Determining value in a design product, is really little more than seeing where a basket of goods is positioned relative to a preset array of demographic, aesthetic, promotional and financial vectors. This is to say, that the things we see as valuable in the arts space, are considered as such for contextual and subjective reasons. People can like what they like due to personal tastes, but when art begins to infiltrate the business and promotional space, people can like what they like because a given piece speaks to a combination of factors including target age, production quality/level of finish, visual relevance to messaging intent, and cost of acquisition. Much of the fundamental difference between art and design can be found in how we assess these factors. Art does not have to regard any of the aforementioned factors to be definitively good or bad: people just have to like it. Inversely, design is a process of scope, and because of this, even if someone does not aesthetically like a design, they can still value it for the sake of its intended purpose, and ability to attack certain production-related bullet points. This should also portend to the fact that a design can be aesthetically pleasing, but of absolutely no value to the client, should it be of little or no relevance to the scope of the design's commission intent. 

Clients who do not understand this, can be generally insufferable to work with. The reason why is because while the client may have whatever tastes that they may, usually there is a disconnect in understanding that just as much as a lot can be done with very little, very little can also be done with seemingly a lot.

This isn't to say that the design process should be considerably "lazy" by any means, it just means that sometimes the ideation process can lead to simple, yet effective concepts... And when these concepts come by, we better damn well make sure to notice them.

One such example of this philosophy would be the work that I did for my friend Kyree Little from Fayetteville, NC. While still a member of the former NC Hip Hop collective, No9To5, he approached me with an album art concept for what would ultimately be one of his last projects, a piece called Limitless, released under his moniker, Topiq The Smooth Prophet.

Typically, the best clients are ones that give their creatives the free reign to explore concepts with respect to a preferred aesthetic. Working with Kyree in the past, I already knew that he was a great client to commission work from me, and as predicted, I was given free reign. The only problem is that working with the idea of being limitless can lead to a conceptual hellscape of potential ends and creative concepts. This is to say that, while free reign is usually an asset to the design process 99% of the time, that remaining 1% represents the times when a process can be perilously open-ended.

I do believe in such a thing as being too open-ended. Typically, when given a contract, I like to have a general set of ideas that I can quickly conscript as basis points to build actual designs. This assists in me being able to create ideas and concepts in a fairly quick fashion, and give clients their product with relatively quick turnaround.

Coming into Limitless, it took a little bit longer than usual to put together the design. Typically, working with No9To5 would involve a relatively fast process where the client would usually be very pleased with what was given. While Kyree wasn't a picky client, I was a picky designer. Because of this, what would usually be a 2-day process was strung out to 1.5 weeks, and mostly so that I could come up with a concept to pin-down a perceptibly unpinnable idea.

Delivering on the contract came down to realizing a couple of things. The first is that going for a high-entropy product could very well run the risk of muddying the greater interpretation of the album concept. Thus, going for simplicity would distinctly be an asset, but we shouldn't confuse simplicity for being basic. Because of trying to understand the liabilities of higher-entropy design, the second thing I came to was that the concept could easily, and appropriately, be pinned down with symbolism. This is much of how the infinity symbol became a major design consideration on the album artwork.

The next step would be to try and anchor this symbol to things that we understand to be limitless. This is how I came to a juxtaposition between using the horizon shot above the clouds as the image's background, while layer masking a nebula into the infinity symbol to take the image further.

Upon delivering the product to Kyree, he loved it,. After the contract closed, he put the artwork on his albums and sent it out. A few weeks later, I was greeted to the pleasant surprise of finding my work on 2DopeBoyz, The Source and many other nationally-recognized hip-hop websites where not just the music was considered in high regard, but the album artwork was too. This is the type of thing that any designer in the music space wishes for.

Ultimately, with all of the logo considerations, 1.5 weeks of conceptualization lead to what any expert designer would tell you is 10 minutes of design time. But sometimes, that is what it takes. The effect of going for simplicity is creating not just a product that feels clean and streamlined, but also one that allows for a third party to come to their own conclusions about the concept itself. The reality of doing something highly complex, detailed and graphic is that going for visually more could run the risk of in fact, limiting a concept that deserves to be open to interpretation. In many ways, I believe that it would have produced a countervailing artistic effect.

I think the closing point is to trust the process. In my case, I was unimpressed with my own work, and in many ways, somewhat underwhelmed by the conclusions I came to after so much time conceptualizing the artwork. But when it was presented next to the rest of the creative concepts for limitless, it was the one that the client loved, and went on to be picked up by major promotional channels. This is to say that while high entropy work can be compelling, and low entropy work can be streamlined, ultimately, entropy itself is a tool to be leveraged contextually. If not, then it can be difficult to discern the moments when more is less and, most importantly, when less is more.