The Prepared Mind Discussion about designing human interaction.

The first two pages of my Flickrblog are photographs from an upscale shopping area in posh South Delhi where I spent the last week visiting friends and family. The first thing that caught my eye on this trip to India after a gap of three years was the proliferation of luxury brands available in the Indian market. In addition, there are even more cases of global brands localizing in ways that we never imagined to suit the Indian customer and wallet. I’m working on detailed reports on the market, the economy and of course, the design industry and innovation in India but thought to share this with you first.

Thank you for inviting me to join The Prepared Mind, Chris, terribly sorry it took me a week to post on the blog after your warm welcome.

Here is an interesting article about “Design Thinking”, a word that is being tossed around quite a bit these days.

What IS Design Thinking?

What are your thoughts on Design Thinking? (more…)

Emily Cohen is a consultant to creative professionals. Having been a designer in the past, she brings unique insights into working with creatives to shore up the business end of their practices. Emily and I had a great conversation about the business of design and the many concerns designers face. Give it a listen!

Listen to the podcast

• 0:00:52 How Emily helps creatives with business consultation
• 0:04:25 Areas for designers to improve, business-wise. Books & resources for business improvement
• 0:09:07 Why it’s important for designers to develop an understanding of business language
• 0:18:43 The changes in the old design business model
• 0:28:40 Dealing with business paperwork. Article from Emily’s website about payment strategies.
• 0:31:31 Design education and design business
• 0:41:36 Designers are often their own worst enemy

Recommended reading:

• The Business of Graphic Design, by Ed Gold
• Business and Legal Forms for Graphic Designers, by Tad Crawford
• AIGA Professional Practices in Graphic Design
• The Business Side of Creativity, by Cameron S. Foote
• Graphic Artists Guild Handbook
• The Graphic Designer’s Guide to Creative Marketing, by Linda Cooper Bowen
• Talent Is Not Enough, by Shel Perkins

Roger L. Martin, Dean of Rotman School of Management, writes a great piece on BusinessWeek Online, comparing the mentality and practices of traditional firms with those of design-shops.

The topic of design is as hot as a pistol these days. Everywhere you look, you see cover stories and conferences. If it’s design-related, people are talking about it. Firms everywhere want to revolutionize themselves by turning design-oriented. They look wistfully at the stupendous growth that the iconic iPod has provided previously stagnating Apple Computer (AAPL), and believe that design can help them create their own version of the iPod and restart their growth engines.

Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as hiring a chief design officer and declaring design as your top corporate priority. To generate meaningful benefits from design, corporations will have to change in fundamental ways before they can operate like the design consultancies who advise them on how to sharpen their design focus. To get the benefit of design, companies have to embed design into — not append it onto– their business.

Design organizations vary significantly from traditional firms along five key dimensions: flow of work life, style of work, mode of thinking, source of status, and dominant attitude. Left unchecked, the stark contrast between traditional firms and design consultancies will impede any attempt by traditional firms to become more design-oriented.

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It’s always great when I come across great design blogs with intelligent, insightful content and passionate writers. Luckily for me I’ve discovered THREE over the weekend!

Niti Bhan’s excellent blog Perspective, which takes on many issues relating to business and design; Ralf Beuker’s equally excellent blog Design Management, which is an excellent resource on design management and business; and finally Does Size Matter? another great blog that deals with issues not only related to design and business but also the intriguing subject of the comparison of “whether large full service companies are better than smaller specialized firms in a loosely knit alliance, sourcing design, innovation, strategy”.

Not too long ago I ranted about how the most designer blogs and forums devote more time to the HOW of design (software, programming, techniques, etc.) and not enough time on the WHY of design (management, strategy, business practices, etc.). Now, thankfully, I have to take some of that back.

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This is a great book on design by Tom Peters. Aptly named Design. It’s actually an excerpt from his book Re-imagine which is also a fantastic read.

Peters’ blog also typically highlights the need for better design in businesses and he states that he feels one of the things lacking in most business school curricula is matters dealing design as a business tool that fosters innovation and creativity.

Peters is not the only non-designer to echo these sentiments. As I’ve detailed in my entry “What if graphic designers get everything we want?“, the notion of design as a business tool is picking up steam in many business quarters.

.chris{}

Every week I mount my soapbox here and bore those unlucky enough to find themselves on this site with concepts like design process, design standards, upgrading our skills, rising to meet the challenge of globalism, etc. Then, every once in a while, something comes along to make me feel like I’m not the village idiot standing in the middle of the street, screaming at the top of my lungs while the townspeople walk by and try to pretend they don’t know I’m there! Well, maybe I am the village idiot but at least there are other folks on other corners shouting as well!

In this case, it happens to be the brilliant folks at NextDesign Leadership Institute. “What is NextDesign Leadership Institute?” you’re probably thinking. It’s a design thinktank (betcha didn’t even know we had a design thinktank, didya?) with these stated goals:

NextDesign Leadership Institute was created as an experiment in innovation acceleration.

