As a freelance graphic designer that most often helps individuals and small companies with brand strategy and interactive development, I’ve run into several situations where I questioned the value of design for a particular project. Will design work for them? To what extent will design help their business? Is this a problem that design can solve? Sometimes the answer is no.

There do seem to be guiding principles that clarify when design is premature or even unnecessary for a company. Here are several I’ve observed:

Design might be unnecessary when your business:

competes locally (not regionally or nationally) and has a single location.

The classic example would be your local hole-in-the-wall pizza joint. You can probably name several of these in your area and wince when you think of their menu or logo design. Do these places need good design to stay in business and thrive? No, they just need excellent pizza at a fair price and someone who always knows your name. Design or redesign would add little value to these companies bottom line, unless they were going to expand locations or compete on a broader scale.

serves lower income customers.

Just so you know, I’m in the lower income bracket (much lower). I’ve observed that folks in the lower income bracket are less easily swayed by the design around the product or service than people in higher income brackets. This is especially true in small town America where the “power of design” has not penetrated the homegrown culture. An exception to the low to middle income principle would be clothing products among big city lower income groups. In this environment, design and the “style” design produces positively impact fashion savvy clientele.

is in a multi-ethnic environment.

I’m thinking of the great American melting pot communities you find in New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Miami. Walking the streets of Astoria (part of New York City) last summer, I was amazed at the number of thriving Greek and Asian businesses which put very little stock in design, but fair quite well. It seems that other cultures across the world don’t readily accept design’s value added proposition for business like Americans.

caters to retirement age customers.

I find that people over 65 don’t care about design at all or at least very little. I suspect this is because they, like most internationals, didn’t grow up in the hyper-designed American culture we now live in. Most of these pre-Boomers grew up during WWII when graphic design equaled propaganda, and design was in its infancy as a profession. I fear the Boomers will be much the same.

Design might be counterproductive when your business:

is a start-up.

Companies, products and people need time to establish themselves before design steps in and tries to “fix them up”. I equate this to little girls trying to wear their mom’s make-up or little boys wearing their dad’s coat and tie. They just don’t have the stature or experience yet to handle the high level of design. I’ve watched countless businesses bolt out of the shoot with design that would knock your socks off. Yet, you get the feeling that the product or service looks better than it should and needs to grow up first. This “design first” mentality for some new start ups tickles our fancy, but pretty soon, everything feels like Disney World. Designed to the hilt in every detail, but lacking connection to something meaningful. At this point design becomes less of communication tool and more like a veneer. I suggest that companies go designless or design less for several years until they know who they are, then use design to communicate the actual substance and meaning.

serves one of the demographic groups mentioned in the unnecessary section above.

These groups may see design as “putting on airs”, no matter what style you use to communicate. I know in my farming community, things that are too well designed are assumed to be expensive or “not from here”.

is B.D. — Before Design.

Think of brands like Levis or Coca-Cola. There was a well established product or service before there was design. Remember the “New Coke” fiasco? Or take The Strand bookstore in New York City. Would there be any value in changing the Strand’s under-designed trademark white and red signs. Doubtful. Some things are fine just the way they are, and introducing professional design may actually cheapen the product and alienate the customer.

I would agree: we, as visual communicators, do carry some burden. It seems as though some designers have been looking for ways to explore the social necessity of design—how design can truly contribute to the quality of life—with little luck. This very fact leads me to question the actual importance (or perception thereof) of graphic design.

It is common knowledge what we need to survive. The essentials of life boil down to food, water, shelter and sleep. So where, in that limited schema, does graphic design fit? In a recent conversation with a designer friend we discussed a possible similarity between design and music. Music is not technically essential to our existence but who can imagine the void that would be left without music. Perhaps we can consider music a second tier essential: not essential to sustain life, but essential to truly appreciate and enjoy life. So perhaps design serves a similar role of augmentation and improvement. So, by attempting to force graphic design into that first essential tier, are we simply in a state of denial/defensiveness?

Perhaps we are simply unwilling to accept the fact that the profession we have chosen or the work we do is not as important as we let ourselves believe. How many of us have/had grand notions of how our work will/would make the world a better, safer, or more efficient place? It is a common human desire: to affect positive change within our world. So many of us long to be “citizen designers”—making our mark on the world through our profession contributions thereto. So many of us got caught up in our own professional self-importance that we forgot that there are other ways in which we could make positive contributions to society.

