Talking design: negotiating the

verbal–visual translation
Anne Tomes, Caroline Oates and Peter Armstrong, Sheffield University
Management School, 9 Mappin Street, Sheffield S1 4DT, UK

Design is commonly regarded as an act of individual creation to which

both verbalisation and logical analysis are only peripherally relevant.

Based on interview data from a graphic design consultancy, this paper

develops an alternative view of design, in which the outputs of
individual creativity are progressively negotiated to a mutually
satisfactory outcome, first with other designers and subsequently with
the client. In this process the ability to articulate verbal meanings
associated with visual design, and conversely, to interpret verbal
messages in visual terms is a core skill. Viewed in this light, the whole
of the design process is directed towards the achievement of a mutually
acceptable visual ‘translation’ of the brief, and it is achieved through
the medium of lesser translations from the verbal to the visual and back
again.  1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved

Keywords: design process, graphic design, communication, verbal/visual

1 Lawson, B Design in mind
Butterworth-Heinemann, Oxford
(1994)
2 Lawson, B and Ming Loke,
S ‘Computers, words and pic-
tures’ Design Studies Vol 18 No
2 (1997) pp 171–183
3 Medway, P and Andrews, R
‘Building with words: discourse in
an architect’s office’ Carleton
Papers in Applied Linguistics Vol
9 (1992) pp 1–32
T
his paper had its origin in a remark on design competitions made
by Mike Press, Professor of Design Research at Sheffield Hallam
University. To be successful, he said, students have to learn to ‘tell
the story’ of a design. This is in interesting contrast to the prevalent view
of visual design as something which ought to speak for itself, and do so,
moreover, in a language quite distinct from ordinary speech and writing.
It prompts the question of how far ‘telling the story’ — and, by extension,
other forms of verbal work — might be integral to the process of actually
producing design.
This is not an entirely new theme in design research. recent studies of the
working practices of architects have revealed the importance of verbally-
formulated core concepts in focusing the work of design teams and of
verbal–visual exchanges between designer and client in the initial stabilis-
ation of the design brief 1–3. The interest of the present paper, which is

0142-694X/98 $19.00 Design Studies 19 (1998) 127–142 PII: S0142-694X(97)00027-6 127

 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd All rights reserved Printed in Great Britain

DST: design studies (page 1 ) 08-09-98 15:33:04 Rev 14.02x ZDST$$118H


4 Rittel, H W J Second gener-
ation design methods in N Cross
(ed) Developments in design
methodology Chap. 5.2 Wiley,
Chichester, (1984) pp. 317–327
5 Kawama, T A semiotic
approach to the design process
in Umiker-Sebeok (ed) Market-
ing and semiotics: new directions
in the study of signs for sale
Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin (1987)
pp. 57–70
6 Ward, A ‘Design cosmologies
and brain research’ Design Stud-
ies Vol 5 No 4 (1984) pp 229–
237
128
DST: design studies (page 2
based on case material from the field of graphic design, lies in the broad
similarities observed between the two widely disparate fields. Parallels of
this kind, of course, raise the question of the extent to which the findings
can be generalised to design as a whole, though that is an issue which
cannot be explored further here.
The question of the role of verbal work in the production of visual design
makes little sense so long as design is thought of as an individual act of
creation. It makes every sense, however, if it is viewed as the outcome of
a series of negotiations between designers and between designers and cli-
ents. This is not as unorthodox as it may sound. A stress on negotiation
as integral to the design process is implicit in much of the discussion of
participation in the literature of design methodology 4. What tends to be
missing, is a complementary discussion of its social mechanics. This paper
is intended as a contribution to the understanding of one aspect of these
negotiations: that they routinely involve translations from the verbal to the
visual and back again.
Since the conversation between designer and client is conducted primarily
through the medium of spoken language, the implication is that translation
from the verbal to the visual and back again is integral to the design process
5
. In Lawson’s case studies of architectural design 1, this can be observed
in the negotiation of the brief with the client. In the present study of graphic
design, it can be seen in the initial realisation of the words of the brief in
the form of a visual sketch. Subsequently that realisation will need to be
critiqued and explained at the verbal level, and modified at the visual, until
first the design team and subsequently both designers and client are satis-
fied that they have understood one another. Viewed in this light, the process
of design routinely accomplishes the theoretically daunting task of translat-
ing meanings between two supposedly incommensurate languages; the vis-
ual and the verbal. The object of this paper is to sketch out a preliminary
map of the verbal work involved both in ‘telling the story in design’ and
‘telling the story of design’. The material is from a case study of the
relationship between a major bank and a graphic design consultancy.
1 The translation problem: design as extra-verbal
creativity
Both the negotiations involved in the design process and the involvement
of verbal media tend to be underplayed in the literature of design method-
ology. Predominantly, the design process is portrayed as a mystery of indi-
vidual creation, inexpressible in ordinary language and inaccessible to
rational analysis. Ward 6, for example, depicts the act of design as involv-
Design Studies Vol 19 No 2 April 1998
) 08-09-98 15:33:04 Rev 14.02x ZDST$$118H
 ing ‘right brain’ processes in which imagery is non-verbal and analytic
distinctions are suspended. Similarly Cross 7 and Archer 8 argue that
‘designerly’ ways of knowing, thinking and acting constitute a form of
intelligence quite distinct from the verbal and analytical. Interestingly,
recent work on the processes of architectural design by Lawson and Loke
2
queries the tendency of these discussions to bracket the verbal with the
rational. A number of prominent architects appear to seek for verbally
formulated core concepts of a metaphoric rather than definitional character,
around which to focus the work of themselves and their teams. Verbalis-
ation, in other words may play a role in visual design quite different from
that of rational analysis. Interestingly, when practitioners discuss the mat-
ter, it is rationality which is distanced from the act of design, rather than
the verbal as such:

