This is a point sure to spark a lot of debate and to divide any room of designers – half proclaiming that there are no rules in design, the other protesting that there are many. And technically, they’re both right.
As with any skill, there are things you have to learn, and this comes with general rules. Things like: make sure your type is legible, learn to kern, don’t use pixelated images, etc. These are the foundations of design, the things that help you make a basic design.
But, as many argue, once you’ve learnt these rules, it’s definitely time to break them.
Let’s look at an example that deliberately breaks the rules big time. This poster by Shahir Zag deliberately breaks some cardinal typographical rules in order to make a (very true) joke.
Another example of a rule breaker that you’ll certainly come across during your design adventures is David Carson. Carson was an avant garde grunge designer for publications such as Ray Gun Magazine where he produced shocking, dynamic, and rule-bending spread designs that are still admired today.
One of the beloved anecdotes about Carson is his layout for an interview with musician Bryan Ferry. Having read over the content and deciding that the interview was pretty dull, Carson chose to execute the entire interview in Zapf Dingbats (a Wingdings-like, symbol-based font) rendering it totally unreadable. Check out the spread below.
Carson’s basic ethos when it came to design was ‘don’t mistake legibility for communication’.
Carson and other rule-breaking designers are often choosing to communicate different ideas to you by breaking the rules. The ‘migraine’ poster by Shahir Zag we previously discussed breaks the rules in order to make a joke, and Carson’s spread breaks the rules in order to make a point about that interview.
So, while the legibility is a little compromised, the communication definitely is not.
Following the rules and breaking them each have their own places in the world of design. Take everything with a grain of salt and learn as much as you can so that you can break and bend the rules the right way and make a memorable splash.