Design Thoughts

Paula Scher

Identity design, for any organization containing more than three people, is the act of diplomatically negotiating personal egos, tastes, and aspirations of various invested individuals against their business needs, their pre-formed expectations, and the constraints of the market place. Making something formalistically beautiful, while desirable, is a more private part of the process, something that the designer needs to achieve incidentally, not something that can appear to be an overt motivating cause. (This is because form is subjective, and not an easily argued position when a designer is trying to get their client to feel comfortable assuming a new identity.)

Erik Spiekermann

You feel that most designers downplay the process of design? The why and how are what’s important, but all people want to talk about is the what. If you talk about a book I presume you’ve read it; you don’t just talk about the cover. Well to me graphic design is a book, full of stuff, and all people are doing usually is talking about the cover. A lot of designers neglect the rest of the book.



When you get wildly different answers from clients, how is that a solution to their problem? 
It simply establishes the fact that there are many ways to look at things, that by no means do they agree, and that they can’t possibly expect one answer to a problem that’s obviously so diverse. But most importantly we show them how incredibly ambivalent the decision process is, how it’s all based on opinions, history, and personal taste, and we explain how we’re trying to make it more objective. And we do this by making them aware of how much of their personal taste they bring into it. Then they can start to help us break things down — only then do we say we’re going to come back later with something. So the most important thing to do is to get clients to commit to a value system, because otherwise the decision process comes down to things like their political hierarchy and, for example, how their day’s been going.





How do you bid on a job? 
We don’t go in for speculative bids anymore, where people say, “Show us a couple of logos” and they have three or four other designers come in too. Instead, we go in there and we don’t show them any work. We show how we would do it if we did it and tell them, first, we’re going to establish a list of criteria. We’re trying to get away from the subjective, artistic type of stuff. I’m not saying we’re taking all the blood and heartbeat out of it, but we’re trying to be as objective as possible within a group of people, to create an atmosphere where people understand rather than guess.





Saul Bass

Steve Jobs

To design something really well you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to thoroughly understand something — chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don’t take the time to do that. Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask a creative person how they did something, they may feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after awhile. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or have thought more about their experiences than other people have. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. They don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions, without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better designs we will have.

Dieter Rams

Good design is innovative
Good design makes a product useful
Good design is aesthetic
Good design makes a product understandable
Good design is unobtrusive
Good design is honest
Good design is long-lasting
Good design is thorough down to the last detail
Good design is environmentally friendly
Good design is as little design as possible