Tag Archive for 'design'

Page 5 of 5

The Smile or the Sigh: Why Delighting Us Matters

Published on October 26, 2008 in design. Closed Tags: , , , , .

Want to know if the things you do come off as corporate to others? Then ask yourself this: Do my policies, products, presentations, performances, or practices make the people who experience them smile or sigh? (The alliteration was on purpose, oh yes!)

Below, I’ve included a release that I designed for when I deliver photographs on a CD.  (As you may know,  most reputable photo developers will ask for a release before printing high-resolution images from a disc.) What’s the point of including a boring document in this magnificent blog? Well, good reader, continue onward, and soon you shall know.

I didn’t include the (resized) form to suggest that I’m the best designer ever. I’m sure there are hundreds if not thousands of designers out there who can come up with a more compelling layout. But there is something pleasing to me about this particular form. It makes me smile. From a distance, it declares its function, and it defies convention with a sense of distinction. Maybe you don’t like it though. That’s OK. Design your own forms that look better, and you’ll make us both happy.

Normally, forms make me sigh. They are slapped together without much thought and they reek of corporate, bureaucratic language. I associate them with words like boredom, obligation, and inhumanity. I like my customers too much to wish those things on them, so I took the time to design a more interesting form for them, a form that I hope will help them smile just as it does for me. This took me an extra hour or two, but I think my customers are worth it. Are your customers and acquaintances worth the extra effort?

It amazes me that companies spend millions of dollars to get their advertising just right, but then they stuff their elegant products with inarticulate, soporific manuals and anti-human legal documents. Boring manuals are the norm, but what if a company started writing manuals of elegance, clarity, and wit? Would this not be a competitive advantage in the marketplace? I don’t know about you, but I personally would rather buy from a company who astounds me with excellent manuals than from a company who throws singing squirrels at me, trying to persuade me to buy their (squirrelly?) stuff.

And why should reading a legal document be to your spirit what the dentist’s drill is to your tooth? Take a look at the GNU General Public license here for example. Not bad. The language is easy enough to understand, but there’s room for improvement even here: I know that you lawyers write stuff in ALL CAPS because you want to make it harder to read, but how would you like it if I WROTE THE REST OF MY POSTS LIKE THIS or if I walked around yelling at everyone? Not cool? Exactly. The law is there to keep society running smoothly. It’s a good thing, so why not write it in a way that helps us admire both the law and your humanity?

In one of their promotional PDFs the AIGA (The American Institute of Graphic Arts) writes, “The role of the designer is to have ideas – and to inspire them in others.” Great quote. Everyone has ideas, and everyone who isn’t entirely evil enjoys inspiring other people at least in some way. Not convinced? Lets assume that you get paid the same for doing your job whether you do it in a banal, uninspiring way that makes people sigh or in a way that inspires them and makes them smile. Which one would you choose? You don’t have to be talented at illustration to be a good designer; all you have to do is have ideas and aim to make people smile with them. The rest is just attention to details.

Organized Lovelessness

Published on October 12, 2008 in being corporate defined. 2 Comments Tags: , , , .

In The Perennial Philosophy Aldous Huxley describes contemporary institutions as “organized lovelessness.”  What a poignant phrase, and it’s a much better definition of being corporate than anything I could articulate even with hundreds of words.   (In fact, maybe you would be better off reading his book instead of this post.  If that’s what you’re thinking and if you have the time to read more than 200 pages of metaphysical commentary, then you can find the book here, provided online by Google Books.)

When I protest against being corporate,  I’m not talking about the ever-growing complexity of  specialization or organization that have developed to accommodate our modern society.   After all, highly specialized, organized people have made it possible for me to write this blog post at no cost, within the comfort of my home, on a computer I can take anywhere.   What’s not to like about that?  No when I’m making a case for being less corporate, I’m talking about the organized lovelessness that can show its ugly head in our business, political, and religious interactions if we’re not vigilant.

"Child in a Harsh World" (a sketch I did)

How awful it is to be treated like a thing and not like a beloved person. But, that’s what happens when a mission statement becomes more important than the people whom the mission statement is supposed to serve. It’s why company policies meant to help serve customers can become bureaucratic nightmares and why a noble political system dedicated to preserving individual freedom can devolve into pressured conformity.

Even churches or other religious institutions are not immune from this plague of organized lovelessness.  This is indeed a disheartening thing, since places of worship, at their best, are built on the belief that God loves his creatures enough to care about their development.  From this foundation,  dignity for human life and decency within a civilization can develop.   And yet, perhaps you’ve been to a loveless, dogmatic-driven church that left you feeling so cold and unconnected to others that you were driven faster into the seductive (but still loveless) arms of vice.  I know I have.   Not every place of worship is like that, but unfortunately, too many of them are.

To help me illustrate these ideas, let’s try a little thought experiment.  Suppose, for a moment, that I am not a lowly writer, but a powerful bestower of wishes.  (Tragically this is untrue, but let us suspend disbelief together for the sake of this example.)  Close your eyes and imagine that I will present you with a package that contains your heart’s desire.   Now open it.

There are many things you might have imagined, but I am willing to bet that you did not imagine a corporate poster featuring bar graphs, pie charts, or banal graphics.   ( Perhaps some day I will find the man who affectionately decorates his home with productivity graphs, and then I’ll have to eat my words, but for now I’m safe, I think.)  And yet, businesses continue to decorate their workplaces with these ugly things.  Why?  Probably because these companies are more committed to their mission statements then to caring enough about their employees to wonder what they would enjoy seeing.

Nothing wrong with reminding the people who work for you about your organizational goals.  There is something enriching in holding someone up to high standards. And besides, you don’t really love people unless you want them to become and remain the very best versions of themselves. But don’t good families have admirable goals as well?  Of course, but you don’t see these families decorating their walls with awful corporate-looking stuff, just to remind each other about those goals.    Why not?  They care about each other too much.

So take another look at even the small things you do in your business, organization, or even your personal life.   Do the posters you put up, the jokes you tell, the ways you interact with people increase someone’s sense of organized lovelessness?  Or do you fight organized lovelessness by putting more importance on caring about people than on achieving goals, looking cool, and growing profit? The second choice is hard to do, I know, but it’s still worth fighting for, don’t you think?