Blog >> Who is the designer?

22 Apr 09 / 10:45 / Joe Hedges

CATEGORIES: Branding / Strategy / Trends /

Who is the designer?

I have often read articles, blogs etc that cover the frustrations of designers who are victims of a prescriptive client. Being agency side for the best part of 21 years I have experienced the effect many times. It is however a complicated area and hard to work around.

I'll start this by breaking down the kind of clients that I have come across, mostly though I have been lucky, but there have been occasions.

The trained marketing or brand manager with no agenda except a successful project and possible promotion as a result, perfect!

They tend to listen and understand the skill of a good designer, but equally, they understand that they themselves have an important part to play, as they should know their market second to none. Therefore a mutual meeting of minds forms and the end result is perfect. The designer gets to understand the issues and so goes about his work well informed, able to explore the depths of his art.

The unsure marketing or brand manager
Then there are those rare, but painful times when a client has a very clear picture of what they want, and yes, know there subject matter extremely well, except that they are less aware of what's been going on in the creative industry and have become victims of their own desire for success, often too engrossed in the detail and missing the bigger picture. The thing about good designers is that they tend to know what makes people tick on a sub-conscience level, an example being Apple's packaging: it seduces people. Yet is there a science to it? Well yes, there probably is, but it would be impossible to dissect that knowledge and re apply it via a layman. So here you have the client - doesn't understand how to handle the creative solution, doesn't know what makes a customer purchase and relies on the detail, i.e. increase the logo, put an image of someone smiling, put an 'offer' label on it, don't forget the disclaimer etc. the result is something that has all the elements that according to the books, will improve sales, but in reality just puts people off.

Another often missed opportunity is brand shelf life, while looking intently at the packaging in isolation, clients and even designers often forget about total brand shelf presence, after all, products mostly sit in masses on shelves don't they?, therefore too many messages on a single piece of packaging not only makes the product lose any presence or personality, but when all together in one mass of marketing opportunity can result in just visual noise, a wasted opportunity.

Ok, I'm going off the track here a little, but bringing it back to my point; a good client should know their subject matter, recognise a good consultancy, trust the designer and let them do what they do best, advising on how their market works and creating some magic. This way special things are created, and guess what, people buy them!