The following is from an interview with Richard Powell, of the well-known

design consultancy, Seymour-Powell 9:
If design, as an activity, can be located on two continuums — engineering/art and
logical/intuitive, then we are definitely at the art and intuitive ends of the spectrum.
That way you think about what a product is rather than what it’s made of; if you
follow a logical path you will always end up with a predictable solution but if you
arrive at solutions intuitively they can be equally good or better but for unpredictable
reasons.

The manner in which design communicates, as well as the process by

which it is created is depicted as incommensurate with the logical and
analytic. Thus Richard Seymour later in the interview quoted above:
The X-factor in the product is its essential personality, its desirability quotient, if you
7 Cross, N ‘The nature and nur- like — those intangible, emotional features, over and above function and efficiency,
ture of design ability’ Design
that make one product better and more desirable than another. It’s the first thing that
Studies Vol 11 No 3 (1990)
pp 127–140 strikes you and it often makes itself felt in an immeasurable fraction of a second. It’s
8 Archer, L B Whatever
became of design methodology the ‘I like it, I want it, what is it?’ element in a product. We’re constantly searching
in N Cross (ed) Developments in for that elusive iconography, the psychological bridge between consumers as they are
Design Methodology Chap. 5.5.
Wiley, Chichester (1984) pp. and consumers as they’d like to be.
347–349
9 Seymour, P Seymour Powell Given this stress on the irrational in both the creation and the workings of
publicity brochure (Reprint from
Car Styling 70 and 89, n.d.).
design, it is not surprising that there are difficulties in establishing the kind
10 Wood, J Paper presented at of linguistically-encoded knowledge base on which design professionalism
4D Dynamics Conference De
Montfort University, 21st Sep- might be based. According to successive speakers at the 1995 4D Dynam-
tember 1995.
11 Allison, B Plenary remarks
ics Conference held at de Montfort University, designers tend to believe
at 4D Dynamics Conference De that ‘if something is true, it cannot be stated.’ 10 and to valorise the individ-
Montfort University, 21st Sep-
tember 1995. ual creative act uninformed by systematic knowledge 11. The latter attitude
12 Morgan, J Conceptual was neatly exemplified by the very next speaker at the same conference 12:
kiosks. Paper presented at 4D
Dynamics Conference De
Sometimes if you don’t know what’s been done in the past, you may stumble on
Montfort University, 21st Sep-
tember 1995. something.

Talking design: negotiating the verbal–visual translation 129

DST: design studies (page 3 ) 08-09-98 15:33:04 Rev 14.02x ZDST$$118H

 Although Coyne and Snodgrass 13 have criticised the individualism, mysti-
fication and elitism implicit in these views of design, arguing (as we do
here) that design is actually a co-operative inter-subjective activity, and
one which participates in the hermeneutic character of all human thinking,
the belief that design and verbal intelligence are quite distinct remains
largely intact. Certainly it was evident in the exchanges between designers
and product managers observed in the course of our fieldwork. In the fol-
lowing extract, a senior designer from the design consultancy compares
notes with one of the bank’s product managers:

Senior Designer: When you lot have a presentation, it’s all verbal, isn’t it. You
stand there with nothing really, just talk about the product, how you got from a
to b. I find that incredible, really, that someone has to stand there in a room in
front of 30 people and just and talk and talk and communicate that way. For us,
it’s so different, because we just do it visually and we don’t really have to speak
an awful lot. Our work speaks for us. It’s visual, it’s definitely a visual thing, so
even when you’re presenting to a client you don’t have to prepare yourself as to
what you’re going to say too much because a lot of it is visual. It’s a totally
different way of presenting. For designers, if you have to go and give a lecture,
it’s horrendous, it can be frightening. You don’t work like that.
Product Manager: We have to really sell [our ideas]. I’m not a very creative
person, but I know when what you present is right for the brand or the product. I
can sense it. But the branch managers won’t have that instinct, so when you’re
writing a staff guide or you’re writing a campaign plan, which we do every sort
of 2 months, it has to be word for word stuff. It really spells it out for them
what we’re doing and why we’ve got where we are.

