Thursday, June 21, 2007
Debating Design
I don't think I've mentioned it before on here, but I was a debater in high school, and I'd like to think I was pretty good. Even though that was a long time ago (93-96), it's no exaggeration to say that my years in high school debate were some of the most influential and educational in my life. I learned a lot of skills, ideas, and techniques that are fundamental parts of the way that I communicate at work to this day.I could go on forever about it, but for I'll just share a concept called Stock Issues. In debate, the Stock Issues are the traditional components of a debate case. You might think about using it as a framework for presenting a solution in the business world. Give it a shot next time you have a presentation, whether internal or external. You don't necessarily have to use the debate jargon- just using the concepts is oftentimes enough. Sometimes I even leave one or two out for the sake of brevity (like topicality and significance), but they're all worth considering.
1. Inherency: The status quo is incapable of solving the problem
2. Harms: The status quo is harmful
3. Solvency: The proposed solution will solve the problem
4. Topicality: The proposed solution is relevant to the problem at hand
5. Significance: The advantages of the proposed solution are significant
For example, let's say you're presenting a case to your boss in favor of a company blog. Obviously my points here aren't the strongest, but you can see how to the Stock Issues as a structure for an idea. These are just top-level ideas, but you get the point:
1. Inherency: We currently just copy and paste press releases onto the website
2. Harms: Nobody visits our press release section, so nobody knows about our new products
3. Solvency: Nobody reads the press releases because they don't take advantage of the online medium. A blog is the perfect solution because it is relevant, engaging content.
4. Topicality: Creating relevant content is key to generating web traffic
5. Significance: Engaging the blogosphere properly can yield millions of visitors if a post is picked up by Digg, Engadget, etc.
In future posts I'll cover other debate-related topics like uniqueness, disadvantages, kritiks, the various speeches (for the debaters out there, I think the 2AR is the most important!), and more. Hope they're useful for you! Check out some debate resources at the NFL site if you're interested.
Labels: design management
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Peter Drucker on Innovation Traps
I'm a big fan of Peter Drucker, whose ideas and insights are as timeless as they are valuable. Branding Strategy Insider posted some of his best work ever on the topic of innovation, focusing on some of the pitfalls that innovation projects face. Read the article here.Change leaders will be tempted by three innovation traps. They're so attractive that leaders can expect to fall into one of them--or into all three--again and again.1. When looking for ways to innovate, the first trap to avoid is an opportunity that is not in tune with the five strategic realities: the collapsing birthrate; shifts in how disposable income is spent; new definitions of performance; global competitiveness; and the growing incongruence between economic globalization and political splintering. (See "Strategy: The New Realities," below.) The misfit opportunity often looks very tempting--precisely because it looks truly innovative. But even if the innovation does not result in failure--as it usually does--it always requires extraordinarily wasteful amounts of effort, money, and time.
2. A second trap is confusing novelty with innovation. The test of an innovation is that it creates value. A novelty creates amusement only. Yet again and again, management decides to innovate for no other reason than that it is bored doing the same thing or making the same product day in and day out. The test of an innovation--as is also the test of quality--is not "Do we like it?" It is "Do customers want it and will they pay for it?"
3. The third trap is confusing motion with action. Typically, when a product, service, or process no longer produces results and should be abandoned or changed radically, management reorganizes. To be sure, reorganization is often needed. But it should come after the action--that is, after what must be abandoned has been faced up to. By itself reorganization is just motion and no substitute for action.
Labels: design management, innovation
Monday, June 18, 2007
London 2012
Most of the time, the general public barely notices a new piece of graphic design. While the design community passionately discusses some new logos, the general public usually seems pretty ambivalent towards the subject. But recently the logo for the 2012 Olympics in London, designed by Wolff Olins, received major criticism from the public.
As design consultants, we have both an opportunity and a challenge to affect change through our clients' projects. We must balance what is best for their business with what is right for the end users of the design.
It will be unfortunate to see a piece of graphic design outshine the other aspects of the London Olympics. The athletes and the host city should define the brand, while the logo serves as a marker that represents the experience. Its unfair for a logo to dictate the Olympic brand, and I hope to see some amazing athletic performances that make this graphic unremarkable by comparison.
Labels: branding, graphic design
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Guy Kawasaki: "So What?"
If you spend any time at all at our office, you'll probably hear us saying "So what?" quite a bit. We're not being short with each other- "So what?" is the mantra we repeat to make sure that everything we do is relevant, concise, and impactful. It's really one of our most valuable tools.The phrase comes from Guy Kawasaki's "The Art of the Start," which is a guide for entrepreneurs on managing startups. The part we like is chapter 3, "The Art of Pitching," which as you might expect, is about pitching ideas to venture capitalists. Although we're not in the venture capital business, we are in the business of quickly communicating big ideas, which is what Guy is talking about.
His big tip to entrepreneurs is to ask yourself "So what?" when creating your presentation. Imagine the audience asking you "OK, so what?" after every slide.
We all have a tendency to fall in love with our own ideas. In our excitement, we sometimes lose sight of the big picture and lose our way by muddying the waters with unnecessary details. We're so proud of the thought that went into the carefully considered nuances of our idea that we have to point them out, but in doing so we can overwhelm the audience. In this case, too much information is effectively the same as no information at all.
