This piece was originally published on the ineffable SpeakUp. Mr. Vit elected to cut the E-Prime preamble; the unedited version is here in full.

I decided, recently, to have a go at excising the word “just” from my vocabulary. Not in the adjectival usage (“just” as in “justice”) nor in the noun (“just” as in “a large-bellied pot with handles”, according to the OED) but as an adverb. Oh, you know, I’ll just write this article on language minutia and graphic design. That’s what I mean. I use it all the time, in that casually dismissive sense. So do most of my peers and contemporaries; it’s almost as common as the plague of “likes” with which my generation is constantly upsetting our more grammar-conscious elders.

I’m not worried about offending them, though, or anyone else. By eliminating the dismissive adverbial form of “just” from my vocabulary, I’m trying to hack my own brain.

In 1965, a linguist named D. David Bourland, Jr, proposed the idea of E-Prime. E-Prime was put forth as a modified version of the English language that basically eliminated the verb ‘to be’. You couldn’t say “I’m tired” in E-Prime, for example. You’d have to say something like “I feel tired” or “I’m constantly closing my eyes because of a dearth of sleep” or somesuch. The fundamental assertion of E-Prime is that, by forcing yourself to have to jump through this absurd linguistic hoop, you have to carefully choose your words. As such, the sentences you come up with are supposedly less ambiguous. Is a rose red? I suppose I don’t know. I do know, however, that a rose appears red to me.

E-Prime has had its share of criticism from prominent linguists, but the idea remains enticing. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, a pivotal linguistic idea, says that there is an inherent and immutable relationship between the grammar of the language a person speaks, and the nature of that persons’ thoughts. This idea is generally accepted as true, although people still bicker about how exactly it works. Walter Ong wrote extensively about written language as a technology that structures the consciousness of those who utilize it in Orality and Literacy. The idea also permeates popular fiction, particularly science-fiction: consider Newspeak, the abbreviated form of English proposed by Orwell in 1984. Many of Borges’ short stories also employ bizarre theoretical languages, into which behavior and ethics have been tellingly encoded.

These are fascinating object lessons in the interplay of form and content, really, but they’re of little practical use. Even E-Prime, with its enticing simplicity, is more of a mindfuck than anything else; once you find yourself rephrasing “You’re disgusting” as “I seem disgusted by you”, you realize that the mental overhead of ablating to be from your speech may not be worth it.

But a simpler challenge, I believe, can yield potent results. Perhaps “just” isn’t the symptom of a problematic institutionalized dismissiveness, but the cause (as some takes on the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis suggest).

On the surface, this seems to be somewhat true. If you say “I just have to design these four posters, and just work out the type treatment for the whole series” to yourself out loud, your eye-rolling is somehow implicit. You just have to do these things; they’re not even worthy of discussion, really. But the same sentence without the “just” sounds far more monumental: “I have to design four posters, and work out the type treatment for the whole series.” That sounds like a far more serious endeavor to me.

The reason this is particularly important to me, a graphic designer, is that this inherently dismissive attitude can short-circuit the iterative processes that we use to make things awesome. For the purposes of this essay, I would define awesomeness as a state characterized by a rich holistic intertwining of style, content, and meaning. An awesome graphic work is the sort that you might stare at for a few tense moments, upon first seeing it, before quietly uttering “fuck yeah!” under your breath.

Consider, for example, 2x4’s entry in the Urban Forest Project’s poster contest. The buttons on this page that allow visitors to download the poster or order a totebag printed with it are laughable, as the poster is a blank white sheet of nothing. Ostensibly, this poster is “about the space between the trees”. Is this cute in a snarky, in-joke sort of way? Perhaps. Is it awesome? I would say no.

There are many posters on the Alan Dye and Petter Ringbom. These are awesome, as are many others. Some of the less complex posters are no less awesome; consider the entries by David Reinfurt or Nikki Chung.

