As designers we all face the dilemma from time to time of having to intentionally sacrifice design in favor of good old fashion usability. While all of us [as designers] love a slick clean layout or a snazzy glitz filled colorful design, many designers often overlook the simple utilitarian designs as plain or even ugly. Designs are designs, whether they are for aesthetics or simply for utility. As a prepress technician as well as a graphic designer I've seen plenty of over-designed artwork where the design itself has usurped the relevance of the information on the page. Keeping in mind that there really isn't a right way to design a printed piece, lets look at a couple generalized printed items where simple utility is frequently more important than ground-breaking graphic designs.

First lets look at one of the more commonly over-designed items: the lowly #10 envelope. This of course is your standard postal envelope used for sending letters, invoices, statements, etc from a business. It has always amazed me the number of times I've seen envelopes with large involved multi or full color graphics (and frequently with bleeds on one or more sides). Before we get into the design specifically lets look at the life cycle of a typical envelope within the business environment. The envelope lives initially in a box or drawer until the time comes to send a letter, invoice, etc. It is pulled out of the dark place it's been hiding, someone jams a couple sheets of folded paper into it and proceeds to address it (by hand or with a label) and throw a stamp on it. The envelope is then handed off to the postman (via pickup or postal drop) where it slips into the U.S. Postal Service's intricate and apparently highly technical post mangling equipment. Once run through the literal wringer of automated machinery its carried by hand through the rain, sleet, and snow, then the battered envelope is tossed irreverently into a mailbox or falls to the floor through a mail slot. The recipient then picks it up, glances at the outside of the envelope briefly, and proceeds to either toss the envelope directly into the trash or rip/slice the envelope open, extract it's contents, then throw the envelope in the trash.

So lets take a look at that envelope lifecycle for a moment; apart from the graphic designer and business man who purchased the envelopes, the only person to really see the design on the envelope is the recipient. The recipient only glances at the envelope itself long enough to determine who it's from and if they want to open it. Regardless of the users decision to open the envelope it is summarily discarded as trash at some point. So the question is? Why put extra design [and expense] into the envelope when a more utilitarian design could be just as effective? Food for thought. This is one of those cases where a simple cost effective design is probably much more suited to the purpose of the envelope. That being said, if the envelope contains perhaps unsolicited sales & marketing materials then a heavily designed envelope meant to prevent the mailing from being discarded unopened is likely warranted.

Consider now a user's manual or instruction manual. This type of printed material should be simple, clear, concise and easily readable thus so should it's design. Could you have a busy background behind the text, full color pages all the way though, or use a font for the text with a particular flourish to the letterforms? Sure, but is it the best choice? I'd likely argue that it isn't. Clean high contrast black on white possibly using color in a limited fashion as accents or for textual highlighting would most likely result in a much more usable manual where the goal, and purpose, is for the user to access information quickly and easily.

So whats this mean? It means that as designers we shouldn't design just for the sake of designing. Always keep the purpose and usage of the item your working on in mind when considering how much design really needs to go into that item. Sometimes the best choice is to simply keep it simple.