More from less

I had invited the wonderful graphic designer Abram Games to my final-year show. He was my design hero, but I never expected him to come.

The last thing he said to me at the show - after berating me for using too many typefaces - was to reiterate his philosophy of ‘Maximum Meaning, Minimum Means’

Abram wanted to wind a spring within a design that would unwind in the mind of the observer. But to do that, he needed to make something so simple, so compressed, so condensed and clear that it could be comprehended from a distance (intellectual or literal). He did this to great effect in his anti-nazi posters from the 1940s.

‘To get it down to its simplicity so that it talked from 50 yards, that was the difficulty.’

But Abram Games’s philosophy has taken on another meaning in the modern age. We’re fighting a different war. We live in a resource-scarce World where our excesses of consumption mount up in landfills. Our job as designers is to use resources wisely.

This became my obsession - to think. To think so hard that it hurts. To use the minimum amount of resources to extract the maximum amount of meaning. To distill, edit, and rearrange until meaning is uncovered.

So much so, that Abram inspired me to write my descriptor on this platform - ‘Helping people, organizations, and the planet derive the most value from the least amount of resources.’

It’s all very well to say that you want to be efficient, but the proof is in the practice. That’s how I measure my success if there is any at all. Not by awards, fancy titles (although I love to play with titles as irony), or self-ascribed expertise. I like to measure success through simplicity and meaning,

This leads me to why I’m writing this. I recently shared work that I completed for the ski-tech brand CARV executed so wonderfully by my team at CCO. But in the case study, one thing that I’m deeply proud of got a little lost. The strategic idea: ‘Ski To Learn’.

It’s easy to think of ‘Ski To Learn’ as a tagline, or piece of advertising copy. But it’s not. We didn’t arrive at the thought until we’d completed a review of the company, its customers, and the market until we reviewed every piece of communication the company had made. ‘Ski To Learn’ is a summation. It is an accurate understanding of the company philosophy and the user motivation.

‘Ski To Learn’ described, as my dear friend Paul Valerio put it,  “the meditative approach to performance. You only get better by doing, and there is no endpoint. It’s why zen meditation is referred to as a practice; the doing of it is the point and how you get better is by doing it.”

‘Ski To Learn’ took three words from a well-known axiom about skiing, that has existed as long as the sport, and transformed the meaning into something that actually describes the mindset just by rearranging the words.

Nothing was invented or created, just uncovered and reorganized. A true expression of minimum means — whether it has maximum meaning is up to you.

A concise and short biography of Abram by the great Jim Carroll here: