The Business of Design.
An Interview with Erik Spiekermann
[by Ken Coupland]

Your philosophy of design goes far beyond mere aesthetics. Can you elaborate?
When they see our work, it’s difficult for other designers to understand that it’s not all about making pretty pictures, but it’s very important that they do understand. Doing “good design” is the easiest to talk about. But aesthetics is only about ten percent of the work and that’s the icing on the cake; the other ninety percent is about getting involved in the process, in planning, supervising, and delegating.

So 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.

By people, do you mean your clients as well?
No, the clients are different. “We don’t need a presentation of what you guys have done for other people,” they say. “We’re only interested in our own problem.” So we’ve learned to make presentations where we give them our take on their problem. If they want a computer interface, it’s no good to show them the book covers or the magazine layouts you’ve done. They come to you because they’re asking for advice and saying, “What can you do for me?”
On the other hand, we’ve had very good experiences talking to clients about other projects we’ve done in a way they can relate to. We don’t talk about the results; we talk about how the budgets are improved, how they can learn from us, how they can work with it.
We present a case study, but it’s not about the visual design, it’s about solving a problem. We present a company’s previous publications and we explain why they were costing them too much (taking too long to produce and employing too many people to do them). Then we show how we streamlined the design program so that they’re now spending half as much money and their deadlines aren’t as numerous. So the first way we save money is by throwing things out that don’t need to be reprinted or redesigned. And this is something everybody can relate to.
This only works if we’re clear about what we mean by design. To most people design means producing something visual. I mean by design looking at a problem, taking it apart and putting it back together again.

And what’s the major stumbling block in this process?
Mainly it’s the in-house politics. A company’s decision-making goes through levels of people, and they all have totally different tastes and opinions. And although nobody likes to admit it, the fact is that design is always decided on taste. So the first thing we always do when we go in is we try to teach our clients our language, because we speak a different language than they do.

If designers don’t get this, how do they keep clients?
Maybe I’m cynical, but I believe that big firms are successful precisely because they do things by the lowest common denominator. They’re going to do the stuff that nobody’s going to love but everybody’s going to like. So every other year you have new trends that come in, and then they become mainstream, and every manager knows if you do what the competitor has done, you can’t go wrong. We call it “preemptive obedience”, that is, to comply with something before it’s even been asked.

Contrast that with the MetaDesign approach.
While we try to sell our clients something that they might not initially agree with, we also try to give them the language to discuss things so that they can say no: we learn their language and they learn ours. And they do begin to realize that visual language is something you’re not born with, it’s something you have to learn. You can learn to distinguish and be more objective if you have the vocabulary. Little exercises help this: for example, we show them a color and say give it a name. Or we ask them if their company were an animal what would it be, and they go from elephants to tigers to monkeys. Or what if their company was a composer, who would it be? And they go from Mahler to Beethoven to Mozart.

When you get all these wildly different answers from people, 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.

You started out doing “design for design”, a way of saying you designed guidelines for other designers, which is where you got the name MetaDesign. Is that still reflected in your work?
Yes, in fact, it’s the second important aspect of what we do. Besides making the process more efficient, we look at the job we’re given as a link in a chain. Clients come to us for a brochure and we look at whatever else they have in printed form. We design the brochure and that gives them a frame of reference that people will expect in their other stuff. By defining their common elements, it usually ends up that we redesign their whole outfit because they realize that they’ve been buying things piecemeal and what they’re getting is not very coherent.
Once we’ve given them templates then, with the next brochure they can almost just go direct to the printer. This is because they basically work with the same finite group of elements we’ve given them rather than always starting from scratch, always rebriefing someone to come up with new ideas and muddling the issue evermore. That’s the main way we save people money.

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.

Once you’ve got the job, where do you begin?
A presentation is not the final truth, it’s not the end, it’s an idea, a sketch. When I’ve got a very difficult job in front of me I sit down and just write about it. As I write I get new ideas and usually my writing is fast enough for my ideas. But having it down there, leaving it for a night, going back the next morning, that gives you so many ideas and clarifies the things that you don’t know.
One problem you have if you work in a team is you say something and five people hear five different things. They go away and do their bits and pieces, and because they’ve all heard something else they all have different results. And you talk about it again and it seems to get further away from what you originally wanted to do, because everybody keeps adding to it. And I’m not talking about artistic or creative license, I’m talking about misunderstanding. But if you sit down and actually write something about it, what’s written down is less prone to misinterpretation than what’s said. You always need proof to check your own thinking and the client’s.

You have a lot of young designers on staff. How do they fit in?
Once we’ve established the conceptual bit and the brief is clear, then maybe we’ll let some of these kids do a visual on it, give it some alternatives and push it a bit. After all, we can always take it back. Designers my age are always going to come up with the same old boring stuff. I know so well how this is done that I can do the thing in two hours and they’re all going to look alike, whereas the younger guys are going to come up with something I wouldn’t come up with in a million years. But it is, as we know, a very difficult thing to keep these kids entertained when they’re involved in these large and ultimately tedious jobs.
One of our tasks is to make these young people feel at home in a very straightforward environment, and give them the chance to learn from that. What I see in most of the conventional design studios is they’re very profit oriented and their position is that pushing things costs too much money. The jobs get cranked out, they always work and there’s no risk involved. You make more money, but there’s also no progress.

You’ve designed advertising programs for leading manufacturers. How do you find this relates to the rest of your work?
Unfortunately a lot of clients still don’t understand exactly what it is we do. They have graphic designers down as people who do posters, record covers, and maybe book covers: arty, cultural stuff. But when it comes to brochures, say, they tend to go to their advertising agency.
Just about everybody needs an advertising agency. We’re so specialized though, that most people don’t realize that we are horizontally opposed, both in attitude and history. Advertising is for the moment; nobody looks at old advertising. Whereas what we do, by definition, has to last at least five if not ten years. We have to design long-term, we have to design things that form a framework for other designers.
Advertising for me is just a part of the company’s communications, using elements of the corporate design that we provide. So when we work for VW or Audi, we make guidelines for their advertising. Not for content, not for how they write their copy, but for what elements of the corporate design that are to be used in the advertising: to what degree, how frequently, and how they will occur visually. We don’t dominate the design with corporate design messages; we provide a consistent framework, and that attitude is something that is quite different from advertising’s attitude. We’re not enemies with them, we just have a totally different approach, and good clients know the difference.
A company has a lot of equity in its brand, and we try to provide the common denominator, the corporate style as it were. If I’ve seen you before, I’ll recognize you whether you’re wearing a jogging suit or black tie. What we try to do with a company is find out its personality, design that, and provide elements so that it’ll always be recognized, whatever the circumstances.

Other than all that, is there any recipe you can give for success?
There are all sorts of things that are different for every job. There really is no recipe for success. We don’t have a patent on it.