This is where "So what?" comes into play. It's our number one tool to keep ourselves honest. It's not just a tool for presentations: it's a great way of evaluating product concepts and features. Five different ways of adjusting the volume? So what? A fridge that plays CDs? So what? Obviously those examples are over the top, but the point is that stepping into the consumers' shoes asking "So what?" is perhaps the best way of looking at design.
You can download an MP3 of Guy reading "The Art of Pitching" here, or buy the whole book on Amazon.
Labels: design management
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Juan Faura: Hispanic Marketing Grows Up
Hispanic Marketing Grows Up - Juan Faura
I picked this one up blind off the shelves, and it turned out to be absolutely fantastic. The author is the principal of noted Latino marketing agency Cultura and a former director at Cheskin. Juan's credentials are impeccable, and the book is everything you would expect from someone with his impressive background. First of all, I love the conversational, personal, yet authoritative tone. It's a welcome departure from the stuffy, phony writing I oftentimes associate with business books. It's much more like reading a blog or interview transcript.
Second, the book is absolutely crammed with insights, despite being relatively short. It's the product of hundreds of interviews and years of experience, all distilled into easily digestible but powerful nuggets. There are about a dozen composite profiles of different Latino consumers, chapters on acculturation, media, and other topics, but what really hit home for me were the 30 "perceptions and realities" about the Latino market, in which he lists typical assumptions we make about the Latino market and his take on them.
For example, the Latino market is broadly divided into people that speak primarily English, primarily Spanish, and those who are bilingual. The conventional wisdom is that primarily Spanish-speaking people prefer to consume Spanish media, but it turns out that isn't necessarily the case for a variety of reasons- social, political, cultural, and economic. Faura lists 29 more insights like this, all concise, impactful and very readable.
What I like is that he doesn't tell us that everything we thought we knew is wrong, that all the conventions of Latino marketing are wrong. Instead, he says they're basically correct, but that marketers need to understand their nuances and details in order to effectively understand the audience. It's a nice change of pace from the blowhards and pundits that crowd the business book market, and the book is worth reading for anybody in product development.
Monday, June 11, 2007
Paul Rand: From Lascaux to Brooklyn
Paul Rand: From Lascaux to Brooklyn
Like a lot of people, my first few years as a designer were spent imitating other designers, and poorly at that. In retrospect, I think a lot of that was because of my myopic view of design- my work wasn't great because I didn't understand design in the greater context of art and visual communication. It wasn't until my sophomore art history class that my eyes were opened.
Like a lot of students, I wasn't really looking forward to taking art history because it's a lot of memorization, but after a week or so I was hooked. I became aware of architecture, and realized how much it has in common with graphic design. Sure, I'd heard the big names before, but without the professor to guide my along, I never quite made the connections. As obvious as it seems in retrospect, I never realized that Le Corbusier and Brockmann were doing the same thing in two different media, that Tschichold and Gropius were two manifestations of the same idea.
Modernist painters also threw me for a loop. Like a lot of people, I had always just disregarded abstract and non-representational art as self-indulgent hogwash. By studying it in the context of the cultural environment that spawned it, as well as in the context of the styles that came before and after, I came to understand what made it so special. I remember the exact moment when the instructor brought up a slide of "The City" by Leger... I'm pretty sure I actually let out a little squeal. That was the painting that showed me the power of of abstraction, of communicating more by saying less.
I could go on forever, but the point is that a year of art history made me grow more as a designer than anything before or since. The proof of this approach is in the pudding- my work is ten times better.
Rand's book takes the reader on the same journey that I took, looking at work from the earliest recorded visual art (the Lascaux cave paintings), to graffiti in Brooklyn. In exquisitely concise language, he draws parallels between something as simple as a painted fisherman's bouy and contemporary graphic design, often by articulating in a single sentence what people like me take years to realize.
Some examples:
"One quickly realizes that simplicity and geometry are the language of timelessness and universality."
"Modest subject matter, modest means, and modest talent do not always prevent an artifact from offering an aesthetic experience to the viewer."
"The quality of a picture is measured not by how much it adheres to nature but by how far it departs from it."
The book is a fascinating exploration of graphic design as the latest chapter in the history of visual communication. Rather than try to sum up everything Rand says in the book, which would surely fall short of capturing his brilliant insights, I'll point to its impact on my work.
I spent a lot of time doing my best to imitate people like Buck and Shilo (as I'm sure many of us have), usually with lackluster results. The reason why my imitations of their style fall flat (aside from my lack of talent) is that they arrived at that style as the sum of their experiences and influences, while I was just going through the motions, aping their specific stylistic touches without any regard for the content.
Too many people do just that: empty formalism that emulates a style without linking it to the content. "From Lascaux to Brooklyn" is an incredible book because it's nothing less than a guide for a designer to find his or her own voice. I only wish I would have discovered this book ten years ago, although it would have been over my head at the time.
The book couldn't be any more relevant in today's postmodern world. Digital tools allow us to acquire, manipulate, and layer imagery, sounds, and motion like never before. The designer today is less a craftsman, creating elements from raw clay, than a collage artist that assembles existing assets, creating new meaning by juxtaposing the meanings of those elements. Only by deeply understanding the history of all these assets - social, political, cultural, and economic context- can the postmodern designer create meaningful work.
Labels: books, graphic design