As a designer, the senior designer’s business is communication through

the designed object. To her, a verbal accompaniment to this process would
at best be an irrelevance and at worst a distraction. The product manager,
on the other hand, is a manager in a large and relatively impersonal
bureaucracy. Her medium, consequently, is explicit instruction, both writ-
ten and verbal. They meet as representatives of quite different cultures.

Senior Designer: But like you said, when we were in that situation, we were
actually thinking of logos or straplines or whatever for 10 minutes. Then you go
and stand up at the front and explain the idea for each one and I just found that
so bizarre. We don’t do that. We would come up with the logo on a piece of
paper and we’d just present them, that’s how we would communicate.
Product Manager: Yeah, we are quite vocal.

To these designers and product managers, then, verbal and visual cultures
13 Coyne, R and Snodgrass,
A ‘Is designing mysterious? chal- involve quite different modes of thinking. Each appears to be a little in
lenging the dual knowledge the-
awe of the expertise of the other, and quite ready to disclaim it on their
sis’ Design Studies Vol 12 No 3
(1991) pp 124–131 own behalf. The question of how they can come to understand one another

130 Design Studies Vol 19 No 2 April 1998

DST: design studies (page 4 ) 08-09-98 15:33:04 Rev 14.02x ZDST$$118H

 is therefore a real one, whatever the underlying similarity of hermeneutic
process. More, if verbal and visual thinking are fundamentally incommen-
surate, how do design teams themselves accomplish the acts of verbal–
visual translation on which the critique and development of their work
depends?

The aim of this paper is to identify key processes by which translations

from verbal to visual and visual to verbal are accomplished in the pro-
gression of a design from brief to final acceptance. The material is from
a case study of the relationship between a graphic design consultancy and
a major client. Since it has not yet proved possible to follow a single
product through the entire design process, semi-structured interviews with
the designers and the bank’s product managers have been used to build up
a picture of the manner in which designs are initiated, criticised, developed,
explicated, and finally accepted.

Before proceeding, a word of caution is in order. In what follows, verbal

work may appear to be more prominent than the visual. Insofar as this
may serve as a corrective to the ‘mute genius’ view of the designer, this
may have its value. It is important to realise, however, that on this issue,
the methodology is inherently imbalanced. Although interview methods are
quite orthodox in qualitative social science, they cannot be neutral on the
question of the relative prominence of verbal and visual processes. Both
the media of data collection and the presentation of the findings favour the
verbal at the expense of the visual. For this reason, it should be stressed
that our exploration of the role of negotiation and translation in design
should not be read as an attempt to minimise the role of the visual imagin-
ation.

2 Encapsulation: identifying the brief’s core message

From what has already been said, it will be apparent that we are viewing
graphic design as a process of translation from the verbal to the visual.
For the graphic designer, the brief appears to be fundamental, since it
contains the initial definition of what is to be translated. This is explicit
in the following extract from a publicity brochure produced by the
design agency:

.... the ideal — the designer’s Holy Grail — is an idea so completely appropriate to
the particular set of circumstances brought together in the brief that it couldn’t
possibly be used by anyone else or in any other situation.There’s only one place to
look for this kind of idea. Within the brief itself...

In our case study agency at least, the process of translation does not begin
by sketching visual responses to the brief, as one might expect. The first

Talking design: negotiating the verbal–visual translation 131

DST: design studies (page 5 ) 08-09-98 15:33:04 Rev 14.02x ZDST$$118H

 step is to re-work the brief itself at the verbal level. A senior designer with
the agency explains:

Senior Designer: Well, basically, what we always do, we go through the brief and see
what the main selling point is. I mean, the problem with this [particular] brief in a
way was that there was so many good points that you’ve got to really single out one
thing that, hopefully, can stand out above everything else... But these are the initial
concepts, we did keep them very very simple and to the point.. so we came up with
three. Before I show you the visuals, actually, I’ll show you my scribbles... I
sometimes find it easier to start with the words and try and summarise in some way,
verbally, what it is they’re trying to say, because it’s quite hard, when you’ve got so
much to say, to get it down to a little nugget. So I got quite a few that’s just bits of
words and trying out different ways of saying the same thing and then different ways
of representing that visually.