We wondered if it might be possible for a small team of practicing designers to help speed the rate of adaptation, by graduate design education, to the radical events unfolding at the leading edge of the marketplace, that are impacting design leadership today. We optimistically guessed that it might be possible and if it wasn’t, finding out seemed like interesting research! To undertake that experiment, we created the NextD initiative and the NextDesign Leadership Institute.

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The other day I was talking to a couple of designers and we brought up as a topic of conversation the existing GD business model.

Now I’m no MBA and certainly am not qualified to design new business models but I think it’s a fair question, for which there may or may not be an answer, as to whether or not the GD business model should be revised or changed?

The old GD business models were as follows:

The old print GD business model:
Before the computer came along and turned it on it’s ear, this model was a very profitable one for graphic designers. Trained graphic designers were the only people who had the expertise to prepare ideas and designs for the arcane and complex offset printing process. Once ideas were finalized, they would create mechanicals which made the artwork “camera-ready” and marked those mechanicals with very specific printing instructions. Designers retained mechanicals from design projects unless clients paid large sums of money (I’ve seen as much as $5,000 for a set of mechanicals) to purchase them. (more…)

Change is always tough and the Graphic Design Industry has a tougher time dealing with change than perhaps most professions.

Our industry’s history of slow reaction to change
The desktop publishing revolution was particularly painful for our industry. We failed to see the writing on the wall, reacted to late, and many design professionals found themselves unemployable because they lacked even the most basic computer skills. Typesetters, comp artists, production people and a whole host of other professionals related to the industry went completely the way of the Dodo bird over night. (more…)

Ask a dozen designers, “What is branding?” and you’ll undoubtedly get twelve completely different answers. It’s a buzzword that we use (or overuse?) when we argue how valuable we are to the business world. Afterall, how can a company establish, modify or reinforce their brand without design? We talk about how design shapes customer attitudes - but do we really understand the full meaning of brand?

It’s a useful exercise to consider what I am about to tell you, so please do your best to suspend disbelief.

There is more to branding than design. And realizing this might just help your own brand.
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It’s very interesting that a huge debate is brewing in the field of web design right now. Design vs. usability. Creative freedom vs. guidelines and standards. Flash vs. HTML. Graphics vs. text. Of course, there is nothing really new about this debate. Most of us who studied design had the Bauhaus philosophy of “Form Follows Function” thoroughly drummed into our heads. What does it matter how wonderful a design is if it fails at the goals for which it was created?

Enter the usability specialists. There is nothing wrong, and everything right, with conducting some sort of user testing depending on the site being built. Designers/developers are often too close to projects and therefore things that are obvious to us may not be obvious to our intended audience. However, too many usability specialists seem to be crossing the line from consulting about practices that help overall site usability to trying to dictate style and design. (more…)

I saw this article posted in the About.com GD forum and thought it would make for a FANTASTIC entry on TPM.

Written by Sally Hogshead, it’s half tough love speech and half career pep talk. What it is 100% is required reading for any graphic designer!

.chris{}

Yesterday, over at my site, I posted the following:

I’ve just read the most concise definition of brand over at A Clear Eye. To quote:

A brand is the expectation of someone or something delivering a certain feeling by way of an experience.

– end of original post.

Well, 24 hours have passed, and I’ve had a chance to digest this. I had one of those a ha! moments in the shower, and nearly cut myself shaving. Two separate ideas suddenly clicked, and my understanding of each deepened as a result.

I’m in the process of reading a book called On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins (the fellow who invented the Palm Pilot, amongst many other things). In it, he proposes a new model for understanding how we are smart. In essence, he states that we hold models of experiences in our memory, and that we compare incoming stimuli against those models to determine, well, everything. In turn, each incoming stimulus affects the shape and content of the memory model – it’s a dynamic relationship.

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Some time ago, I started to write a series called Does Blog Design Matter?. I made it through the first 3 of 4 parts, then the wind dropped out of my sails. Why? It was depressing.

I was making all kinds of arguments for design, saying things like “while this site is high ranking now, it won’t be in the future unless it improves its design”. In reviewing the top 10 blogs, I made this argument 6 times. Well that’s all fine and good, but it leaves the distinct impression that blog design doesn’t matter. At least not now.

As a designer and passionate believer in power of blogs to help businesses, I find this disappointing. (more…)

Every graphic designer has to, at one time or another, have wondered how to perform the simple every day tasks that are necessary in any business. How do I market my design services? Where do I find an independent contractor agreement? Where do I find a graphic designer’s copyright agreement and what should a good one look like? What kind of staff does a design consultancy require?

At many points I’m sure we all have wondered “wouldn’t it be great if someone wrote a handbook on how to be a professional graphic designer?” Well guess what? Someone DID!

The Registered Graphic Designers of Ontario are now on their second edition of their handbook “The Business of Graphic Design: A Professional’s Handbook.” (more…)