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Dark Design Firm Secrets that clients have always wanted to know

How many times have you gone to a designer to get a bunch of concepts created and how often have you thought “Damn! I could have done this myself!”?  It happened during my first freelance gig when I was 15. A textiles mill wanted a logo and after about 60 variations (student enthusiasm!) I presented my delightfully minimal and subtracted logo consisting of 3 wobbly lines. The fucker said “I could have drawn these three lines myself!” and actually kept the logo and booted me out.

So, are these designers actually worth it? Aren’t they just people who you go to for aesthetic opinions? Aren’t you the one who adds business logic to their miserable scrawls (and boy, do they wail!) when they present it to you? Well, here are all those answers boyo and some of them are pretty cocked. So don’t say I didn’t warn you.

What is Design?
Commonsense. Yeah. Pretty much common sense mostly. I could say design is a complex process that consists of an understanding of gestalt and it’s effects on perception, an understanding of cultural  trends, a close alignment to the real world business or operational needs and is a direct anchor to specific aesthetic experiences. It’s all true, however, here’s a simpler way of saying it.

a. An understanding of gestalt and it’s effects on perception
Even babies understand how shapes and forms communicate. Becase you have commissioned a logo, you are looking at it as an object, a checklist of core values perhaps, but not as a sensory experience. You cannot because you’ve already thought it. But me, i’m different. As a designer I’ve trained myself to look at the world differently. It’s my job to manipulate people with sensory stimuli, because I’ve had years of experience in knowing what stimuli pushes which button. To me it is common sense.

b. An understanding of cultural  trends
Who do you think dictates what is fashionable this season in mens wear, or which colour palette or beat rules the waves? Designers of all types chart global trends in fashion, music, films, graphics, street culture and more. Why chart trends? It’s the oldest social phenomenon. The joneses next door, peer mirroring thing. We’re all bloody monkeys. So, unless you’re sitting there charting trends like me, you’ve joined the party at the bumpy side of Roger’s Bell Curve.

c. A close alignment to the real world business or operational needs
If you still think designers are those bearded nuts, with touchy feely nonsensical ideas about brands and who’s crap you have to listen to because your CEO is a closet painter, then you’re so busted! We still have our beards, but a good designer will give your marketing team a run for their money. Design schools actually have guest lecturers who give out lessons in marketing and budgeting in advertising y’know. And then there’s the fact that every canny designer knows to hit the Nielsen website at least once a week and especially before meetings with certain puffy clients.

So,if it’s all common sense, why the dog and pony show?

Aha. I’m glad you asked. Before you understand why designers act like Santas’ with elves during presentations, you have first understand what happened during the ‘design-process‘. See, no matter what anyone says there is no such thing as a design process. It’s just an term used in retrospect to explain the duration during which the concepts evolved. Trying to replicate the damn thing is useless. So, the designer was sitting there, exhausted from reading all that source and reference material staring at that stain on his bathroom door, when BAM! he sees a form and it all makes perfect sense. He runs back and sketches it. It works. He quickly runs it past a mental checklist. Reflects business, scalable, cohesive, pratical…etc.) Once he’s sure, he commits it to paper.

When it’s time to present it he knows that if he ever told you that he came up with the concept while taking a shit, you’re likely going to take a second opinion. Therefore those endless slides on value research, forum testing, connection with aesthetic ratios in nature and a whole lot of other crap like this. What’re you going to say? It looks like you did it while you’re taking a shit? Cough up that last payment bro. This is how it is.

Wait, my designer doesn’t say stuff like this.
I know. Any ideas on how you’re going to resolve that? Huh? anything?

Need Investment Advice – Try Onemint

This ain’t no design post. Just some friendly advice. I love that guy over at Onemint and you should too. He’s got his head firmly on his shoulders.

Morton’s Fork in a Court hearing!

I discovered a nice little story on Wikipedia, where a judge from the US court of appeals shoots down an appeal from the Burroughs household!