This initial verbal re-working of the brief was not peculiar to this one
designer; it was a procedure endorsed by the director of the agency, since
exactly the same method was outlined in the agency’s brochure:

Very loosely graphic design consists of concept and expression. Theoretically these
are two distinct stages in the design process: first you sit down and come up with a
single pin-sharp concept that perfectly embodies the essence of whatever it is you
want to communicate; then you search for the best way to express it, using colour,
type, photography or any of the many other tools of our trade.

and:

... often designers are presented with something like a shopping list; a number of
more or less unrelated elements all of which must be seamlessly incorporated into the
finished product.In these circumstances, what’s needed is a ‘vehicle’ — not a fast car
in which to escape but a core idea which can be developed and manipulated in order
to accommodate all the various subsidiary points which need to be made.

This initial search for a verbally-formulated ‘primary generator’ of design

ideas has been previously noted in Lawson’s study of the working methods
of prominent architects 1. In contrast to the graphic designers in our study,
however, the architectural brief appears to be developed in the early stages
of conversation with the client, so that the brief is as much a product as
a source of the core design concept. What the processes have in common
is that the core verbalised design concept, however arrived at, serves to
anchor the designer’s creative play and becomes a benchmark against
which the developing realisations of the concept can be continually evalu-
ated. The following extract is from an interview with the agency director:

... And how we assess the creative solution is to refer back to that sentence and say,
‘Does this, with the use of colour and images and words, does it make it more

132 Design Studies Vol 19 No 2 April 1998

DST: design studies (page 6 ) 08-09-98 15:33:04 Rev 14.02x ZDST$$118H

 interesting than simply saying it? Does it make it more powerful. Does it get the
message across better, or have we strayed off somewhere? Are we not making that
point?’

Having boiled down the brief to a core (textual) message, the next step
was to explore means of communicating that message in visual form. Here
too, however, work at the verbal level often preceded the visual.

3 Making ‘routes’
In the house language of our case study agency, the series of increasingly
refined visual translations of the core message of the brief was called a
‘route’. Basically the establishment of a route required two things — an
act of creation to bring it into being, and an act of recognition in which
the development potential of the route was assessed as viable. Word-play
on the core message of the brief was prominent as a method of creating
candidate routes. A senior designer with the agency was showing the inter-
viewer some initial sketches for the graphics to be incorporated into the
mailshots for a new credit card. The core message was the low interest rate:

Senior Designer: Oh dear, some of them are more interesting than others. The things
that never get to the client, these are quite funny. There’s cheap plastic, so that’s like
a hair roller, a bucket, all made out of cheap plastic. And then there was like the
lowest APR, which was like a sausage dog. So we had some very cheap plastic, some
very cheap plastic.

Notice that the visual translation of these verbally-defined possible routes

was quite literal. All of the play on the core concept of the brief (‘low’ in
this instance) took place at the verbal level. The subsequent translation
into visual terms was straightforward. Thus a credit card with a low interest
rate was first punned as ‘cheap plastic’, and then literally instanced by
illustrations of hair rollers and plastic buckets. If a potential route created
by such means appeared initially convincing (see section 5.1), illustrated
word play of this kind would be used to generate a whole family of related
translations of the brief’s concept. This procedure appeared to be quite
common, Whilst insisting that potential routes could be created in a variety
of ways, another senior designer with the agency, still offered the verbal
pun as her first example:

Senior Designer: There isn’t like one formula to come with a design idea. It can be
the main message you want to get across, it could be, er, word association sometimes,
just the way words make a particular suggestion or it could be a particular image
that’s summed something up, or comes to mind. We have lots of different routes that
we go down, really. We don’t just have like a set way of working.

Talking design: negotiating the verbal–visual translation 133

DST: design studies (page 7 ) 08-09-98 15:33:04 Rev 14.02x ZDST$$118H

 The agency’s brochure provides further instances of literally-translated
word-play as a means of generating routes. Full-page line drawings of an
ass in a lawyer’s wig and a pen and ink (rhyming slang: stink) were offered
as examples.

In these instances it is clear that the imagination of the designer was not
working solely or even predominantly at a non-verbal level. Nor was the
act of creation achieved by the suspension of analytic distinctions, as sug-
gested by Cross 7, since such distinctions are precisely the raw material of
word-play.

Against this, we do not wish to suggest that word play was the invariable
or even the predominant means of developing the core concept of the brief.
A key route in the development of one design centred on visuals of a
golden eagle. In part, this was intended as a response to the brief’s specifi-
cation of a ‘masculine’ image for the product, a translation which could
only make sense at the visual level, since the actual sex of these creatures
is not immediately apparent to the inexpert. The other reason for the choice
of the golden eagle, interestingly, leads us back into the territory of the
verbal pun, since the name of the financial product included the word
‘gold’, itself a metaphor of imperishable value.

