[no. 003] Visual Research /chapter 2/ case study 3

While I was looking through Visual Research: An Introduction to Research Methodologies in Graphic Design, by Ian Noble and Russel Bestley, I came across a case study that caught my eye. In the book it is Case Study #3: I Love You, beginning on page 82. What drew me to it initially was just the multitude of small little icons that reminded me of Webdings or some other dingbat typeface that we see and can usually recognize, but rarely use. Then, upon reading into the article, I found out that it is from a designer named Wayne Daly who was “investigat[ing] the relationship between graphic design and human emotions.”

Daly researched the history and development of the heart symbol (like the one used in “I LOVE NY”) and how it has been applied to branding campaigns and corporate identities. I thought that the amount of research that went into the preliminary stages of Daly’s personal project were very impressive. He has 400 examples on the posters that attracted my attention, and I am sure that he had much more, but was forced to pare it down to these 400. This is a lesson to all of us as beginning designers, and better yet, as students in general. It is only through thorough research that will be able to create an impressive final. Though it seems like a waste of time to research in depth, it surely pays off in the end.




Reading further, the case study describes how Daly made these posters by categorized each symbol by their usage. For example, healthcare institutions, charitable organizations, political groups, pornography, and other distinctions that are not legible enough to read on the posters printed in the book. Unless I’m missing something in the reading, I think this may have been as far as Daly went in this particular facet of the project. So I was a little disappointed to discover that although I was attracted to these posters, they really had no depth to them. But this can also serve as a good lesson that I know Lee has told us time and again, that it is absolutely pointless if what you design is attractive, but provides no deeper layer of information.

Daly used his initial interest and some of that research, then expanded it to include lonely heart advertisements and electronic romance indicators. However, the culmination of his “graphic ephemera” in this entire project, was scanned into a computer, and then composed into a poster that “mark[ed] the overall scale of the project.”