Garry Emery: Singapore Institute of Management, April 2002

Shades of grey: thinking between

Im fascinated by how we think and how we get ideas. This
fascination comes out of years, actually decades now, of
designing typographic layouts, designing commercial and
cultural communications material of all kinds, designing
furniture and artefacts, and wayfinding systems for
buildings and cities.
Then reflecting on how design thinking develops.
Designing requires the development of particular kinds of
thinking, both logical and intuitive. But if there is too
much rational thinking, the outcome lacks spirit and
character. And too much intuitive thinking results in no
rigour or structure. Design thinking lies somewhere in
between rational and intuitive thinking, in between logic
and dreaming, in between the discipline of the message and
the poetry of imagination.
If I could pin down exactly what creative thinking entails,
or how we generate creative ideas,
I would be a very fortunate designer. Creativity always
entails an effort or struggle. If design is easy or
automatic, its probably not very effective. There seems to
be no clear path to creative thinking. Each designer or
artist approaches creative thinking in a unique way. We
lever our creative work off our own personal experiences and
subconscious energies as much as our professional training
and philosophical theories. And that accounts for the
infinite variety and diversity of creativity in all design
disciplines. But I observe that creative thinking boils down
to an interaction or a struggle between two essential types
of thinking: rational and intuitive. There is always a
dialogue going on between these two poles, a dialogue of
tension that is necessary to any constructive creative act.
My particular core discipline as a designer is typography:
the design, composition and ordering of letterforms.
Typography is the basic grammar of graphic design. Nearly
all visual communications employ typography, from books and
magazines to film, television and electronic media, as well
as buildings and urban environments. Designers select
specific styles and compositional arrangements of type to
command attention, interpret messages and to establish a
particular desired atmosphere. Some forms of typography are
so familiar that they recede, becoming a neutral background
to the function of reading. Other forms of typographic
design disrupt and actively engage the reader, combining,
distorting
and layering letters into unfamiliar compositions or
patterns that we have to work at to decode or read. A given
typeface plus the way it is composed or ordered can express
the identity of an organization, the interests of a market
group or the personal sensibility of a graphic designer.

Page 1 of 5

I am able to draw on my understanding of typography, and on

my passion for calligraphy and letterforms, to develop a
model of creative thinking that describes how I as a
designer might better understand what I do - and maybe this
model is also useful to someone working in another field
that depends on creative thinking, to help them better
understand how they might operate effectively. Its not a
formular for creative thinking, simply some reflections on
how creativity comes into being, from my experience.
Letterforms and calligraphy teach me certain basic things.
The black forms against the white field constitute a duality
or gestalt. The black forms do not have definition or
meaning without a contrasting background that sets them off;
and the white field is not a neutral agent. It enables the
letterforms to signify.
Positive - negative duality demands a holistic perception:
the typographer or calligrapher cannot think only in terms
of the black forms, or only in terms of the negative white
spaces, but must always simultaneously consider both the
entirety and the interaction of its constituent parts in
order to effectively communicate.
Good typography and creative thinking alike require a
simultaneous awareness of the whole gestalt well as its
separate components and details. This holistic thinking can
be seen as strategic or structural, and it operates in many
other fields apart from design. On the surface its so
simple. Negative and positive, yin and yang. A holistic
order where balance and harmony are fundamental to
establishing a unity of meaning necessary for communication
and good design. This harmony is not a recipe in itself for
creative thinking, but rather a goal.
The designer does not easily or immediately attain this goal
of balance, and not all typography is elegant and well
executed. So even with an awareness of the necessity for
meaningful duality, for the balanced interaction of negative
and positive, the designer still needs to acquire skill and
experience and to develop a natural sensibility in order to
control the tiny incremental subtleties of line thickness
and weight, and to judge the negative spaces and master the
whole duality of the system. Logical or rational thinking
wont help here.
The acquisition of skill and the application of judgement
become ingrained, second-nature thinking, part of a
designers personal creative process, accessed intuitively
from the unconscious and memory, and without too much
interference from rationalisation.
Its grey area thinking: somewhere between the extremes of
purely logical and purely intuitive thought. This is not to
suggest that this grey area thinking is not susceptible to
analysis, although many sophisticated designers do not like
to delve too far into the wellspring of their creativity,
preferring to simply allow it to flow.