I would consider some of the entries that fall back on default modes to be generally less awesome. Whether the default mode in question is unique to the designer’s house style (see Paula Scher’s) or specific to the means of graphic production (see COMA’s), these posters invariably end up as one-liners. You read or see them, and that’s it, you’re done.

But the 2x4 example epitomizes anti-awesomeness in the most thorough fashion. It is, I would submit, the ultimate product of the mentality fostered by the overuse of “just”. You can readily imagine the smirk on the author’s face when he or she decided to send in a blank PDF file, knowing full well that their authority as an agent of a highly regarded design firm would guarantee the blind acceptance of their imbecilic pun into the projects’ pantheon.

I don’t mean to single out the Urban Forest Project, but the fact that it collects such a wide range of designer-authors under one aegis makes it an ideal context in which to compare awesomeness, and test for the evidence of “just” default-mode thinking. If you’re familiar enough with a given aesthetic, you can spot the “just” stuff easily, in any portfolio. Experimental Jetset, the Amsterdam-based design collective, has practically made a career of “just” employing default typefaces, monotonous color palettes, and other such deadpan decisions.

I want to point out at this point that “just” design is not necessarily bad design, and awesome design is not necessarily good. Awesomeness can suck you in, but the design in question must hang together as a whole, or it will lose you, and the awesomeness will have been wasted. And sometimes the “just” move is the right move, as the signature type treatments of iconic artists like Jenny Holzer and Barbra Kruger indicate. In these cases, the simplistic repetition of the default type style in question becomes synonymous with the persona of the artist, and so encapsulates their message. (In design, we call this “branding.”)

I propose that there is a perfect fulcrum between the opposing forces of absolute “just” and absolute awesomeness. At this point, the rote application of a default approach is harmoniously tempered by the rigors and context-dependant overtures that characterize awesomeness. Artists and designers who have reached this magic singularity in their practices can be said to have a ™.

A fine example of a ™ practitioner is M/M Paris, the French design studio chaired by Michael Amzalag and Mathias Augustniak. M/M Paris’ aesthetic is highly distinctive and contiguous throughout their work, but they completely eschew the bog-standard default styles, having created their own sort of “just” approach using the methodology of awesomeness. Many of their posters contain hand-drawn type, and the letterforms themselves often have line weights, contrast values, and other parameters that are notably common to many of M/M Paris’ works. But in each case, these letterforms are manifest for their given context, and their given context only.

We can refer to this hybridized approach as M/M Paris™. It is a systematic default style that can be applied in a veneer, but a veneer that can only be concocted (and summarily decocted) by M/M Paris themselves, as only they retain the distinct strains of awesome that are essential for the styles’ formulation.

Many of the established upper echelons of graphic designs’ canon are ™ practitioners. The likes of Ogilvy™, Landor™, Wieden+Kennedy™, Pentagram™, Vignelli Associates™, and their ilk, continue to land lucrative contracts. They have the same appeal to their clients as does a company like Ford™, or Charles Schwab™, or Maytag™… the breath and scope of their respective histories have achieved the critical mass necessary to sustain their ™ equilibrium. Likewise, relatively younger independent entities such as Fons Hickmann™, Tomato™, Aesthetic Apparatus™, Graphic Thought Facility™, Harmen Liemburg™, et cetera, all are nimble enough to maintain the trappings of ™ness at small sizes.

At both ends of the spectrum, their work is both serially recognizable and utterly distinctive. It is important to note, however, that these luminaries™, as well as their up-and-coming subordinates™ with less name-brand recognition, have all historically been delivered to the nirvana of the ™ state through paths lined with hard-earned awesomeness. The dichotomy of “just” and awesome is an inequitable one, and the spiraling gravitic arms surrounding the ™ state only spin in one direction.

This is the primary reason I want to purge the actual word “just” from my speech. As Orwell postulated, if I can’t think it, I can’t do it. And so it will go. This act will constitute but a tiny fraction of the journey down Awesome Street, but it’s high time I got going. I just have to fix my brain first, and I’ll be right there.