The Pumpkin-King Goes To Hell

Last year, I went on a Caribbean cruise vacation.  One of the places the ship anchored was in Grand Cayman, a beautiful island known for its snorkeling, turtle farms and rum cakes (which are amazing – I took home 6 of them). Another popular attraction among tourists to this island is a visit, literally, to Hell.

Hell owes its name to the black, spire-like limestone formations that are its main tourist draw. There’s also a gift shop and post office (which is painted hellfire red) – and that’s about all there is to see in Hell, Grand Cayman!  My wife was generally disappointed in Hell, but I instantly fell in love with the place.  It was so unapologetically cheesy that I couldn’t help but appreciate it.

What would you expect to find in an area named Hell? Red-skinned devils with pitchforks? Lots of flame motifs? ‘Welcome to Hell’ merchandise? - check, check and check (you can even use the hellfire-red post office send a postcard back home – which of course comes postmarked ‘From Hell’). Hell succeeds as a tourist destination because it is exactly what you’d expect – as cheesy as that may be. They embrace the most obvious and expected aspects associated with their brand and it works for them beautifully.

To Hell With My Process

My visit to Hell got me thinking about my design process, specifically ‘obvious’ design choices that I am often quick to squash. My personal design process usually has me sketching ideas out on paper prior to taking them to the screen and using Photoshop to turn my low-fidelity sketches into a more realized design comp. Sketching my designs as a first step generally allows me to get the most obvious ideas out of my system right away, but I wonder if that is always a good thing?

As a designer, I am always hesitant to do work that would be considering expected or safe. I never want to hear a client say, ‘Yeah, that’s what I expected’, even if what they expected was a competent, solid design that meets their (and their visitors’) needs. It seems like as a designer, I always want clients to be blown away (or at least pleasantly surprised) by my work, but sometimes the obvious approach works better than attempts at visual innovation. Innovation that solves a problem better than an obvious approach is great, but innovating solely for the sake of innovating, especially at the expense of a project’s ultimate success, seems backwards to me.

My visit to Hell has caused me to rethink my process a bit. I still sketch out some initial ideas and layouts as a first step, but I have tried to avoid purging my mind of those early, obvious ideas as part of the process and have instead begun to look at some of them a little deeper to really evaluate whether or not they have merit. I have even begun to force myself to follow my first concept for a project through from time to time to see if a higher fidelity version (such as a Photoshop comp) helps flesh out the idea so I can really evaluate whether that initial idea has merit or if it does, indeed, deserve to be passed over. An example of this is actually the design of this particular blog post.

To Hell With This Design

When I first began sketching out the design of this post, it really played off of the elements I saw on my visit to Hell – flames and devils, a color scheme of red, yellows and oranges, cheesy postcards, etc. Rather than push past that initial concept and explore some other options, I decided to follow through with those first ideas – the results of which you can see on this page now.

Did it work? I don’t know, you tell me, but one thing is for sure – it was a fun design to do (I don’t generally get to use this color palette and flames in much of my client work it seems, so this was a welcome departure) and it certainly made me want to get back on a cruise ship and head out to Grand Cayman for some hellish souvenirs and rum cakes.