(Apologies to Josef Albers)

A friend of mine was recently accepted to the MBA program at Stanford. Somehow we got onto the topic of the essays required for his application—especially one in particular:

Essay 1: What matters most to you, and why?

The best examples of Essay 1 reflect the process of self-examination that you have undertaken to write them. They give us a vivid and genuine image of who you are—and they also convey how you became the person you are. They do not focus merely on what you’ve done or accomplished. Instead, they share with us the values, experiences, and lessons that have shaped your perspectives. They are written from the heart and address not only a person, situation, or event, but also how that person, situation, or event has influenced your life.

What was perhaps even more perplexing than the nature of the question itself, was that his response was not to exceed 750 words. (For comparison’s sake, the word count for the instructions alone total 107.) He found the limitations reminiscent of Twitter’s 140 character cap—only in this case, there was no bit.ly available to condense a thoughtful or nuanced response into a meaningful short-form proxy that would satisfy the requirements.

We live in an era where personal communications are becoming less meaningful and increasingly truncated—friending someone on Facebook after years of lost contact requires a single click to either “Confirm” or “Send Request,” auto-generating a stock email to the recipient. Shouldn’t we have to work harder than this to stay in touch? The act of writing a letter or email is valuable to both writer and recipient because it requires curiosity, commitment, reflection, and often a bit of self-consciousness.

That’s not to say that I don’t see the inherent value in how technology is enabling our ability to share and access information, via links, tags, Tweets, what have you. I just ask that as with all good design, we consider the form most appropriate to both the content contained therein and the context in which it is viewed. Stanford’s question around an applicant’s personal values begs for more than the length of this blog entry, and truthfully, I feel incredibly fortunate to have chosen a profession where my acceptance to schools and jobs has been largely evaluated on the basis of a portfolio.

Writing is an incredibly daunting and difficult exercise for me; throughout the years, I’ve relied predominantly on my visual—not my verbal—vocabulary as a means to inquiry and expression. And while I wouldn’t classify myself as a minimalist, my tendencies as a designer are to develop a rationale for every gesture, thereby avoiding or eliminating that which isn’t deemed essential. However, I don’t apply these same economics to language. When I do write, I tend to overwrite—as if more clarification, more detail, more words can somehow work less hard, so as to more evenly distribute the burden of communicating that which I’m attempting to convey.

Hence the title of this blog.