Years ago, while working as a graphic designer, I presented a project logo to my client, an NGO. After a brief review, one of the board members said the logo reminded him of a gun. No one else, by any measure, could see what he was talking about, but everyone, while agreeing that it was a great logo, certainly didn’t want their project associated with guns.

I repeat, no one else could see how this logo (that everyone else loved) could ever be mistaken for a gun. Nevertheless, the clients curled up into conservatism, and disabused themselves of any associations with imaginary guns and the logo was changed, changed again and again. No one, not even me, remembers how it turned out. As to why the NGO’s project ultimately failed…

As always there are those who reveal their asininity (as they did throughout his career) with ascriptions like “salesman”, “showman” or the giveaway blunder “triumph of style over substance”. The use of that last phrase, “style over substance” has always been, as Oscar Wilde observed, a marvellous and instant indicator of a fool. For those who perceive a separation between the two have either not lived, thought, read or experienced the world with any degree of insight, imagination or connective intelligence. It may have been Leclerc Buffon who first said “le style c’est l’homme — the style is the man” but it is an observation that anyone with sense had understood centuries before. Only dullards crippled into cretinism by a fear of being thought pretentious could be so dumb as to believe that there is a distinction between design and use, between form and function, between style and substance.

That last sentence is, with out a doubt, my favourite piece of design commentary for 2011.

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