This interview with former BMW Chief of Design Chris Bangle reveals some universal creative principles for creating and managing a culture of design.
Break down the walls between your teams, but ...
During the true development process there’s no reason to hide things. However, keep the board of directors and the marketing guys at bay - you can’t create life under an atmosphere of ‘no’.
Balance your race-horses with thinkers
First and foremost you want designers to bring energy to the table ... those are the race-horses - you just want to turn them loose. But you also want to make sure you get the deep thinkers in there, the artistic ones, who are sometimes shy and often intimidated by the aggressiveness of the other types. But they’re often the quiet sleeper ones that come up with that deep deep idea.
Having the power to let go
When you are on a model, you are the design chief - you have to know you have that power. Yet, design chiefs, if they do their job right, need to become experts at letting go.
Get deeper inside your team’s heads
My job is to help you do your job. However I’m going to open up your drawers and see what you’ve got stashed away that you’re not doing. What is it that you want to do that someone is not letting you do, that you’re dreaming of doing, but don’t have the courage to put up on the wall?
Open your horizons
If you like cars you have to appreciate all of them - for what it took to make them. Even the cars that are butt-ugly - there was a design team that put a lot of love into that. Try to understand it from their point of view - their limitations - and see what you can learn from that.
According to the Financial Times Kodak has gone through the most radical business transformation in history.
Here’s a company snapshot to give you an idea:
Company employees 1988: 145,000
Company employees today: less than 20,000, 60% of which are new in the past 4 years
19 products drive almost all the company’s revenue, 11 of them are digital
Half of these products didn’t exist 2 years ago
In this video CMO Jeffrey Hayzlett is very open about the rapid pace and in-flux state of their brand transformation.
I have to say that I love this guy. In a very entertaining and humorous way he highlights the company bottlenecks that have them producing break-through products with meaningless names (i.e. Zi8).
In my opinion Hayzlett’s energy is just what this company needs if they’re ever to become a household name again. Seems like a great client to work for.
That’s what Jeff Jarvis’s new book aims to answer - not just for tech companies, but in many other industries.
In the above video he gives quick examples of this, such as crowd-sourcing automotive design and restaurant menus.
I have to say, those have to be the most un-compelling, and frankly, ill-advised ways to look at your business that he could have stated.
There’s a widely used axiom (source unknown), that goes like this…
If you asked a group of Porsche owners what they wanted they’d tell you things like, “smoother ride, more trunk space, more leg room”
They just designed a Volvo.
While crowd-sourcing can provide critical input, it’s not the formula for brand differentiation.
It’s also not universally loved within Google.
Former Google employee and Lead Designer, Doug Bowman explained his departure from Google on his blog...
“Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that. I’ve grown tired of debating such minuscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle.”
Putting aside Doug’s interests here, it’s clear that Google has removed the human element, the emotion, out of the design process. Now, maybe this works for a company like Google that creates things for the masses, but there are many many businesses that don’t. And even some that do, such as Apple, wouldn’t be who they are if they democratized their product creation.
For certain companies, and for specific applications, crowd-sourcing can be a powerful tool. It’s working for Google. But that doesn’t mean that it’s the new paradigm, period.
I typically don’t slam a book before I read it. And I’m sure that there’s more to glean from Google than democratized design. But between this video and the Amazon user reviews, I’m having second thoughts about picking this one up.
More and more I’m hearing folks in the advertising industry finally starting to talk some sense.
Mark Earls former head of Ogilvy’s planning offices in London speaks here about the perils of a multi-channel execution of a single “big idea”. Today, many agencies and brands continue to focus on consistency rather than effectiveness. This is certainly evident in my recent blog post on MasterCard.
There is a quibble I have with something he said - though it might be semantics. He aligned the term “big idea” with “big insight”. Big insights are very different than big ideas. Many ideas, strategies, and executions can flow from a single insight. And while one insight might rise to the top, the second, third, fourth and fifth aren’t far behind. The key with insights is to get the ones that no one else has. Patrick Edson from MillerCoors talked about this a few months ago.
Earls quickly touches here on the decreasing relevance of the 30-second spot and how products and services are the future of advertising.
So what’s slowing the industry down?
Minds are boggled with how to structure awards shows around things that actually provide consumer value vs brand impressions.
In a recent interview with Nevil Brody on the Design Matters podcast, a caller asked if he thought the proliferation and evolution of digital cameras will bring about the death of film-based photography.
His answer was “yes”, but his worry wasn’t about loss of quality, or the demise of an art form. His concern was that the infinite options that digital enables brings with it an overwhelming amount of choices. And too many options negatively impact the creative process.
“If only my computer had a ‘no’ function and could tell me that I was done”, he wished.
I remember reading an interview in the 80’s with Geddy Lee from the band Rush. He was complaining about the same challenges they had in the studio as they introduced more and more digital into their recording production. They never knew when the record was done.
Very early in my career I founded the short-lived magazine d8. As the founder, Creative Director and primary designer I pretty much had free creative reign. Therein lied my biggest enemy. Without any real limitations I frequently experienced decision anxiety. Looking back at the work it seems as if my design decisions were totally random - they were, actually. And the truth is, back then I lacked the experience and the discipline to create my own boundaries. It was design for design’s sake.
I’m thankful to have experienced a freedom there that most never get outside of art school. But having been there I can tell you that it’s overrated. The greener grass.
Limitations create focus, they channel the mission, they breed innovation.
Whether it’s the budget, the schedule, the client, your team, the medium, or the attention-span of your audience - welcome the limitations. If they’re not there - tighten the brief, push the team, trim the schedule, tie both hands behind your back and put the blindfold on.