Posts Tagged ‘design’

Another Guy Who Thinks Design is Alive and Well

By Chief Oddball on April 2nd, 2008 at 2:12 pm

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What was I just saying the other day about design — about how there’s no way I can see it becoming a lost art, despite what the disillusioned Philippe Starck may think?

Today, my pro-design argument received more support in the form of Peter DeLorenzo’s latest rant at AutoExtremist.com. Peter talks about how, despite all the boring focus groups where people regurgitate “safety, fuel economy and quality” as their top deciding factors in purchasing an automobile, the actual reality is that those factors have become the basic ingredients of almost every car out there — and that an actual purchase design hinges more on the vehicle design, and the emotional connection it creates, than anything else.

“As I’ve said before, we should never forget the essence of the machine, and what makes it a living, breathing mechanical conduit of our hopes and dreams,” says Peter. “Some out there may insist that the old saying, ‘you are what you drive’ has become obsolete in this touchy-feely, green-tinged world — but I’m not buying it for a second.”

Read the whole rant at AutoExtremist.com.

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Philippe Starck Says Design is Dead

By Chief Oddball on March 27th, 2008 at 5:24 pm

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“I was a producer of materiality and I am ashamed of this fact,” Starck told Die Zeit weekly newspaper. Starck, who is known for his interior design of hotels and Eurostar trains and mass consumption objects ranging from chairs to tooth brushes and lemon juice squeezers, went on to say that he believed that design on the whole was dead.

“In future there will be no more designers. The designers of the future will be the personal coach, the gym trainer, the diet consultant.”
AFP Report

As a designer myself — admittedly of graphics, user interfaces and advertising, rather than consumer products — I’m afraid I’m having trouble understanding how anyone could possibly claim that designers will not exist in the future. Will every man, woman and child on Earth suddenly become blind? Will the concept of aesthetics suddenly cease to matter to anyone? Will people suddenly and completely stop working and interacting with devices and equipment of even the most rudimentary sort?

I ask these questions because design — and art — can be found in all of these things, and is in fact integral to them.

Because Starck spent much of his career designing consumer-oriented pabulum and now regrets this fact does not mean that design, as a whole, is or will become irrelevant. More than that, the fact that any person could be so arrogant and egomaniacal as to claim that his personal revelations equal an inevitable paradigm shift in human perception simply disgusts me. Maybe Mr. Starck’s shame is not entirely misplaced.

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I May Not Like Marketing, But I’m Not Half Bad

By Chief Oddball on January 11th, 2008 at 2:27 pm

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At work, we recently started doing some advertising in print magazines — a first for us. Our company is pretty small, so the director of marketing is really just our most outgoing salesperson. He came up with an idea for our print ad campaign that was definitely out of the box, and actually seemed a little risque. My advertising experience is limited to the standard “corporate” type fare — you know, conservative and professional — but I was willing to give the new idea a try. Hell, it was certainly a lot more interesting to design.

There were some nay-sayers at the company, including one who called the campaign “tacky,” and others who were quietly asking for my opinion behind the marketing director’s back. I was honest — telling them I wasn’t sure it was the best way to go, either, but we have so little experience in doing advertising — and so little of it turned out to be effective — that I thought a radical new approach was worth a try. What we needed to do, I said, was run the ad for a few months and gauge the reaction.

Well, it looks like this advertising idea has proven itself effective. Since the magazines we’re running in started hitting mailboxes, we’ve been getting tons of calls and emails that specifically reference the new ads. Even better, that reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. One guy even emailed to say his company was looking to partner with an advertising agency, and asked if we would share the name of the agency we used to create our ad. Heh — no agency here, just the marketing guy, little old me and Photoshop! It’s pretty flattering that corporations are assuming we had to hire an ad agency to create something as good as this.

Another guy wrote in to say that he initially thought our ad would appeal mostly to men. (It features a picture of a rather attractive woman.) But, he says, he asked his wife to look through the magazine and point out the most interesting thing in it, and she picked our ad. So hey, even if we don’t necessarily appeal, at least we’re interesting — which is all advertising really needs to be.

I’m stoked that my design work has gotten some more exposure — particularly in a field where I don’t really have any exposure. As for the director of marketing, who recently feared his job was on the chopping block, it seems that his worth has been proven.

Tonight, we’re launching our brand new websites, online store, discussion forums, and CRM services to help us better reach and manage customers both new and old. Together with our new advertising initiative, plus the new wave of products we’re currently working on, it looks like 2008 could stand to be a pretty good year indeed.

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