The Joy of Doing Nothing

The problem with effort and good design is that the best solutions looks like they takes very little work. The solution appears natural and effortless. The worst work are the solutions that are over-designed, over-produced, over-wrought, and desperate. But, civilians will look at the ABC logo and say, "So what? What took so long? I could have done that." The logo that is an illustration of a person with raised hands on top of a globe with all nations color coded and series of stars that wraps around the globe, sitting on a word mark of tortured typography is praised, "Boy that must have taken a long time."

Charles Coiner's World War II poster, Give it Your Best, is one of these examples. It's so obvious and straightforward that it appears that no design happened. But, the poster leaves nobody guessing at the message, is visually aggressive and powerful, and stands the test of time. Works for me.

And while we're on the subject of World War II posters, I can't resist discussing the series, This is Your Friend. These posters were created to help our troops understand what our allies looked like so we wouldn't shoot them. The Chinese were our allies; they were not Japanese who were our enemies. The English,and Australian men wore these specific hats and were not German. I like that they try so hard to make clear what could be difficult; if someone was caucasian and blonde were they German? Not if they had a smile and tam-o-shanter hat. They were clearly Canadian.

But the poor Dutch. Why only a Dutch sailor? If they weren't sailors and Dutch were they dangerous? And I don't want to sound mean, but couldn't the War Office find a strapping young and handsome Dutch man? I'm pretty sure there were other options here. If a student tuned this in I would say, "You need to stop using Google as a research tool and using low resolution bad images."