Posts Tagged ‘service design’

escape velocity

Thursday, September 8th, 2011

An awful lot of very good graphic designers celebrate their success in the profession by leaving it. Is this because they cannot wait to get away from design? Surely not…

A recent blog post by Steven Heller concerned one Kent Hunter, a gifted designer I met briefly in the 80s whilst working for a transatlantic corporate graphics concern. Kent is a very talented chap indeed who amongst other things I remember art directed some ground-breaking annual report work for Time-Warner. Having had a very successful career with Franfurt Balkind, Kent and his partner have now opened an antique store in Millerton, NY.

Around the same time, in our London office Suzi Godson was a highly talented, clear-thinking designer I enjoyed working with. She bailed out of a very promising design career to become a successful Author and Times Columnist.

John Larkin was co-founder (with Tim May) of Design House Consultants, which was (and still is as far as I know) a very successful business, although John has long since departed both design and the UK to St Tropez for a new life as a hotelier.

There are plenty of other and higher-profile Poachers-turned-Gamekeeper: For Ben Schott (of Original Miscellany fame) and Dave Eggers (of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, What Is the What, McSweeney’s and-much-more fame), graphic design activity was just step on the road to greater things.

What makes these escapees so keen to leave design? A desperate desire to never work for the man again? (understandable); a fundamental hatred of hard work? (not likely); A sudden need to assume a new identity for tax purposes? (possibly)…

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hail to the Info Tsar

Tuesday, July 26th, 2011

 

 

Having lately spent far more time than I care to in and around NHS facilities it is hard avoid noticing how much energy / resources are wasted when information is badly managed. I am no systems analyst, but even without an abacus for a mind the potential benefits of sorting out information in the NHS seem clear in three areas:

In some trusts, budgetary adjustments have reduced willingness to create / maintain good patient communications. Visits to dreary GP surgeries are not elevated by leaflet / poster displays that climb the walls like mutant strains of rising damp. Clip art and Comic Sans feature heavily in DIY print productions in which clarity and communication have taken a back seat. Patients should have the right to clear information in support of their treatment.

Physically navigating the NHS, its hospitals, clinics and other facilities can be complex. Some of the larger hospitals have decently planned sign systems and an air of calm efficiency as a result, but many smaller or regional ones do not, and those that are building / reorganizing often fail to consider users by properly re-routing them. How many late / missed appointments are caused by being in the wrong place at the wrong time? Exceptional facilities like the Kentish Town Integrated Care Centre seem to be from another world entirely. Owing its existence to an opportunity of history, the persistent vision of an individual and a gifted design team, such a paragon is unlikely to ever be anything like the norm, in this universe at least.

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inside out: designing sustainable brands

Thursday, June 17th, 2010

You don’t construct a building façade-first, then install services, framework and foundations. You don’t build a car by starting with the bodywork. We don’t (unless recovering from a big night out) dress coat & shoes first.  So why are some brands designed from the outside-in, imposing personality at odds with experience? Outside-in brand design can set expectations significantly adrift of reality, resulting in dissonant and negative communications and an unsustainable brand.  How do you build a sustainable brand? From the inside out.

Graphic design is superficial, ephemeral.  Much of it ends up, if not as yesterday’s fish & chip paper (they don’t do that any more), in the bottom of the budgie cage’s (no-one keeps those any more either), binned and recycled until fit only for landfill.  Pixels or paper, graphic design is largely transient, disposable. Its outcomes may be all about about the surface but there is every reason why its process should have more depth.

At Wolff Olins as far back as the 1970s a much-used maxim was “you can’t paper over the cracks” i.e. if your company/product/service is poor, a stunning visual identity will not help you long-term, it only creates a credibility gap that makes things worse. Advice that clearly never reached the ears of hapless BP CEO Tony Hayward…

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we want… information

Thursday, February 18th, 2010

I put up a shed last weekend (yes, the designer lifestyle is that glamorous):  two days of stressful toil lengthened in no small part by the appalling quality of the ‘instructions’ provided: 14 pages of verbal and visual redundancy, irrelevance and confusion.  Well what did I expect for £99?

Most products arrive with scant, inaccurate or misleading information for assembly and use.  Many well-designed consumer products neglect information as part of the product experience, leading to returns, safety issues, customer dissatisfaction and erosion of brand loyalty.   This seems overwhelmingly the norm and we are accustomed to sucking up all the wasted time, the frustration and stress, and moving on with our lives.  Why are ‘instructions’ such a design-free zone? (more…)

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