“One might perhaps have expected the plaintiffs to contend directly, in light of the issues in this lawsuit, that the 1981 film is based on the book. However, by mounting an indirect attack, in which the major premise is that the 1932 film is based on the book, plaintiffs apparently hoped to impale MGM with a ‘Morton’s Fork’: either the 1981 film followed the 1932 film, thereby infringing the book, or the 1981 film did not follow the 1932 film, thereby breaching the 1931 Agreement. Even if plaintiffs’ major premise were sound, which our discussion in the text … demonstrates it is not, MGM was not necessarily forced into the dilemma that plaintiffs seek to create. Since the standard by which we judge the similarity of film to book is not the same standard by which we must judge the similarity between the two films … the Fork is flawed by the fact that its tines are not true opposites. Thus the possibility remained that for its new remake MGM could eliminate the arguably infringing elements of the 1932 film in a way that did not substantially alter the story, thereby complying with both the copyright law and the 1931 Agreement. As it happens, this may have been the course MGM followed. Most of the specific incidents in the 1932 film that plaintiffs claim were taken from the book, i.e., Holt’s killing of the ape, Tarzan’s killing of the lion with a stranglehold, and Holt’s asking Jane if she can use a gun, are not in the 1981 film.”

Recognising life’s user interfaces

Ashok Neelakanta taught me chess. And what an amazing game it is!

Not that my plays are any good mind you. To this day I mostly lose to anyone that I play with, so it’s not the fact that it is a game that makes it amazing. It’s what chess does to you. Chess teaches you penetrative thought.

During college I joined a martial arts dojo to learn karate and during the initial few months of intense classes, I found myself diving deeper into the world of martial arts. Walking home from college, I would visualise passerby’s purposely maintaining a poker face, walking at me and at the last minute launching a preplanned attack, which I would deflect using a series of combinations, etc. Then something strange started to happen. I started seeing martial arts solutions to day to day problems. It’s not that I specifically think kick, punch, jab. Rather, the solution is directly based on the problem, but i’m always left with the feeling that the solution taste’s a bit martial artsy.

It seems that my mind is able to draw a parralel between martial arts combinations and common day to day issues, without mixing up the graphical language or terminology for each. After picking up chess I’ve started noticing that same thing. I need to stress that this is NOT volitional on my part. I don’t apply my learnings at chess on real world problems. I just find myself aware that the solution feels like a chess move. Somehow, I feel like there’s a bishop out there covering the queen and inevitably it turns out to be right.

Chess is turning out to be a graphical user interface to determine life’s decisions with.

I thought about it some more. I noticed that once the skill I am learning either becomes entirely a part of me, or ends up being forgotten these flashes of awarness stop or decrease substantially. Then it seems to be the case that these flashes occur the most when I am at the upward peak of the learning curve. Since they are not a volitive function, I can at best ride the wave and the only way to keep them in abundance is to ensure that my brain is constantly picking up something entirely new every once in a while.

As an after note…
Scientifically speaking there cannot really be an ‘I‘. I mean, sure from a religious point of view or from a sociological point of view a sense of identity does exist. I know I am George Supreeth. However, on careful scrutiny I am not able to place the source of this feeling. I just cannot localise it. Yet I am!

Benjamin Libet’s experiments (1979) showed that the concious decision to act occured 0.2 seconds before the action. However the readiness potential to act occured o.55 seconds before the act. This has it’s echoes in modern day experiments in the postdiction effect recorded by David M. Eagleman. It follows that the awareness that is I is then really a user interface to life. It’s an inference based on itself. (awareness)

Naming Innovation 2

Morpheme – The Innovation Consultant is back. This time he’s helping Intrateck find a new name for it’s product. This is the sequel to Naming Innovation. If you haven’t already read it, we suggest you head here first.

Morpheme Strikes Again

THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE INDECISIVE COO
“Do you know where I’m standing?” The voice boomed over my cell phone. “Umm, no sir.” “I’m standing on the vestibule of my flight, waiting for my turn to be frisked and you’re telling me that the launch of my product is delayed by a name? Are you mad Bhattacharya?”

I couldn’t forget the tone of the voice and it followed me home and back to work the next day. The disembodied voice belongs to Niren Gupta my boss, the CEO of Intrateck. After almost a year of working in stealth mode, Intrateck was about to release a device that would blow the socks off the wireless industry, and as Murphy would have it, the juggernaut snowball came to a sudden stop a month before the launch. See, we didn’t have a name for the product, and in the retail industry – especially the home segment the name meant everything.