Allow me address the phrase “citizen designer”, as it has been a catch phrase in our field for at least the past few years. It is a badge that any self-respecting designer would be proud to wear. If we are working for the good of humankind this title is an official confirmation of our successes. The problem with the phrase is that it places these two words as an inseparable pair. We are not being encouraged to think as citizens and designers—we are being encouraged to practice good citizenship through design. I know many designers have a rather myopic view of the world outside of their work and thus spend far too much time wondering “what can I do as a designer to help” — time that could be much better spent simply volunteering for any number of traditional causes or organizations.

This entry is certainly not intended to be a holier-than-thou call to non-design-related social action. I write this because I only now realize that I too have been consumed by the desire to relate good citizenship to design. I am only now realizing that the two do not always have to overlap—when they do it is a beautiful opportunity, but when they don’t we need to be resourceful and apply our skills to finding other avenues for good citizenship.

From AIGA‘s Communique newsletter:

Promoting a new standard definition for “designer”
AIGA testified this month before the commission on redefining the standard occupational classifications for “designer” used by the U.S. government in its economic research. This is another step in an effort that AIGA has pursued consistently for ten years. The occupational classification for designer is at least two decades old and captures the functions of a designer prior to the introduction of the Macintosh and securely anchored in the realm of commercial artist.

Stated definition: “Design or create graphics to meet specific commercial or promotional needs, such as packaging, displays, or logos. May use a variety of mediums to achieve artistic or decorative effects.” (Last updated in 2003).

Again from AIGA:

The U.S. Department of Labor’s contractor for the Occupational Information Network (O*NET), the government’s database on occupational characteristics, is conducting a survey to gain a sense of the relevance of the current definition. The survey will be sent to 80 opinion leaders within the profession, and their responses will govern the future definition. The definition is important to designers, since it governs both the literature about the profession that the government issues, but also influences the economic data collected about the profession.

Milton Glaser weighed in with a presentation at the AIGA conference, touching on on role and responsibilities as designers. I’m certain he wasn’t thinking of a definition the government would use in establishing criteria for economic data.

What is curious is that the US Department of Labor’s definition seems much more current on the Bureau of Labor statistics web site. It’s broad and inclusive and recognizes many aspects of what a graphic designer does.

All in all, it’s a great time in which to be a graphic designer. Don’t worry so much about your software skills. Instead, learn how to think. Then it won’t matter how you’re defined, you’ll know how to solve problems, and your clients will recognize that and value you for it.

Usually it starts off with good intentions. Some designer at company x or freelancing y begins reading design blogs. Then they get the idea that they could do the same. They stretch their wings out a bit and start their own blog. People start reading it. Traffic to the site rises. They promote their work. It’s good. They get featured some place big like name-your-favorite-design-blog.com. A bunch of people start coming to their site and leaving nice comments. After a year or two of this, the designer comes up with something that gets their foot into the door of design stardom. Might be a Web 2.0 application or a really helpful tool or the-next-big-thing insight. They’re invited to speak at SXSW-NXPDQZ conferences. They appear in HOW. They write the book everyone wants to buy. Shoot, maybe their “style” actually starts a design trend. How wonderful.

I know I’m over exaggerating a bit here, but the spirit underneath it all is to exalt the self…your self. How do I know? I’ve been tempted to travel this road too. You won’t find it slapping you in the face like the story above, but you will see “Your Way” road signs in more subtle ways. Take the term “personal branding”. Personal branding involves discovering our selves, our passions, our goals, our capabilities, our mission, our focus, our target, our customers, etc. We set it to paper. We try to live by it. Personal branding can manifest itself in branding statements for yourself that look an awful lot like the mission and vision statements of old. Personal branding comes to life in carefully sculpted clients, work, websites, articles that bolster and enhance one’s personal brand. There’s just one problem with all of this: us.

You see personal branding and all the other forms of exaltation you find in designdom today are centered around self. How does MY site look? Here is MY playlist? MY blog’s now in 9Rules. So-and-so even bigger named designer reads MY blog. MY work was just featured on umpty-ump. And the list goes on. I should know. I’ve fallen into most all of these myself.