4 Recycling visuals
Some routes which appear to be purely visual translations of the brief’s
core concept may, in fact, be the outcome of past, verbally negotiated
translations. Negotiations of this kind will be discussed presently (section
5.2). Meanwhile, bearing in mind that a successful route is one which ends
in a design acceptable to the client, it makes sense for designers to base
new designs upon visual translations which have proved acceptable in the
past. In effect such designs are able to draw on an experientially-based
repertoire of visual signification which has been negotiated in the course
of an ongoing relationship between designer and client. This might be
thought of as a kind of verbal–visual ‘dictionary’ which is private to the
parties involved, provided that the dictionary metaphor is not understood
in an over-mechanical fashion. In our case study, the bank and the agency
had worked together for about eight years and the visual styles jointly
developed by the client and the agency had been formally stabilised in a
reference manual. The manner in which these visual elements could be
used to produce visual responses to new design briefs is illustrated in the
following extract from an interview with an agency designer:

Senior Designer: These are the standard bank cards. A decision was made a
while ago to look at all the bank’s standard cards together, so that’s why they’ve

134 Design Studies Vol 19 No 2 April 1998

DST: design studies (page 8 ) 08-09-98 15:33:05 Rev 14.02x ZDST$$118H

 all got this symbol on, which we use sometimes as the bank’s secondary symbol,
and just vary the colour... sometimes the imagery that the bank has already, we
have to work with.

The rationale for such a manual from the bank’s point of view is explained
by the agency director:
Interviewer: Is there some kind of manual that you’ve built up to use with the
bank?
Agency Director: Yes, that’s not unusual. It’s a corporate identity manual. And
it’s really so there’s consistency across, everything that is produced by the bank.

But from the agency’s point of view, consistency of style also means that
new designs produced within that consistency are likely to prove accept-
able.

Long-term designer–client relationships, then, enable designers to draw

upon a repertoire of visual form which has already been negotiated and
agreed with the client 14. This may be one of the reasons for the agreement
amongst both design researchers and practitioners that such stable relation-
ships are desirable 15.

In our case study, matters had gone further, in that the agency–client
relationship had developed into a quasi consulting role on the corporate
identity of the client. In this respect it could be said that the agency influ-
enced the design briefs which it was required to meet:
Agency Director:....they describe us as guardians of their corporate identity,
which isn’t just making sure that we’ve used the right type faces and the logo’s
in the right place. It’s a wider role than that. Every now and then we sort of take
a step back and say, ‘Are we different? Is this difference coming over in the
literature and everything we produce? Is that really getting through to what the
customer sees? A few years ago, we went for a look round the branches just to
see if it was visible, you know. We went round quite a few branches without
announcing it, just to look, when you walk in, ’Does it seem different?"

Where the designer–client relationship has progressed to this point, design-

ers may be able to satisfy the client by developing their own past work.

On the other hand, they may be able to draw on the outcome of negotiations
between the client and other designers. The agency’s publicity handbook
gave examples of visuals originating with the client, such as re-workings
14 Cami, A ‘Interview: the
shape of things to come’ Design of company logos and designs based on architectural features of com-
Vol Winter (1995) pp 10–13 pany headquarters.
15 Bruce, M and Morris, B
‘Managing external design pro-
fessionals in the product devel-
All of these appear at first sight to be purely visual responses to the core
opment process’ Technovation
Vol 14 No 9 (1994) pp 585–599 message of the design brief. In reality they incorporate histories of the

Talking design: negotiating the verbal–visual translation 135

DST: design studies (page 9 ) 08-09-98 15:33:05 Rev 14.02x ZDST$$118H

 negotiations through which designer and client have reached mutual under-
standings of their conceptions of the correspondences between the visual
and the verbal. We turn now to an examination of these negotiations.

5 Developing design: negotiating translation

To repeat, we are viewing design as the achievement of an agreed trans-
lation from the verbal to the visual. This characteristic of design partly
defines the means by which it is achieved. Once a possible route is pro-
duced, it is developed and refined through a complex series of negotiations
which take the form of a search for agreement on the mutual translatability
of the verbal and the visual. Unlike translation between different verbal
languages, however, differences of opinion and misunderstandings cannot
be resolved by reference to a determinate and public dictionary. For the
verbal and the visual, there is no such thing. Instead the negotiators have
to search for commonalities in their respective personal understandings of
the translatability of the verbal and the visual, and build on those. The
process is one of experimentation in which verbal interpretations of the
visual and visual realisations of the verbal are offered to the other party
for critique and modification. There are striking parallels with the verbal–
visual conversation with the client revealed in the accounts of architectural
design collected by Lawson 1. In both cases, the iterative nature of the
negotiation and adjustment of design means that the sub-processes involved
do not take place in a set sequence. Rather they tend to recur throughout
the progression from initial idea to the agreement on the final design.

