A problem that everyone faces every day is how to convey information effectively. The information is generally verbal, visual, or both. Do you make your case in only a few words or deliver a lengthy speech? Do you show up for a first date wearing heels or flats? Do you best convince consumers to buy brand X rather than brand Y through a jingle, a motto, a logo, or some clever combination of media?
All of these are questions of style, and I was recently reminded of how George Tscherny, a giant of mid-century graphic design who died on November 13, described his work: “minimum means: maximum meaning.” George was my uncle, married for seventy years to my father’s late sister, Sonia. In one way, he and I could not have been more different: he had exquisite visual sense whereas mine is, well, challenged. Still, his visual sensibility very much included the verbal, and we shared an appreciation for the ways in which fonts accentuate (or, in the wrong hands, detract from) meaning. By inclination and training a linguist, I have always gravitated to art that centers around words; it took me years to realize that this is probably in no small part the result of childhood explorations in the paradoxically down-to-earth Wunderkammer that was his and Sonia’s lovely townhouse on East Seventy-second Street.
From the linguistic point of view, “minimum means: maximum meaning” is a highly effective sound bite. It embodies the principle of iconicity that stands at the center of good visual—and, though this is less often recognized, also verbal—design: how something is expressed is intimately related to the content of the expression.
The phrase works because of the snappy interplay between similarity and difference. (As I believe Tscherny would have agreed, it would work even better on the page with a balancing space to the left of the colon as well as to the right: “minimum means : maximum meaning.”) First, the similarities. All four words begin with m; two of these words also have two more ms apiece; three of them have one or more instance of the other nasal consonant, n; and almost all the vowels are pronounced high in the mouth (long and short i) or as neutral schwas.
The exceptional vowel is the first one in “maximum,” where, thanks to what is sometimes known as “size-sound symbolism” (or the “sound-magnitude effect”), the combination of the low a and the double consonant x (i.e., ks, with k pronounced further back in the mouth than any of the consonants so far: m, n, and s) makes the word feel appropriately much heavier than “minimum,” which trips lightly off the tongue. It is attractive that the weight of both elements increases rightward across the colon: not only is there a move from “minimum” to “maximum,” but “meaning” adds a syllable to “means.” And there is the added delight that the words “means” and “meaning” are semantically far apart—no surprise to the lexicographer since they have entirely different histories—and yet work together beautifully in context.
This is how a linguist thinks about such things. I leave to those with a proper artistic temperament the task of using words to describe how a great designer regularly achieves “m.m.m.m.” in images. But just a glance at some of Tscherny’s work (e.g., here, here, here, here, here, here, and here) will show that he succeeded, time and again.
A favorite Tscherny poster of mine is one he designed for the 1978 television documentary series When Havoc Struck, sponsored by Mobil. I was eight when it was plastered all over bus stops in New York, and—though I don’t suppose I would have been able to articulate this at that age—it was immediately clear what made it so good. To be sure, the opportunity to illustrate the phrase “havoc struck” was a gift: the off-kilter near-rhyme is foreboding, and the word havoc itself has an unusual structure that gnaws at the mind of anyone attentive to the niceties of English. Very few words in the language end in -oc, and if we exclude postdoc (short for “postdoctoral”), it is the only reasonably common one that has more than one syllable. Indeed, aside from informal doc (for “doctor”) and croc (for “crocodile”), the only other –oc word you are likely to come across is bloc, which at the time of the series was most often used in the collocation “Soviet bloc”—and thus carried with it the threat of the ultimate havoc, nuclear war.
So what did Tscherny do? Others will of course be able to say this better, but here’s my shot at an explanation. Tscherny forced the viewer to feel off-kilter by using three different sizes for each of the words WHEN HAVOC STRUCK, all in dark-colored, harsh sans-serif capitals. Understandably, he made the central word HAVOC the largest of the three, but it is curiously off-center and the following STRUCK is larger than the preceding WHEN: the effect is disorienting and pushes the eye to the right. And then directly above the center of the central V of HAVOC, he began with the same dark hue a watercolor that rises into a terrifyingly gorgeous, right-leaning explosion: a riot of browns, reds, oranges, and yellows that I confess I’m surprised an oil company allowed itself to be associated with.
I will never be able to see or hear the word havoc without thinking of this image.
Fellow scholars have been known to make fun of the style of my linguistic articles, which might at their best be said to embody the principle “maximum means: maximum meaning.” For example, I’ve never met a footnote I didn’t like. But a change in life has meant that I now write more footnote-free pieces for non-scholarly audiences, and this has given me greater appreciation for something my dear uncle intuitively understood: sometimes you get more by doing less.