Design is all about others, not us. Design is a servant, not the star. Design is outward focused, not inward. So, to all those designers who no one knows or will ever know; who are slogging it out in the trenches day in and day out serving others without a note of “look at what I’ve done” fanfare being played: I salute you. Keep going. Resist the urge to jump onto the “try to get myself noticed” wagon and keep serving others.

I just have to get this off my chest. It’s been grinding at my soul for several years now, and I can’t escape confessing this. Since I live in a very small town, there’s only one place for starving designers to shop. You guessed it…Wal-Mart. I think I can overcome my ideological and moral issues associated with supporting the world’s largest corporation, but I just can’t handle one more day of their in-store brand design. “Great Value” products are driving me insane.

At first I was simply stunned that a company with all that money couldn’t come up with better design for their own store brand. The “Great Value” font is nasty when it’s readable and the photography/printing is depressing. It just exudes cheap, not “value” and certainly not “great”. I’m sure the work was done in-house at Wal-Mart, and the designers were well intentioned with a “need it yesterday” boss breathing down their necks. But a first year design student could do better. What does this communicate about Wal-Mart? Why don’t they understand how design can impact their business like Target?

Now that’s more like it! Great design used in a practical way. Design doesn’t have to be so “pie in the sky” altruistic to touch people’s heart. If we had a Target where I live and prices were competitive, I’d never look at another Great Value box of pasta again. In fact, I’ve even toyed with the idea of spending a couple of hours designing a new Great Value brand and more than a couple of hours driving to Wal-Mart headquarters to show them what design can do. But a blog post will have to suffice. I feel better now.

Gotta run, looks like I’m low on milk.

Or maybe you’re more familiar with the start-up that wants a complete identity for their business…”make it chic”; “make us look modern but with a nod to the traditional”. Or possibly the client who already has the design “in their mind” and needs a “professional” to make it reality. Or try some of these actual client requests on for size:

“I would like the design to be simple, yet refined (don’t want to have to pay a lot each time for reproducing). This logo will reflect our passion for the business, and our willingness to provide excellent customer service, and our team spirit.”

“We are looking for a designer to create our company logo for X Consulting. How quickly can you deliver?”

“Looking for nice logo design. Have design in mind. Should be easy.”

“We are not looking for logos that are just font styles we actually want a logo, a picture or sketch design preferably with a door or something that would just be distinctive even something to incorporate our name, a mock sketch or quick rough sample designs would be appreciated and would help narrow down the people that are going in the direction that we are interested in. Total freedom on this project is granted.”

“I need a simple but effective logo for an up-and-coming band. We want this logo to go on everything from t-shits to koosies and stickers. We want a logo that is as recognizable as the xx Band logo if you know what I mean. Simple but unusual enough to bring recognition up to the top tier. So I guess what I am getting at is that all that is needed is a kick-butt font as well as arrangement ideas. Anyway, as I said this could move into all kinds of areas from logos to CD covers to the business stuff for the label. Give me some good stuff guys. I plan to move fast, so really put your heads into it and get me something people are going to rave about.”

Don’t you feel appreciated? Valued for your creativity and talents? Know that you are contributing to something worthwhile and lasting? And what’s the kicker to all these client requests? Most want the projects done for less than $250. Hire a plumber to put in your kitchen sink for that much, and he’ll laugh at you. Why are clients so cheap when it comes to design? Do they not understand what we do? Do they not care? Have we lead them to crave logos like an expectant mother craves a midnight jar of pickles?

I believe that logo and identity design (or “branding” as the advertising mucky mucks call it) is like a veneer you put over particle board. Looks good on the outside, but it covers over cheap insides. Logos and their all encompassing brand identities don’t give meaning to a company or product. They just express what is already there. Unfortunately, most clients just want to look good, and they’ve been trained (by us) to know that their business must have a logo or an identity system before it can be successful. Form without meaning.

Here is what I’d like to suggest to clients: Forget about a logo. Go naked for at least 2-5 years with a logo-less, identity-less business and spend your time and energy actually becoming something. Then, once your business identity is firmly established, hire a designer to express it. And pay them well for it. If you can’t, just do everyone a favor and design something yourself.

And to designers: If you simply must pay a bill (which we all must do in between multi-million dollar award winning projects), crank out that logo in under an hour. I guarantee it’s going to look better than anything the client could have come up with even if it is meaningless.