5.1 Testing
In practice design must work unaided. For this reason, there are interludes
throughout the development of a design in which it is displayed without
comment or explication. The intention is that the observer (fellow designer
or client) should experience the design as would its intended public and
so be able to provide a verbal report on that experience. The test, in other
words, is of whether the design engages as intended with the public’s sense
of the verbal meaning of the visual. For this to work, it is important that
the observer does not know, or is able to clear from his or her mind, the
(verbal) rationale behind the design. This is why explication tends to be
excluded from the moment of display. Although distinct as a process, on
the other hand, the significance of these silent tests could easily be missed
since they tended in practice to take the form of brief interruptions in the
flow of verbal discussion. A senior designer with the agency, and a product
manager with the bank, discuss the rationale and practice of silent testing:

Senior Designer: I think it’s how something communicates. If it works at the

beginning, if we understand it and the client understands it, without having to

136 Design Studies Vol 19 No 2 April 1998

DST: design studies (page 10 ) 08-09-98 15:33:05 Rev 14.02x ZDST$$118H

 explain it too much... Quite often, when we present something, we won’t really
talk on and on about it, build it all up then show it...
Product Manager: No, you don’t, you tend to just...
Senior Designer: You tend to just get it out and wait for the reaction and then
start discussing it. You shouldn’t have to build it up or have lots of reasons why
you’ve done it. It should just communicate, really, and if it works like that for
the client, it will work like that for the customer.
Product Manager: I think when an agency starts to do that when they come in
and they talk and talk they’re not sure whether what they’re presenting is right
for the client.
Senior Designer: They’re trying to justify it and really you shouldn’t need to
know all that information.
Product Manager: No, it should be clear. What you’re trying to do when
something’s passed across to you, [is ask] ‘Does that communicate?’. Because
when that comes through the door and you open it up and you give it a couple
of seconds and if it doesn’t communicate..
Senior Designer: It’s lost, it’s wasted.
The moment of mute display, then can be brief. You ‘wait for the reaction
and then start discussing it.’ We will examine the nature of this discussion
in a moment. Meanwhile the parallel with an account by the architect Her-
man Herzberger 1 is irresistible:
A drawing without explanation is nothing... clients always ask you to send a drawing
one week before [a meeting] so they can study it, and I always try to find a pretext
for not doing that, because I want to present them myself and open the drawings and
look at their eyes to see what their first reaction is and to try to detect what the hard
points are, and then try to listen to their first question.

5.2 The search for a common verbal–visual ‘dictionary’

Whilst the mute display of a design may be appropriate as a test of whether
or not it ‘works’, it offers, in itself, no guide to the manner in which it
might be developed. For that, as is implied by the Herzberger quotation,
it is necessary for the observer to articulate a reaction. In the first instance,
this necessarily takes the form of a verbal translation of the visual. The
mismatch, if any, between this interpretation and the designer’s intentions
then forms part of the material from which the design must be developed.
In the second instance, the observer may be able to enrich this material
by outlining alternative visualisations of the designer’s intentions, and this
is probably the main reason why these tend to be discussed after the initial
display of a design (see the second statement by a senior designer in the
interview extract in section 5.1). The following account of the design of
a charity-affinity credit card illustrates the alternation between verbal reac-
tions to the visual and visual realisations of the verbal which characterise
the search for a shared sense of translatability between the two:

Talking design: negotiating the verbal–visual translation 137

DST: design studies (page 11 ) 08-09-98 15:33:05 Rev 14.02x ZDST$$118H

 Originally concerned with assisting children in immediate need, the charity
had broadened its approach to include contributions to education and wel-
fare programmes. Having recently changed both its name and its logo to
reflect this shift, the charity now wished to update its affinity card. One
possibility was to adapt a cartoon which had already been used in some
promotional material. The direct marketing manager, however, felt that
this was too oriented towards children (its original purpose), and the mar-
keting team decided to try a photographic route. What they were looking
for was a positive, bright image which represented the charity’s current
range of work and was something that supporters would want to use. An
employee was despatched to search the archives for 6 appropriate photo-
graphs.

Three of these were sent off to the bank but with no design brief other
than a request to explore ways of using them in conjunction with the char-
ity’s new logo. Because of the tight time schedule and the lack of instruc-
tion from the charity itself, the bank gave only a verbal brief to its consult-
ant designers. This yielded 13 trial designs which were returned to the
charity and circulated within the marketing team for their comments, which
were collated by the direct marketing manager.

