The Mysterious Affair of Style or “How do you (and should you in fact) find your style in data visualization?“
It was the doom scrolling the internet plagued us with. Hours and hours fixated on the screen, reviewing hundreds of tempting options, pulling the best looking ones on different tabs. At the beginning, they all look promising—the charisma of this one, the playfulness of the other, ouuh, and the refined style of this one! But at closer inspection, not one of them fit. Too slender or too fat, too immature or too serious, too energetic or too sloppy: How is it that the more choices we have, the less we find what we’re looking for? Maybe you’re bound to find the one when you stop looking, purely by chance—that’s usually how it works. At last, I closed all the open tabs on my computer. I would find the perfect font for this project later.
Someone sent me a typeface once on Instagram, saying it made her think of me. Could you imagine a better compliment for a designer? The font had a very datacitron feel to it, according to her. At first, it made me gleam, but then I thought ‘Do I always use the same type of font so that people instinctively associate me with it?’ That got me worried.
The fact is, I’ve been asked about style, more particularly how to find your style, quite a few times already and that question always leaves me with a bittersweet taste. It’s obviously meant as some compliment. It is, after all, the most literal form of recognition—your work is unmistakably identified as yours. It bears a mark, a signature, that makes it surface from the crowded ocean of everyday productions. But what if it floats only because it’s empty? Is having a style, having your signature, a good thing?
For the longest time, I had no style and, of course, I was mortified by it. I would do all sorts of projects in my former creative agency and no one would look alike. My babies were the kind of eclectic collection that any casting director of a Benetton ad would dream of. Obviously, I didn’t think of it as something good. I didn’t think I was a versatile designer, able to produce in a wide range of styles; I just thought I had none. It bothered me enough that, one day, I decided to reach out to a former art teacher of mine with my portfolio and this lament: Why don’t I have a personal style and by what spell could I make it appear? She only had an answer to the first one, but in such an enlightening way that it put me at-rest on the matter for years to come.
She said, “Oh, but you do have a style, you just don’t see it. You’d see it better if you look less at what you do and more at what you don’t do when designing.” And sure enough, squeezing my eyes to focus on negative space, there it was: The embryo of a style, of my style! There were definitely a couple of things I would consistently keep myself away from: I didn’t care much for realistic illustrations, I loved colors but only in limited palettes, not in Camaieu, I avoided white background and grid design was clearly not my thing. Even today, when my style is now sufficiently affirmed that I could express it positively through what I do, I still prefer to define it via things I tend not to do—I rarely use more than 3 or 4 colors, I very much don’t like to align everything, I almost never ever use color on fonts and I refuse to use plain black or plain white, only tainted ones. The negative list could go on and on.
When you start to see style as a funnel that slowly guides in and out certain design tendencies, everything gets clearer, everything gets more natural. For you’re no longer actively trying to piece something together from the myriads of options surrounding you, you simply acknowledge how some of them fade in the background while others tend to be at a closer reach. Project after project—especially personal ones that bear less external constraints—more of those gravitating elements drift out of your field of attraction while the remaining chosen ones become your trusted satellites. A gravitational system emerges around you, almost by itself, with elements to pick up and combine while designing, ultimately carrying your signature.
Still, a question persistently nags me: If style is a funnel, how do you prevent it from turning so narrow that it eventually becomes clogged? Imagine a system so sleek that it just keeps repeating the same revolution of a few satellites, forever and ever, until everything turns out so predictable that it loses all interest. Every project echoing the former and presaging of the next. How do you still make sure an asteroid comes crashing from time to time to shake things up and create new moons?
And that’s why I always feel a bit icky when someone mentions my style. I can’t help but wonder if developing a signature is fundamentally a good thing. Could it be the warning sign that you’re stiffening, settling in a comfortable hole instead of exploring new paths? Sure, like everybody else, I want to be a rockstar, crowd screaming and people fainting every time I design a bar chart, but not the mummified one that keeps playing the same old hits, instead of writing new albums! The whole enigma is there: How do you keep evolving while still being recognizable?
That’s a heady question that dances in the back of my mind every time I start a new mission and it’s what keeps me on my toes while looking for a new font for this project. Don’t follow any former train paths, Julie, try something new, something fresh. After hours of browsing every foundry I could think of until I probably needed a new prescription from my optician, I finally found the gem I was looking for and downloaded it. As I installed it, I stretched on my chair and let out a sigh of relief, rubbing my sore eyes, not having noticed yet the alert that had popped up on my screen: This font is already uploaded in the library, do you want to upload it again?
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Datacitron (aka Julie Brunet) is an independent data & information designer as well as the Creative Director of Nightingale, the journal of Datavisualization Society. She believes in the accessibility of information through design and storytelling, and the virtuous role data designers can play in our society
