[my friend and colleague, terry marks, of seattle is working on a book and among other questions, he asked me to define my criteria for defining good work.}

criteria: the academic answer is what i apply to my students' work. five things: concept, design (i.e. layout), typography, color, craft. which all goes to show that type or color could literally be crap (what is deemed classic, traditional or swiss, let's say, as compared to nasty and hand-rendered) or absurd and yet be in service to the concept. what often fails first is terrible typography, as that is usually the most obvious, followed quickly by layout and color. what takes a bit more time to suss out is concept, if all of the above seem competent or even superb. 

but even superb attention to typography or to other details makes no difference if the concept is flat.

which leads to the simpler and more complex answer.

the simple part is this: all of the above must be in service to two things - utility and beauty. the words that are on either side of the AIGA medal. or said another way, appropriate and unique. communication design has to communicate in an manner that is utilitarian and appropriate to the message and medium.

a designer can’t just dip into their bag of tricks or hot licks or trends of the day and slap them on a given project. i didn’t say it first, but form follows function. we’ve seen too many applications of any number of typefaces or design trends that had NOTHING to do with underscoring the message or concept.

of course once the utilitarian and appropriate angle is covered, if design only serves those masters, we’re left with a very pedestrian reading of the content. the BEST design offers beauty and differentiation, that messages and their proponents are separated from those many other messages out there.

if one has a need to eat, wants fowl, odds are chicken may be more appropriate than peacock. one is bred for eating, the other for sheer beauty. maybe peacock tastes good. i don’t know. but pollo would do the trick. boiling the chicken would make it passable food. but i’d like mine fried. and then fried a certain way, with certain spices. or maybe i’d like that chicken broiled, grilled or roasted. its about the audience. because for some boiled may be just right. even then, you can boil chicken and add a few spices.

or think about it in terms of grapes provided to us by our client. are we serving grapes? or raisins? or wine, grape juice, grape jam, grape jelly? and for any of the above, then what quality? general purpose or a more rarified and organic variety of product? utility and beauty have there places in that final design.

the more complex part is determining beauty. for to determine the utilitarian is rather simple: it works or it doesn’t. it communicates or it doesn’t. it is clear or it isn’t.

but beauty IS in the eyes of the beholder, and one’s aesthetic tastes are guided by one’s experiences and understanding. example: i had lunch not too long ago with a woman that was my account executive for a few years. at lunch she said there were two things she learned while working with me, one of which was seeing beauty where she had never realized it was before. that comes with a deliberate opening of the imagination, a deliberate engaging in the unknown, and a deliberate willingness to drop previous assumptions. it requires a consciousness that allows for all things to be possible

several years ago i read a lot of emmanuel kant (Critique of Aesthetic Judgment) and johann schiller (On the Aesthetic Education of Man) each of whom wrote superb essays on aesthetics in the 1700s. while i may have forgotten more than i retained, they underscored such disparate notions as pleasure and education, and for each, how morality fits in to the notion of beauty. the Good is the Beautiful. so if good is beautiful, according to schiller, then imagine what kant’s definition of the sublime must have been. and for schiller, he believed that one could raise the moral values of people with beauty.

so to answer your question about criteria i use when defining what is good, i seek pleasure, education and a very certain feeling that all is right in the world. pretty simple, hunh?