The Changing Emphasis of Design

The emphasis of design has undergone a major change since I first entered the communications business several decades ago. In the 70s, 80s and throughout much of the 90s, when you talked design in marketing, most people were referring to graphic design. At that time, the emphasis for designers that were well respected and admired by their industry peers was doing something that was distinctive, eye-catching, and helped define a brand look and feel.

One of the main goals of advertising, and designers that were associated with the marketing function, was to create relevant attention for their clients’ companies, products and services. The tools of the marketing trade at that time — including design — only allowed one way communication, and marketing practitioners were often left to interpret the results of their efforts through the complicated and time-consuming sieve of research and extensive account planning activities.

In defining the modern-day emphasis on design, I would offer that the assumption is no longer on simply graphic design. When people in the marketing industry refer to design today, they are just as likely to be talking about information design and experience design. Graphic considerations certainly play an important role in these other elements of design, but the role of the graphic design is now not necessarily to make something “eye-catching.”

Today, a major function of graphic, information and experience design is to help make things easier, more useful, and more understandable for people that interact with a brand touchpoint. Like technology, design is often most useful when it disappears behind the scenes, and the connection between a product and a consumer is at once on an intuitive and helpful level. Google’s search page design is elegantly simple in appearance. However, the brilliant information design, experience design, graphic design, and technology behind that simple interface have, for all practical purposes, disappeared from view on a user level. The Google brand has conveyed an easy and powerful utility. Design — in all its forms — has helped communicate that message.

One thing that hasn’t changed is the job of all design to create brand distinction. That may be through more visual design and the expressive art direction that characterizes Target’s online and offline advertising efforts, or it may be the aforementioned simple Google interface. However, creating brand distinction on an attention level without regard to making that brand’s renown useful and engaging so people actually buy things and rave to others about it, is a tremendous waste of the new tools of marketing.

In this interactive age, where design output and audience feedback can exist on an almost instantaneous level, designers in all forms of the discipline have wonderful opportunities to gauge firsthand if what they are doing is contributing or detracting from making things more useful, usable and relevant to the people they are attempting to reach. As Khoi Vinh, the design director of NYTimes.com, said in this Business Week interview:

“Historically, graphic design has been a discipline that deals in control, in creating carefully managed, organized experiences that are then distributed to people to be consumed in whole. Digital media has upended that equation, and now—yes—the audience is an active participant in the process of design. In fact, the process is now a conversation between designers and users.”

With the audience’s active role now engaged in the process, design, on a much broader level, is more empowered than ever to serve as a vital nexus of interactive communication for today’s marketers.