Today’s guest blogger is Paul Caputo, the Art & Publications Director for the National Association for Interpretation (NAI) and author of **Interpretation By Design.

I’m honored to be included as a guest author on the Taylor Studios blog, and I’m grateful to Taylor for its support of my employer, the National Association for Interpretation (NAI). Also, as the person responsible for laying out Legacy magazine, I’m always grateful for the attractive ads Taylor runs. It certainly makes the magazine look better when the ads look good!

Also, I enjoyed meeting and reconnecting with Taylor Studios’ Betty, Samantha, Jason, and Myrna at the NAI National Workshop in Las Vegas a couple weeks ago. (And lucky for them, I’m pretty sure they got out of town without having to see my head get shaved at the scholarship auction.)

I’ve always enjoyed that the definition of interpretation, as identified by NAI, is similar to how I think about graphic design—a communication process that forges emotional and intellectual connections. I’ve been with NAI for almost nine years, and in that time I’ve made it a personal mission to encourage interpreters to consider their graphic design decisions as carefully as they do the decisions they make about their interpretive programs. (A much more daunting mission has been to get interpreters to stop using Comic Sans.)

Many interpreters work at sites with little to no budget for design, so the people responsible for creating brochures, websites, and other media inherit the task because they know how to turn on a computer and open Microsoft Publisher. These individuals are the target audience of training workshops called Interpretation By Design that I conduct with Shea Lewis of Arkansas State Parks and/or NAI Associate Director Lisa Brochu. (Shameless self-promotion alert: Interpretation By Design is the title of a serious book about graphic design and interpretation that I wrote with Shea and Lisa. It is also the title of a not-so-serious blog — www.interpretationbydesign.com — that I write with Shea.)

Many interpreters new to graphic design are surprised to hear us talk about using interpretive principles to make design decisions. We stress that you can choose a typeface that supports your site’s mission—whether it be a classical serif like Garamond or a modernist sans serif like Futura. We talk not only about choosing appropriate colors (like green for a nature center or turquoise for an event in Albuquerque), but meaningful color palettes (like analogous for an aquarium or complementary for the uniforms for the aquarium’s softball team).

When an interpreter sits down to develop a program, there is no computer program (though Adobe Interpreter 1.0 has to be right around the corner) with pull-down menus of themes (first option: “What you see before you was once a vast inland sea”). Interpreters start with a blank slate and come up with creative, engaging programs. But when these same individuals get in front of a computer to create nonpersonal media, their creativity frequently abandons them, in part because the computer makes it so easy to do so. This is how people who are smart and engaging in person create media replete with clipart, centered type, and, unfortunately, Comic Sans.

Of course, conducting training sessions and writing about graphic design force me to practice what I preach—and remember some of the things I’ve said. (There’s always someone out there who will call you out for using type on a curve if you once wrote a blog post about it being hokey to do so.) But it’s never a bad thing, when I’m sketching out a composition or settling on a typeface, to get beyond what simply looks good in favor of what is truly meaningful.

Graphic design and interpretation have a lot in common, not least of all that they are successful only when they are the result of carefully considered, meaningful decisions.