At the heart of design is meaning and passion more than form or function. Let’s help people connect with the heart of who they are through design.

As design is increasingly recognized by business as the new “competitive edge,” designers will get more stroking in the form of paychecks, press and pretty plaques. I’m concerned though that this new attention on design from outside the design community will be enough of a disguise for the big bad wolf to cook us all.

“It’s about the struggle between individuals with jagged passion in their work and today’s faceless corporate committees, which claim to understand the needs of the mass audience, and are removing the idiosyncrasies, polishing the jags, creating a thought-free, passion-free, cultural mush that will not be hated nor loved by anyone. By now, virtually all media, architecture, product and graphic design have been freed from ideas, individual passion, and have been relegated to a role of corporate servitude, carrying out corporate strategies and increasing stock prices. Creative people are now working for the bottom line.

Magazine editors have lost their editorial independence, and work for committees of publisher (who work for committees of advertisers). TV scripts are vetted by producers, advertisers, lawyers, research specialists, layers and layers of paid executives who determine whether the scripts are dumb enough to amuse what they call the ‘lowest common denominator’. Film studios put films in front of focus groups to determine whether an ending will please target audiences. All cars look the same. Architectural decisions are made by accountants. Ads are stupid. Theater is dead.

Corporations have become the sole arbiters of cultural ideas and taste in America.

Our culture is corporate culture.

Culture used to be the opposite of commerce, not a fast track to ‘content’-derived riches. Not so long ago captains of industry (no angels in the way the acquired wealth) thought that part of their responsibility was to use their millions to support culture. Carnegie built libraries, Rockefeller built art museums, Ford created his global foundation. What do we now get from our billionaires? Gates? Or Eisner? Or Redstone? Sales pitches. Junk mail. Meanwhile, creative people have their work reduced to ‘content’ or ‘intellectual property’. Magazine and films become ‘delivery systems’ for product messages.

But to be fair, the above is only 99 percent true.

I offer a modest solution: find the cracks in the wall. There are a very few lunatic entrepreneurs who will understand that culture and design are not about fatter wallets, but about creating a future. They will understand that wealth is a means, not an end. Under other circumstances they may have turned out to be like you, creative lunatics. Believe me, they’re there and when you find them, treat them well and use their money to change the world.”

~Tibor Kalman, New York, June 1998. “F___ Committees. I Believe in Lunatics” article excerpted from Tibor Kalman: Perverse Optimist. Published by Booth-Clibborn.

He sent my donation letter through “corporate mail” and said it would take a week or so to hear back from headquarters. I couldn’t believe it. Here is a store manager responsible for over $1 million worth of inventory and unable to make a simple, local donation decision. It must go to “corporate.” Why did he go to college? Why does he get paid so much?

Contrast this scene with one earlier in the day. My two sons and I went to a very large construction site in town to ask for lumber donations. The site manager, an older crusty sort of fellow, looked at me and said, “you’ve got some nice boys there. Reminds me of my two grandsons. Pull you van around, and I’ll see what I can do.” He then proceeded to load about $200 worth of brand new 16 foot 2×4′s into my van himself. When I asked if he needed a donation receipt he said, “Nope. Just hope it does some good.” This same scenario was repeated later at a different construction site where a foreman donated about 300 feet of wood fencing for the skatepark on the spot. Neither one of these guys consulted anyone when giving the wood away. Didn’t even blink an eye. And neither of them were “educated” past high school.

I’m beginning to connect the dots. Our ability to think and act creatively has been blunted by years of being taught to follow orders. From day one, we’re encouraged in school to color between the lines, connect the dots in a logical sequence, stand in straight lines, stop learning when the bell rings and start again at the next bell, and on and on. College is our first opportunity to create freely, and most of us enjoy this time…if it weren’t for those darn tests, grades and professors (maybe we weren’t that free after all). Then we get thrown into the “workforce,” where once again we must not make waves or venture outside the corporate lines or bite the hand that feeds us. There are approval chains, org charts, offices with windows and small cube cells—all of which create artificial power and authority structures that value obedience and following orders over genuine creativity. This power structure has dumbed us down to new levels of sameness.

