This week I was asked to design a poster and several pieces of digital ephemera for the Philosophy Student Union. No problem. I love poster design because it’s an opportunity to think outside of the brand’s global identity and play with new techniques and styles. The union doesn’t have a strong brand identity outside of a colour palette, a font and a logo. This is great because I can get away with so much and still remain on brand. So was excited! A new project with a lot of freedom to make something unique. 

The Event: A casual get-together with donuts and coffee provided.
The Name: Philosofun

However, little did I know that a deeper and more abstract problem lay in wait. 

The Problem:

Okay, wait, if my only tangible prompt was ‘fun,’ I had questions: What is fun? 

Or, more specifically, how is fun demonstrated in visual language? Is fun something we impose on design elements through context, or is there some inherent principle that screams fun? It may seem like a silly question, but when a designer is given very little to work with, the process of conceptualization requires no stone unturned!

For example, let’s focus on the latter question: are there *things* we can say are inherently fun? To scrutinize this, let’s take a well-worn typographic debate: Comic Sans.  We say that Times New Roman is more formal(not fun) than Comic Sans(fun?), making it an appropriate typographic choice when conveying serious information. Which makes sense, doesn’t it? Can we imagine the word ‘ambulance’ in Comic Sans on the side of an emergency vehicle?  If this is true, which it seems to be, it’s justifiable to wonder if there are design choices that are inherently(in the strong sense of contingency) more serious, fun, sombre, etc. However, it doesn’t seem satisfying to say that the design concepts inherently contain fun. 

If such inherent qualities exist within our design principles, we have a metaphysical issue: Which specific attribute does fun arise from? That seems baffling because no one points at Comic Sans and says, “This font is inherently fun because of its rounded terminals or because its x-height is exaggerated.

So if what is fun isn’t inherent to some design principles, it could be contextual or socially constructed. This is prima facie more reasonable, and we can use a bit of modal thinking to justify it. 

We can imagine a world where Comic Sans is accepted as a font for formal information.  A world where government correspondence, funerary notifications, wills, and legal documents are all typeset in Comic Sans. There is nothing contradictory in imaging this, so at least we can say it’s logically possible.

Therefore in the world, as it is, it just so happens that our current cultural norms exclude Comic Sans from being appropriate for formal usage for all the typical reasons that typographers throughout modern history have bemoaned its usage. This is satisfactory for the philosophy of my question, but the problem remains: How does one demonstrate fun in design?

Fun is a bad word

Not a bad word like an expletive. Fun is bad because it lacks descriptive power. What’s fun for me may not be fun for you. So, if I photoshop a picture of myself at home with a glass of wine and a book, there is nothing guaranteed that this ‘fun’ would translate to other people’s interpretation. Similarly, whatever is fun about having free coffee and meeting academics is also contingently fun. I needed to distill whatever fun means into something universal enough for everyone. First, I attempted typography.

Not a home run. I asked for advice from my fiance, and she told me that my “fun” looked suss (suspicious). Who demonstrates fun like this? Perhaps some business convincing its consumer that their product is fun. I busted a gut hearing this. Not only was she right, but it reminded me of a meaningful limit to typography. Typography is like glass. It exists, but you are meant to ‘see through’ it. It isn’t meant to do the heavy lifting of the content, only accentuate. What I had done was an attempt to ‘convince’ the audience that the concept was fun through design when in fact, it should have been present in some foundational sense.  

I decided I needed to focus on the imagery to suggest the fun. So I opened up Illustrator and attempted to demonstrate fun through a reimagining of a picture. I took a well-known image of Plato and Aristotle, turned it into a coloured line drawing and imposed smiley faces and coffee in the picture.

Don’t they look like they’re having fun? While design elements lack an inherent property of something like fun, a smile seems to be a better contender for signifying fun. As for the typography, I pivoted to something simpler. Finally, here is the finished product for the digital ephemera.

Thus I completed my task, but not without succumbing to days of inner dialogue.

What do you think? Are there other universal ways we convey meaning to ambiguous words, like fun?