It’s an old lesson, but in this age, when design presentations can be changed with a few twitches of the wrist at the mouse, there’s no reason why every finished design can’t be built from a cornucopia of failures, so much so that perhaps the very nomenclature of failure needs to be reconsidered. Perhaps we designers have already subliminally assimilated this lesson. After all, most people I know don’t call it failure, we call it process. For me, success and failure are the same things, just on a different timeline.

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