Good thing this doesn’t happen in the creative world. Ever wonder why there are titles like “senior creative director” or “senior art director”? It’s all based on the premise that people need to be managed, especially their creativity. Why? Because we’ve been dumbed down. We need to be “directed” and “supervised” in our creative activities. We can’t be trusted to be creative on our own. How many “approval” chains do we go through with our concept developments? Would we ever dare showing something to a client without our “management” okaying it?

An “Art Director” friend of mine at an agency told me how he wasn’t “invited” to be on the creative team for an interesting new project. Why? Because his creative team boss said he “wasn’t ready yet.” Instead he was stuck cranking out mundane but billable projects for clients. Hmmm. Was Charles Lindbergh ready to make the first solo trans-Atlantic flight in history at age 25 having very little flying experience? Was David, the little shepherd boy, ready to fight the seasoned killing machine Goliath? Was Bill Gates ready to start Microsoft when he couldn’t even finish college? I think you get the point. Structures like these are created and maintained to ensure a class and pay system (no, I’m not a communist), not to nurture creativity. They don’t just keep people down, they keep creativity down too.

Have you ever met two people who were alike? I haven’t. Have you ever seen two designs that are alike? Ever wonder why creative people who are all so incredibly unique can produce such a pile of bland sameness in design (I’m including my own work in the pile)? Wouldn’t it follow that if the individuals are all unique, their designs would all be unique as well? So what happened? Management. Supervision. Direction. These structures dumb us down creatively and have been doing so since we were kids in school being taught to color between the lines. Relationships. Freedom. Passion. These are the things that produce unique creative work and allow crusty construction workers to load up your car with lumber and say, “I’ve got grand kids like yours. Hope it does some good.”

Then midway through my career I took class in naval operations, and my whole perspective changed. Naval operations were orders of magnitude more complex than our Air Force operations. Not only does the Navy have to contend with all the same issues the Air Force does, but they have to do it on the ocean, away from land for months at a time and in hostile territory. A typical aircraft carrier task force commander is in charge of thousands of lives and hundreds of ships and planes, plus an entire underwater submarine force. What I once thought was complex really wasn’t.

That’s the way I’m feeling about design work today. I just returned from dinner at a friend’s who is new home builder. He not only has to work with the future home owners to define requirements, he actually has to build the home, work the equipment, keep up with the latest building codes, and often come up with creative design ideas when clients say, “just build something kind of like this.” All this while working with finger chopping power tools, driving bone-crushingly heavy equipment, working in every kind of weather and eating lunch from a tin pale. The level of complexity in his design work is orders of magnitude greater than mine. My printer may jam or email go down. I might fret over a typeface decision or a color scheme.

Do you ever think that designers take themselves too seriously? Like we’ve made our work harder than it really should be? Doesn’t this unwarranted complexity limit our creativity? Has design become more complicated or less or too complicated? Could design’s heart be a bit prideful in an unbecoming sort of way? Are we treating clients (never overtly of course) in such a way that we’re communicating a “this design stuff we do is just too complex for you to understand” attitude? I wonder. Your thoughts?

To make matters worse, we almost missed the hospital entrance due to do poor typography on their entrance sign. I’m not kidding. Bad typography could cost some folks their lives finding this hospital. The architect (couldn’t have been a designer!) chose a narrow, serif typeface lit from the inside of each letter. In the daytime, the sign’s typeface is legible from a distance, but at night, the width and weight of the letterforms didn’t allow sufficient light to shine through for legibility. A wider, sans serif display typeface would have made all the difference for drivers at night. I can’t imagine how out-of-town folks find the hospital in the rain.

Even more interesting is the road sign I saw a mile away from the hospital with a large “H” in a blue field. I understood what the sign meant, but wonder if everyone in our society would. Would someone visiting from another country understand the “H” as a hospital symbol? There is another emergency symbol (see the Caduceus symbol above right with cross and snake), but I’m not sure it’s any better. Wouldn’t the internationally known and recognized symbol of the red cross be the clearest and best symbol to use for hospital road signs (see above). Militaries of all nations use this symbol in combat to mark non-combatant medical care facilities and personnel. Why not here in the States for civilian hospitals?

What does this have to do with the heart and soul of design? If there is one thing I’ve decoded about design’s DNA, it’s that design is practical and functional at the heart. Design exists for others. Unlike art which sometimes serves only itself, design should have an outward focus beyond its bellybutton. Design is a servant, and it’s important that design serves people well.