Three designs stood out, one of which was rejected in the course of dis-
cussion because of its perceived messy background, a slightly out of focus
picture and lettering which obscured the child’s face. Of the remaining
two, one was strongly preferred by the bank whilst the other was based
on a photograph taken by the charity’s direct marketing manager. Because
there was otherwise little preference between the two within the charity,
the decision was taken to develop the design favoured by the bank.

As it stood, this was not yet completely acceptable to the charity. In an

attempt to represent the bright, positive image specified in the brief, the
designers had added handprints and face paint to the child’s photograph.
This wasn’t the interpretation which the charity had in mind, and the
design was returned to design agency via the bank with instructions to
remove these and to ‘make more of’ the child’s face on the left hand side
of the design. In response, the agency produced four ‘tweaked’ designs
which were forwarded to the charity. The direct marketing manager’s pref-
erence was to modify one of these by adding a purple background running
down and across the card, so as to form a purple strip along the bottom
edge. The bank resisted this, claiming that similar designs hadn’t worked
well in earlier trials. Taking their word for it, without insisting on a further
visual try-out, the direct marketing manager then settled the charity’s final
choice by combining two of the trial designs offered by the agency.

138 Design Studies Vol 19 No 2 April 1998

DST: design studies (page 12 ) 08-09-98 15:33:05 Rev 14.02x ZDST$$118H


16 Broadbent, G The develop-
ment of design methods in N
Cross (ed) Developments in
design methodology Chap. 5.4.
Wiley, Chichester (1984) pp.
337–345
Talking design: negotiating the verbal–visual translation
DST: design studies (page 13 )
On the surface, this is an unremarkable story, although something remark-
able happens in the course of it. It involves the meeting of two cultures
and two languages; the visual and the verbal. The meeting of the two is
negotiated through a process of experimentation in which each party
explores its own sense of verbal–visual translation through an engagement
with that of the other.
Although its basis in translation is not is not made explicit, this kind of
negotiation is described in some of the literature of design methodology.
Cross 7 for example writes of trial design as a means of clarifying the
client’s definition of the problem, whilst Broadbent’s 16 ‘conjectures and
refutations’ model of design participation expresses a similar idea. It also
has affinities with Coyne and Snodgrass’ 13 view of design as an her-
meneutic exploration of a ‘design situation’, provided this is understood
as defined by the social relationship between designer and client.
5.3 Rival conceptions of the consumer
In our account so far, designers have appeared as both active and passive.
They appear as active in their exploration of the client’s sense of translation
from the verbal to the visual, but passive insofar as their designs are an
attempt to conform to it. If this were all, disagreements over the merits of
a design would last only so long as the misunderstandings of the client’s
intentions which gave rise to them. It was quite evident from our fieldwork
that designers could be much more obstinate than is implied by such a pic-
ture:
Assistant Product Manager: It can become especially difficult when you tell an
agency that is not what you want and they still come back with it. And they
represent it to you with a different angle. It can get very annoying. It wastes
your time and your money. Or their time and their money as well.
Interviewer: Why do they do that?
Assistant Product Manager: Because I think they do believe in it, they really
believe in it. And although you say it’s not appropriate, they change it ever so
slightly, just tweak a little bit. It’s because they really believe in it and because
they often don’t think that your thing is right — and it might not be, design is
very subjective, what you like and don’t like — but we’re the customer at the
end of the day, and we have customers to please at the end of the day.
At first sight, this looks as if the designers were attempting to manoeuvre
the client into accepting a design against their better judgement. Though
conceivable, this is scarcely in the designer’s own interests. Even if the
design succeeds, the client may suspect it could have been better, and if
it fails, the blame will certainly fall upon the designer. What is more likely
is that designers ‘belief in’ a design is based on a conviction that it will
139
08-09-98 15:33:05 Rev 14.02x ZDST$$118H
 communicate with its intended public. Their experience, after all, is not just
of producing designs, but of observing their subsequent reception. When
designers speak of something that ‘works’, therefore, they are not simply
articulating a preference, but claiming knowledge of the reactions of the
public. Here, the agency director explains the evaluation of potential routes
produced in response to a brief:

Ideally it ends up with what in advertising is called a proposition, which is the single
most important point. So that is what we would focus our creative thinking on. It
would be a sentence, hopefully. And how we assess the creative solution is to refer
back to that sentence and say, ‘Does this, with the use of colour and images and
words, does it make it more interesting than simply saying it? Does it make it more
powerful? Does it get the message across better or have we strayed off somewhere?
Are we not making that point?’

