What is the Value of Design?
Lately I’ve been reading Paula Scher’s Make It Bigger. Although this book is almost five years old, I would highly recommend it for anyone with even a mild interest in advertising design. Scher is something of a design industry icon, a partner at Pentagram, and arguably one of the most influential figures of the last 20 years in the design community.
One of the questions raised in the book is What is the Value of Design? Scher notes the damage that is done by treating design as a freebie that is included with a media buy:
Copy and design are thrown in for free. And if they’re free, they’re worthless. There is nothing to defend or protect, no standard to bear, no paradigm to change, nothing to elevate. There is no extra value in something intelligent or well crafted. If the “creative” is thrown in for free, then all that has value is the media space itself. If you take that thought to its logical conclusion, what fills the media space is essentially irrelevant, as long as the client feels satisfied enough to continue purchasing it. That creates a completely amoral design climate.
Having worked extensively over the past three years with publications that are free to consumers, I have seen this first hand. Such publications make money solely on advertising revenue. Once again: buy the ad space; design is free. It’s not that I have it in for free publications. On the contrary, they have been and continue to be clients of mine. But what invariably happens is that there are two losers in this model: design (as defined as well-executed communications pieces) and the end-user (the person that actually picks up the free magazine).
The readers of these magazines lose because what they end up with is a publication that usually does not communicate with them effectively. If the magazine is free to the reader then he/she [the reader] has no voice in shaping the magazine. Subscriptions and cover prices are the usual collateral that force a magazine to listen to its readers. By removing the cost to consumers, the publisher has absolved itself of accountability to its readers. The publisher is now accountable only to its advertisers - its only revenue stream. This is what Scher refers to as an “amoral design climate.”
As we all know, advertisers are famous for telling us about what is most important to them (usually themselves), which is frequently not what is important to us as consumers. Designers become mere button-pushers, executing poorly crafted narcissistic messages which ultimately fail to connect effectively with the target market. And consumers are forced to make due with a product that ultimately falls short of their expectations. Many times with such free publications, there are no other alternatives in the marketplace - save competing free publications that claim to “do it better” by whatever criteria they and their advertisers measure “better.”
Surprisingly, the ones that are hurt most by all of this are the advertisers themselves, as they often become perceived by their customers as not listening to consumers wants/needs. In the consumer’s mind, said advertisers are “necessary evils” in whatever the particular buying process may be. And that is never good for a brand’s image.
Tags: brand image, design, Make It Bigger, Paula Scher, Pentagram, value of design
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