WE'RE HERE TO BE BAD

Designers need to function as outsiders. We need to be wise to the concerns of the marketers, the researchers, the people who believe that every visual nuance can somehow be quantified. But we need to solve the problem independently.

Marketing is the science of manufacturing desire. It’s a way of making business more efficient and profitable by creating a market place where most people want the same stuff.

For instance, it would be easier and more profitable for General Motors if everyone would just buy the same model car. It would be easier and more profitable for R.J. Reynolds if everybody would just smoke the same brand of cigarette. But people have learned to express their individuality through the products they buy. So products have to appear to express different attitudes. In order to grow and increase their market shares, companies are required to diversify their product lines. And as more and more competitive products become more and more alike, a good package can become a packaged good’s best if not only point of difference.—ad in the Wall Street Journal for The Michael Peters/Duffy Design Groups.

Designers are needed to make one product appear to be distinct from another. Designers make cars look a little different from model to model and year to year. Designers come up with new graphics for old cigarettes. Designers are hired to give the appearance of a world (or a supermarket aisle) brimming with options by graphically dramatizing the differences between, say, Coke and Pepsi, Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi, Caffeine Free Coke and Caffeine Free Pepsi, Diet Caffeine Free Coke and Diet Caffeine Free Pepsi, and so on.

Designers are good at this. But design shouldn’t be an accessory to the marketing process. It should be the opposite. Design should be a way of making things truly different, distinctive, individualistic, and interesting. Design should be about the creation of real choices. But designers, like everyone else, have been suckered by the allure of marketing. We’ve become part of that process. We’ve become insiders.

We are a cog in a machine when we might be more effective as a wrench in the works. We have begun to dress like our clients and talk like our clients and even worse, think like our clients.

Often, the best design, the most important design, takes place outside the profession, where there is still a true vernacular. A non-corporate, non-designed vernacular. What we come to think of as Good design. And we come away with reinforced beliefs about what and who is good. And this is bad.

Designers have to forget how to be professionals. We have to stop being the lap dogs of big business. We have to be bad.

Designers need to function as outsiders. We need to be wise to the concerns of the marketers, the researchers, the people who believe that every visual nuance can somehow be quantified. But we need to solve the problem independently.

Marketing is the science of manufacturing desire. It’s a way of making business more efficient and profitable by creating a market place where most people want the same stuff.

For instance, it would be easier and more profitable for General Motors if everyone would just buy the same model car. It would be easier and more profitable for R.J. Reynolds if everybody would just smoke the same brand of cigarette. But people have learned to express their individuality through the products they buy. So products have to appear to express different attitudes. In order to grow and increase their market shares, companies are required to diversify their product lines. And as more and more competitive products become more and more alike, a good package can become a packaged good’s best if not only point of difference.—ad in the Wall Street Journal for The Michael Peters/Duffy Design Groups.

Designers are needed to make one product appear to be distinct from another. Designers make cars look a little different from model to model and year to year. Designers come up with new graphics for old cigarettes. Designers are hired to give the appearance of a world (or a supermarket aisle) brimming with options by graphically dramatizing the differences between, say, Coke and Pepsi, Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi, Caffeine Free Coke and Caffeine Free Pepsi, Diet Caffeine Free Coke and Diet Caffeine Free Pepsi, and so on.

Designers are good at this. But design shouldn’t be an accessory to the marketing process. It should be the opposite. Design should be a way of making things truly different, distinctive, individualistic, and interesting. Design should be about the creation of real choices. But designers, like everyone else, have been suckered by the allure of marketing. We’ve become part of that process. We’ve become insiders.

We are a cog in a machine when we might be more effective as a wrench in the works We have begun to dress like our clients and talk like our clients and even worse, think like our clients.

Often, the best design, the most important design, takes place outside the profession, where there is still a true vernacular. A non-corporate, non-designed vernacular.

What we come to think of as Good design And we come away with reinforced beliefs about what and who is good. And this is bad. Designers have to forget how to be professionals.

• We have to stop being the lap dogs of big business.
• We have to be bad.
• We have to forget what we learned in design school about appropriateness.
• We have to dump all those awkward phrases taught at overpriced seminars on Your Message Across to the Client.
• We have to learn to listen to our gut instincts instead of the corporate rhetoric.
• We have to be brave and we have to be bad.

If we’re bad, we can be the esthetic conscience of the business world. We can break the cycle of blandness. We can jam up the assembly line that spits out one dull, lookalike piece of crap after another. We can say, not do something with artistic integrity or ideological courage? We can say, Why not do something that forces us to rewrite the definition of ‘good design’? Most of all, bad is about recapturing the idea that a designer is the presentative—almost like a missionary of art, within the world of business. We’re not here to give them what’s safe and expedient. We’re not here to help clients eradicate everything of visual interest from the face of the earth. We’re here to make them think about design that’s dangerous and unpredictable.