As was mentioned in our earlier comment on this interview (pages 132–

133), the assessment of possible interpretations of the brief is guided by
this sense of what ‘works’ as communication. It is difficult, indeed, to see
how designs could be developed in any other way. It follows that the
practice of judging the public response is integral to the practice of design.
The problem for the negotiation of design is that this habit of judgement
is not something which designers can simply switch off in the presence of
the client. The consequence can be an obdurate conviction that the client
has got it wrong as is illustrated in the interview with an assistant product
manager at the beginning of section 5.3.

Albeit on a different basis, the client can be just as confident as the designer
of his or her own assessment of what will communicate with the public.
Here, a product manager with the bank, articulates this conviction to an
agency designer who was also present at the interview:

Product Manager: I’m not a very creative person, but I know when what you present
is right for the brand or the product. I can sense it.

This is a claim to an expertise based on a knowledge of the product market

rather than experience of the impact of design in general. It also hints,
interestingly, that a lack of creativity may be an asset in judging the likely
reception of a design, since it could facilitate empathy with a public which
is assumed to be similarly uncreative.

What needs to be resolved in such cases is a disagreement over the visual

translation of the verbal, as it exists in the mind of the public. The outright
exercise of the power of the purchaser, is one means of settling the ques-
tion, as in the interview above. This is obviously a second best solution,
however, since it simply suppresses the input of the designer on the point.

140 Design Studies Vol 19 No 2 April 1998

DST: design studies (page 14 ) 08-09-98 15:33:05 Rev 14.02x ZDST$$118H

 Negotiating the question to a mutually satisfactory resolution, on the other
hand, involves all of the difficulties of resolving personal differences in
the verbal–visual dictionary, with the additional complication that it is the
dictionary as it exists in the mind of the public which is at issue, not the
perceptions of the participants themselves.

6 Implications
The major implication of this study is that the self-image of designers is
in some respects at odds with the manner in which they actually work. As
was illustrated in section 1, the graphic designers in our case study tended
to regard the verbal culture of their clients as alien to their own, predomi-
nantly visual practice. This is not a self-concept confined to graphic design.
Recently, the authors have attended a number of conferences at which
design practitioners of all kinds have prefaced their remarks which such
disclaimers as ‘I’m not really used to talking about my work.’ and ‘I’m a
doer, not a talker.’

As against this, it is clear from our interviews, that verbal work is an

integral part of all phases of graphic design. Much of this, furthermore,
takes the challenging form of a search for commonalties between designer
and client in the sense of translation between the verbal and the visual.
One has only to read a small sample of art criticism to gain a sense of
how difficult a task this can be, and yet it is one which is routinely
accomplished in the negotiation of a visual interpretation of the design
brief. In order to achieve this, designers need not only to be able to articu-
late the intentions behind their own visuals, but to interpret the visual inten-
tions implied by the verbal utterances of the client. Though these may not
be informed by the expertise of the designer — and the product managers
in our case study were quick to disclaim any such expertise — they need
nevertheless to be respected as constraints on the interpretations of the
brief which will be acceptable. This is not simply a matter of ‘giving the
customer what (s)he wants’. Rather, it is a development of mutual under-
standing in which the designer enables the client to articulate what (s)he
wants in visual terms.

Nor is this a one-off process. In a stable designer–client relationship such

as that observed in our case study, each new design both draws upon and
adds to the store of mutual understanding. In the metaphor we have
employed, it adds to the designer and client’s private dictionary of trans-
lation between the verbal and the visual. This, it was clear from our case
study, was an important asset. Frequently it enabled the bank’s product
managers to pick up a phone, brief the agency in a few words and expect
to receive a satisfactory design at very short notice.

Talking design: negotiating the verbal–visual translation 141

DST: design studies (page 15 ) 08-09-98 15:33:05 Rev 14.02x ZDST$$118H


17 Page, J Planning and pro-
test in N. Cross (ed) Design par-
ticipation Academy Editions,
London (1972) pp. 113–119
142
DST: design studies (page 16 )
It seems to us that the important ability to move fluently from the verbal
to the visual and back again was developed on the job by the agency
designers, and was also somewhat hindered by their view of themselves
as uneasy in a verbal culture. It is as if young designers view design as a
primarily a matter of individual self-expression, which just happens to take
place in an employment context which involves relationships with the cli-
ent and with other designers. If, on the other hand, these relationships are
regarded as integral to design, as is increasingly recognised in the literature
on design participation 4,16,17, the skills of verbal–visual translation must
also be recognised as integral to the design process. From this point of
view, ‘Talking design’ is design.
Acknowledgments
This paper is based on a research project on the use of product market
information in the design process sponsored by the UK Design Council,
to whom thanks are due. The opinions in the paper, however, are the
authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Design Council.
Design Studies Vol 19 No 2 April 1998
08-09-98 15:33:05 Rev 14.02x ZDST$$118H