Design weaponised
Selling out
Thursday 29 April 2010
Being opinionated is part of the whole designer vernacular. We can create works that the majority of the public find beautiful by simply following preset geometric rules. We can throw those rules away and create something brand new, and use our experience and judgement to decide it's value compared to the conventionally beautiful norm.
Public opinion on those works rarely reach the designers themselves. Essentially we are flying blind; and we tend to get used to the temperate climes which this umbrella affords us.
Client opinion on the aesthetics of your work for them rarely stand up to any scrutiny. Clients are the best source of information on the type of person your work should be targeting, but to produce something based purely on what they are asking for is a waste of both the designer's talent and the client's money.
Being asked to shuffle the position of a logo a bit to the right by a client that manages a shop bears the same logic as approaching a particle physicist and suggesting that the azimuth of the carrier beam on their atom smasher is incorrect. The physicist can chuckle at you and uncomfortably continue what they were doing after blatantly ignoring your interjection;- The designer has to boot up their democratic skill and attempt to justify their decisions, for fear of losing the client or worse; making the client vocal about how the dude they paid didn't do what they asked for.
What makes designers good is that they do not do what they are told; they do what their skill and experience tells them to. This is our value; to forget or to go back on it is the definition of being a sell-out.
My point is this; absolute verbosity in a design brief is not a design brief at all; it's just a set of instructions that a well trained monkey could carry out.
And we're not in the business of employing monkeys.
Public opinion on those works rarely reach the designers themselves. Essentially we are flying blind; and we tend to get used to the temperate climes which this umbrella affords us.
Client opinion on the aesthetics of your work for them rarely stand up to any scrutiny. Clients are the best source of information on the type of person your work should be targeting, but to produce something based purely on what they are asking for is a waste of both the designer's talent and the client's money.
Being asked to shuffle the position of a logo a bit to the right by a client that manages a shop bears the same logic as approaching a particle physicist and suggesting that the azimuth of the carrier beam on their atom smasher is incorrect. The physicist can chuckle at you and uncomfortably continue what they were doing after blatantly ignoring your interjection;- The designer has to boot up their democratic skill and attempt to justify their decisions, for fear of losing the client or worse; making the client vocal about how the dude they paid didn't do what they asked for.
What makes designers good is that they do not do what they are told; they do what their skill and experience tells them to. This is our value; to forget or to go back on it is the definition of being a sell-out.
My point is this; absolute verbosity in a design brief is not a design brief at all; it's just a set of instructions that a well trained monkey could carry out.
And we're not in the business of employing monkeys.
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