By Gordon Rugg
Making a design interesting can be a significant challenge for designers, particularly when working in a well-established field.
Two simple but effective ways of making a design interesting are:
- making the design novel, in terms of deep structure and/or surface structure
- making the design difficult or impossible to parse.
Both these approaches have a long history in applied design, though usually without much explicit reference to the underlying principles.
This article discusses the underlying principles, and then looks at practical implications for making a design novel. I’ll look at the issue of parsing a design in a separate article, for reasons of space.