I signaled to Padma that I don’t want to be disturbed for a bit. Shut the door on my cabin and sat down to think. An internal naming exercise had thrown up about 120 names and none of them could be substantiated. In the group discussions that we had, every single named turned out to have a flaw, some strategic some plain stupid. My logic is to just pick the most sensible of the whole lot and just go, see what the test audience has to say and roll it out. But Niren would have none of that. He needed the product out in time for the annual IT.com event, and a market test we just didn’t have time for.

Hey, don’t look at me. I’m just the COO.

Sigh.

Continue reading…

Naming Innovation 1

Morpheme – An Innovation Consultant helps Gavitech loosen up. A Naming Story.

Continue reading…

The difference is in knowing

Two significant things happened today. I read Gilbert Ryle on my way to work, and I was thinking about his, “The difference between knowing how and knowing that”, when I ran smack into a project meeting. The client across the table was expressing marked distress over a bright red layout of mine, projected on a screen… The trouble was it didn’t have the brand colours. The theme of the layout was love, and somewhere between his recommendations of blue and the grey, it hit me.

I made the connection…

It was Gilbert Ryle telling me what the trouble was. It was the difference between knowing how and knowing that. The client was making the classic Ryle’s ‘category mistake’. My bastardized version of Ryle’s rendition goes roughly like this.

There’s this intern who’s doing his rounds of the industry, and is being shown the various activities towards brand building. “I see the brand managers” he says, “and the advertisements, the brand manual and the product even… but where the heck is the brand?” The intern’s mistake is his assumption that the word brand belongs to the same category of words that advertisements, brand managers, and brand manuals belong to. Branding is the invisible intended effect of the visible branding effort.

The difference between knowing how and knowing that…

Take colour. Apply semiotic rules. See it as a language. Then you’ll spot my client’s category mistake.
(Though Semiotics is another system of ‘tagging’ sign structures, all we need to do is acknowledge the fact, not reverse engineer it. It is a classification, not a directive. It’s useful in literature or to communicate to each other. Assuming that it’s actually so is the mistake.)

We tend to treat colour as an attribute. Like a tag appended to things. This is a mistake that comes from a functionalistic view of looking. We are taught to accumulate knowledge. That the knowledge of something is nothing, that is until the void is filled with the knowledge of the thing, therefore allowing us to know the thing itself. Therefore A for Apple and apples are red, and red is a safe colour for food, though if you step out on the road at a red signal you’ll probably get killed… and so on.

We are taught to tag colours, in the assumption that we will have the ability to actively use this tag as a thoughtful pre-cursor to an action. Let me paint an example.

There is a new sports drink in the market. A designer is called in to design a poster that should cause people to associate the product to sports and fitness. During the brief, marketing also tells the designer that the brand colours of the firm are lilac and mauve, and he’s told to use it to increase brand recall. This presumes that the end customer will have a tiny pre-thought to the thought he has when he first sees the brochure. That is “Oh, Lilac and Mauve”, //tag// -register colour to Sports Drink name -//tag//… End of pre-thought. //Start of Main thought// “Oh, a sports drink! It makes me want to run around a bit…”

See how category mistakes create a muddle? (Seeing we’re on a roll, the above predicament is the classic Ryle’s Regress. If a thought precedes every action, and a thought is an action of the mind, then what precedes the thought, before the thought? Another thought?)

Contrary to what some ‘experts’ say, a human mind is vastly superior to a system-functional. Our mind allows us direct and absolute perception unmatched by an functionalist system of tagging and meta tagging. Ryle wanted people to see for themselves that the human organism perceives more directly. The human organism does not see a tree, thinks a tree and then perceives a tree. It perceives all at once as only sentience can. Ryle was a philosopher who wrote for the benefit of mankind. I’m a businessman. To me category mistakes are unforgivable, and when my competitors do it, absolutely delightful.

It’s 12.00 Am, and I finished the rest of the chapter. While I type this I realize that this post is about one simple category mistake that relates to colour. There are thousands of creative decisions being made out there by others in the Industry. Some by large firms with mega-ad spends, and there are start-up entrepreneurs who’re turning over their life savings onto identities and product launches. There are legions of client executives who are selling the client ideas, and brand savvy managers who throw back ideas of their own. There is a clamor for ‘customer eyeballs’ and ‘footfalls’ all of which is promised by communication material that costs crores.