‘Coles can be saved, branding experts believe.’

This headline appeared in The Age business section, on Saturday October 27th 2007. All praise be to the brand experts I thought to myself. Well, actually I lie. It was more a feeling of incredulity at such a preposterous statement. Everyone knows that if something stinks, you can’t get rid of the smell by gift-wrapping it. I read on…

‘Coles can be revived with some intensive surgery.’

The brand experts’ operating theatre is more about theatre than operating. Changing the branding is not a surgical procedure, more like adding a prosthetic limb to help it hobble along.

The article continued in much the same way.

‘What retailers have is space where they can talk to you, have conversations with you, engage with you, inspire you.’

The last thing I want is to be ‘engaged with’ when I am buying a 12 roll pack of loo paper.

We designers are great at talking crap. Many of us believe our own crap. And, unfortunately many in our industry believe that spinning crap is what we are being paid to do.

It is precisely this kind of design industry propaganda that undermines our industry. How can anyone view what we do in a professional light when design practitioners make such ridiculous claims? (Proven in this case by the fact that the brand experts did not save Coles, rather a corporate takeover by Wesfarmers).

As designers we are in the business of creating propaganda. We help to present things in a deliciously palatable way, regardless of whether they are bad, bland or bull.

Designers are often told by their clients what to do and how to do it. But, if you were to hire a plumber, I doubt you would tell him where to lay the pipes. Unlike a good plumbing job – where toilets flush, showers flow and pipes drain – there is no clear evidence provided to clients to show that a design will work.

Rather than providing spin, we should be providing evidence that a design works. How do we do this? By demonstrating that the intended user can read the design, navigate their way through it, and act appropriately on the information it provides – for example, using the information on a medicine label to take the right dose, using warnings on a toy box to buy a suitable product for a child under 3, using a bill to find out when to pay, using signage to find the maternity section, and so on. If designers focussed on developing design solutions that not only looked good, but were usable and functional, perhaps less propaganda would be needed. Unfortunately, many of us have nothing more than aesthetic arguments to support what we do at the design stage, resulting in the kind of terrible dross we see peddled by the brand experts in The Age article. And, as long as clients stay hooked on the rain dance rather than the actual rain, we will continue to see more of the same.

We are also in the habit of continually re-branding ourselves: commercial artists became graphic artists, who became graphic designers, who became communication designers, corporate identity specialists, branding experts, wayfinders, and information architects. People could be forgiven for not knowing what industry we are actually in.

Interestingly, architects do not feel the need to change their industry title every 5-10 years. This speaks volumes about the difference in the level of professionalism and professional standing that exists within the community for these two disciplines. It doesn’t need to be this way. A move to a performance-based approach would not only improve the standing of designers, but make them more accountable for what they do and say.

It makes me cringe when I read statements, like this one from the brand experts in The Age article, describing the supermarket experience:

‘It’s the sense of having a shopping trip where you know you will come out stimulated, instead of having fulfilled that core and ticked the items on the list.’

The article features a full colour photo of the brand experts, who look like they have never set foot in a supermarket in their lives.

Fortunately for all of us, Douglas Adams had a solution 20 years ago for those among us who undermine our industry. In the final installment of his Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy novels, the Golgafrinchams round up all of their designers, hair dressers, documentary filmmakers, governmental bureaucrats and other vacuous inhabitants and trick them into leaving their planet, shipping them off in Ark Fleet Ships programmed to crash-land on a distant planet so they can never return. If only…

This article appeared in Open manifesto {4}, Australia’s leading design publication and brainchild of Kevin Finn. openmanifesto.net

In the lead-up to the launch of the film the Rage in Placid Lake, Palace Films commissioned us to develop a cartoon strip, a kind of teaser, to whet film-goers appetites. We developed six separate strips which appeared in local street magazines around the country. The stories were written by the extremely talented Tony McNamara, who also wrote and directed the film. Alex drew the cartoons.

In the Zurich Life Insurance Forms there is text that asks questions, text that is instructional, and text that is explanatory. We created three distinct voices for these through the use of type hierarchy and colour. The use of different voices helped form-fillers better negotiate the 28-page form.

These voices also provide a sense of conversational turn taking between Zurich, a person’s adviser and the form-filler. Forms often take the place of a direct conversation where someone would ask questions and the other respond. By filling out a form we are having a conversation with an organisation and them with us. Incorporating elements of the conversation process is therefore essential to creating a successful form. We undertook this project for Zurich Insurance on behalf of the CRI.

The application for regional development funding is a long and involved form. Applicants were getting lost along the way to form completion. To address this, we added a snapshot of the funding application process on the first page. Following on from this, the form was structured with same flow of information. We undertook this project for DOTARS on behalf of the CRI.

Despite the fact that people get form-filling fatigue very quickly, organisations demand that their forms do more and more. This is the case with the NSW Birth Registration Form. When someone registers the birth of their child they are also obliged to provide a range of responses on the form that seem to have little to do with their child’s birth directly (rather they are for the benefit of the Australian Bureau of Statistics). In addition, parents can also use the form to purchase a Birth Certificate. The end result of this is a much longer and more complicated form-filling process. When we design a form we conduct an extensive analysis of content to determine whether it is necessary and what format it should take. If possible it is best to create forms that have a singular purpose. Unfortunately, in this case we were unable to do so. We undertook this project for NSW Attorney General’s Dept. on behalf of the CRI.

Interestingly, when we tested the old Births Registration form many people failed to provide their signatures. On the old form there had been an attempt to highlight this area by boxing it. In our new design we removed all cases of ‘boxing’ – the result being that everyone filled this section in. Boxed information seems to do the opposite of its intention – locking people out of sections rather than highlighting them.