Page 2 of 5

But I persist in trying to establish how the design process

works for me. And I keep coming back to this idea of
duality. An idea of duality seems basic to human nature and
perception. We think easily in binary terms: light-dark,
male-female, sun-moon, on-off, big-small, happy-sad. A
particular quality is best understood in terms of its
opposite. There is no good without bad. To communicate
effectively, it is often useful to draw such distinctions
dramatically, underscoring the difference or opposition
between things in order to sharpen meaning.
The technical processes of communication can be understood
in terms of a polarity: redundancy and disruption.
Redundancy is repetition. Disruption is a breaking apart,
disorder. A certain amount of redundancy is necessary to
communicate effectively.
We repeat the message we want to convey in order to get the
point across. But redundancy also makes people tune out;
they have heard it before; there is nothing new.
So if we want to communicate effectively, we must insert
something new, something disruptive, to keep peoples
attention and to convey meaning. The classic model to
demonstrate how disruption works conveying meaning is a
joke. The punch line of a joke is always disruptive. Thats
the point where we learn something new. Arthur Kessler
regarded the joke as the paradigm of the creative act, the
reconciliation of two paradoxical ideas in an explosion of
revelation and meaning.
Disruption is essential to creative thinking. Perpetual
sameness in design is similar to and constantly satisfying
that expectation leads to staleness and loss of meaning.
Just think how saying the same thing over and over
diminishes its meaning. Have a nice day.
In my own work I have always been conscious of using
disruption as a creative tactic to heighten perception:
utilising surrealist images, unexpected conjunctions of
opposites or different frames of reference that the viewer
has to reconcile mentally to find the meaning.
In order to make a message memorable, its important to
disturb or unsettle viewers to some extent, to produce an
idea or inflection they were not expecting. This is often
achieved through paradox, or the presence of two opposing
ideas.
Another duality that fascinates me is that of signs and
emblems. Signs are rational.
Emblems are emotive. I design signs or signage, for
wayfinding, building identification, public information
systems. But letterforms and words in themselves are also
signs.
They signify, they stand for something. My dictionary gives
the meaning for sign as something that serves to indicate

Page 3 of 5

the presence or existence of something. A sign is quite a

direct, rational thing. An emblem, in contrast, is more
oblique in the ways it conveys information. Emblems are
metaphorical: visual representations suggesting qualities,
feelings, emotions.
When I think of typography and calligraphy, I can see that
Roman letterforms are signs, whereas Chinese characters are
emblems; and it is tempting to see in this broad distinction
perhaps two different ways of thinking and two different
cultural approaches. It confirms my own sense that Western
thought tends towards being black and white, whereas Eastern
thought allows more shades of grey. I cannot say how true
these generalisations are, but to me they are useful in
reinforcing an idea that creative thinking demands both ways
of thinking, rational and intuitive, direct and subtle.
But its interesting too that today Roman letterforms are
being used in more emblematic and emotive ways. The computer
is responsible for this. In the old days of hot metal,
typesetting was a separate technical process from the
production of images. Now designers on the computer process
both type and images simultaneously with the choice of
thousands of different type fonts, giving designers
limitless possibilities to express or suggest different
meanings, to employ type emblematically rather than always
as the sober signs for information. Simply by putting the
same message into different typefaces, we can see how the
meaning of the message is altered. If for instance, you were
to see the words of President George W Bushs recent State
of the Union address typeset in a red Coca-Cola typeface, it
would read as an ironic commentary on American imperialism.
The same words typeset in letters decorated with red white
and blue stars and stripes would read as a proud declaration
of American patriotism. The computer allows designers to
explore the emotive meanings behind the rational message,
and in the process the Roman alphabet is being used in more
pictorial and emblematic ways.
My analysis of creative thinking is based on an idea that
binary thinking, polarities, and paradoxes are somehow wired
in to human thought and natural to the way designers and
artists think. When two opposing elements are brought
together, there is always an explosion or a reconciliation.
Either way, the chemistry of opposites produces a new
meaning.
But in this model of dualities, what about inspiration? How
much does creative thinking depend on the wonderful original
idea that magically appears from thin air? Inspiration
happens, but usually when you are not expecting it. As a
method of creating, I think we have to discount inspiration,
because it can be so erratic. Creative thinking does at
times produce those eureka moments of realisation, when the
designer suddenly sees everything in a new light, but these
moments are generally the culmination of much brainstorming

Page 4 of 5

and research. Someone who knew what he was saying once

remarked that creation is ten percent inspiration and ninety
percent perspiration; and I agree. Inspiration in design
generally takes the form of realising that a particular
solution will effectively satisfy several different criteria
at the same time. Then you know you are on the right track.
Our modern world is obsessed with the idea of the creative
genius. Originality and novelty are everything. The designer
as ego is big business, with architecture, fashion,
furniture heavily marketed on the basis of the big name
design gurus.
But Buddhists believe that all possibilities already exist,
and that creativity depends not on originality but on what
choices we make at a given moment. There is nothing new
under the sun. Creative thinking becomes a process of
discovery rather than invention, and the designer is an
explorer on a journey.

Page 5 of 5