Recently, a colleague showed me a design he was working on for a jewelry company. When I looked at it closely, I could see a rose mostly hidden in the image. The rose in the design was just a rose: it was in no way assisting the body copy, or somehow making anything on the layout communicate better. Despite this, anyone that looked close would receive a gift from the designer and a further incentive to check out the store.

It reminded me of how sometimes designers and artists “hide” things in their work: bits of numerology, important dates or symbols only the artist would understand. These cryptograms serve no function in the design-instead, they are a point of delight for the artist and a puzzle for future historians to dissect (if the artist is lucky enough to be remembered by history).

Both examples here could best be described as “decorative elements.” A decoration doesn’t communicate, rather, it increases the visual appeal of a design. Decoration has become extremely popular in design in the last twenty years: with superfluous typography, grungy effects, flourishes, unneeded geometrical elements, splashes of color, etc. But what has happened to decoration in design academia?

Obviously, “form follows function” is paramount, and designers like Herbert Bayer, Paul Rand, Jan Tschichold and 20th century minimalists are revered as the prophets of a very strict, modern design doctrine. The content must dictate the style, all design elements must support the message and everything extraneous must be removed.

The debate over decoration comes up all the time in current critiques: “It’s too busy,” or “It’s not clearly communicating,” or “Those extra touches are not assisting the message.” What’s more interesting is how we take these statements for granted-statements like these are assumed to be the correct analysis of a design.

But it hasn’t always been so. In fact, the current academic trend is nothing more than the most recently adopted doctrine of design. We don’t have to look far into the past to see this.

In classical times, Greek pottery painters surrounded their narrative illustrations with elaborate geometry, borders and line work that did anything but support the message. These extra elements were used to make the pottery appear more beautiful, even though they didn’t assist the narrative of the illustrations. Middle Age scribes often filled the extra space in a column where a line had ended with elaborate flourishes and decoration, along with bold decoration in the margins. Like the Greek pottery painters, these scribes were using decorative elements to make the vehicle of the message (in this case, a page, instead of a pot) appear more beautiful. Renaissance printers preferred extravagant black letter typefaces that, though hard to read, looked beautiful with their thick strokes and unnecessary ornamentation. 18th and 19th century printers enclosed their text columns with beautiful frames and borders.

Then, after thousands of years of decoration, the 20th century came and a prerequisite was added to every design element: if it wasn’t assisting the message of the piece, it was masturbatory, and needed to be eliminated, thereby clarifying the flow of information. This prerequisite was allowed to become a law in design academia, and it is a starting point for almost any criticism of a piece of graphic design. More than this, it is universally accepted foundation on which to hold conversations about design, a common ground on which we all stand.

Maybe it’s time that academic designers begin to reach past the last century of doctrine, and realize that phrases like “These extra elements are not serving the purpose of the design,” are not true, lawful statements, but simply reflections of the last few decades of taste. In fact, a master printer from the 16th century would look at a piece by Bayer and say, “You need to add something to liven up the page, right now it is boring.”