Recently, I’ve been returning to the same question in my design work:
Is my work identifiable?
This has driven many of the decisions behind what I’ve included in my portfolio, the stylistic elements I use, and the (perhaps unnecessary) design flourishes that I include in my work.
The instinct makes sense. But the way I’ve pursued it so far, through what’s seen on the surface, has a ceiling that I’m starting to bump up against. The more interesting model comes from an unexpected place: hip-hop production.
Two ways of signing your name
Tagging in music production is an art in and of itself. Producer tags are memorable, culturally sticky, and completely effective in communicating authorship. A listener knows who orchestrated the sounds that foreground an artist’s words before those words are spoken.
However, they announce authorship from the outside in. A producer tag is usually a label that’s placed on top of a work rather than inside it. It’s a label in all the useful ways: clear, distinct, and wholly separate from what’s underneath.
Pharrell Williams does things differently by fully incorporating his spirit into his productions. His audience knows that the distinct four-count opening is his. Instead of being externalized from the song, it’s the first expression of the philosophy that informs every arrangement he composes. His listeners’ ears know that he produced a track before their minds do.
I’m of the opinion that this distinction matters for designers.
Why surface signatures have ceilings
Surface signatures are identifiable but superficial. If a work is recognizable by its visual style (color scheme, typography, layout, etc.), then the recognition is real, but it can also be replicable, dilatable, or succeeded by the very trends that made it popular.
It’s equally important to consider that when a signature is decorative, it doesn’t travel. Yes, it works for the types of projects that can display it, but the philosophy behind it (the part that actually belongs to you) is not conveyed. Anyone can steal your aesthetics without inheriting your thinking, because the aesthetics are tacked onto the surface and can be just as easily peeled away.
A structural signature is different in that it comprises decisions. It can manifest itself in your treatment of empty space, your handling of hierarchy, in what you always remove in your work, and in how you think about the feelings a product should have versus the functions. It is the repeated action that occurs in every artifact from the construction visual identity to the design of the data tables, and everything in between. Although they may not seem similar because they look different, what is shared between them can be felt, because they embody a common design philosophy.
Issey Miyake’s structural signature lay in designing generative systems, namely pleats, folds, cuts, and movement, from which garments could take form.
What structural signatures look like in practice
Dieter Rams designed his widely-acclaimed work for Braun using a design language predicated on a conviction that nothing on a brand surface should be placed there without reason. He meticulously ensured that every included element had a justification for its existence. What appeared to be simplicity was in fact a complexity behind the interfaces that actually prevented the feeling of complexity. A product can thereby apply the same principles to feel “Braun-like” without recycling visual elements. Rams used principles to generate form instead of having form borrow principles.
Braun Atelier HiFi Stereo System by Dieter Rams, exemplifying his philosophy of having "as little design as possible"
The same applied to Apple under the design leadership of Jony Ive. His designs were expressed through soft geometry, material honesty, and ceremony around each unveiling. All of these were embodiments of his (and consequently of Apple’s) philosophy of designing products that demonstrated the amount of effort put into their making. Again, the same philosophy can be seen in products that look different, because it’s structural and not stylistic.
"Our goal is to make something that is better"
More recently, companies like Linear and Teenage Engineering have achieved something similar. Without becoming homogeneous, their work has tells, whether those be a density of thought in their interface, a particular relationship between function and feeling, or a refusal to let friction masquerade as depth. Once more, you can recognize their sensibility in products they’ve never touched, because it’s a set of values rather than an amalgam of aesthetics.
Linear has become known for lavishing an almost absurd degree of care on even the most trivial-seeming details of its interfaces.The Teenage Engineering OP-1 Portable Synthesizer, a marvel of design and engineering
For forces of design like these, the aesthetics follow the values, and the values themselves are the signature.
Structural signatures are accruals
What I find both frustrating and exciting about this structural kind of signature is that you can’t easily make one for yourself or for a brand; instead, it accumulates.
A structural signature is what you’re left with after making enough decisions that certain patterns become automatic. Instead of an aspiration, it’s something that’s descriptive. It’s a pattern that begins to form in your work, whether you’re aware of it or not.
Pharrell never set out to create his signature. When speaking on it in an interview, he explained that “sometimes you put a count in so you can start on a beat versus just doing a metronome. If you want to sing at the top of the song, sometimes you just end up leaving it in the song. But I never meant to.” He didn’t even recognize it as a pattern until someone else pointed it out: “I wish I had some kind of profound answer, but I’m really a feeling guy; I don’t always look at what it is that I’m doing on paper conceptually.”
The fact that it was an accident is what fascinates me the most. It wasn’t born as a symbol of authorship for the music; it was born out of the process of making music in a decision made enough times to become a familiar pattern.
A building cannot be made from the outside in. The questions that I ask myself now are:
“What do I do without fail when I’m given complete creative freedom?”
“What do I always remove in my designs?”
“What are some decisions that feel wrong to me, even when I can’t articulate why?”
As they develop, these patterns will be the building blocks for my work. I suspect that they are already there in their nascent forms and I haven’t been able to spot them yet because I’ve been thinking about the surface rather than the patterns beneath. I’ve always asked:
“What does my work look like?”
When the more valuable question is:
“What does my work consistently do?”
It’s not a hierarchy
Just as producer tags have practical uses, so do the surfaces signatures of visual artists and designers.
But for a practice built with longevity in mind, the structural signature is more durable. This structure changes according to context but never fully disappears. It survives fads and trends. It’s a common whisper echoing through projects that have no connection with one another otherwise.
The best signatures accrue and become distinctive not because they were made that way, but because there was something behind them that was consistent, principled, and repeated.
