The seeming disconnect between designers and everyone else feels bigger than it should. On a couple of occasions over the passed week I've had to deal with a weird design prejudice. I have a client at the moment whom I'm doing a fairly large rebrand for and whilst they are very smart they also have little experience in dealing with design in a formal way. This is totally fine of course and is part of the process (that word again) but what I found odd and very interesting was that when presented with work outside of there fairly limited window of understanding there was immediate suspicion that it was design stuff that no one else under stood. This isnt an unusual response and after a few meetings and a fairly simple non-bullshite explanation and education they came back to it and actually loved it. All pretty par for the course.
Then this week I've been helping out on a new retail brand admittedly not directly with the client but one step back. The client has engaged a marketing agency to launch the brand and because of the lack of budget the agency has pushed to do the identity work as well as all the marcoms stuff. Without getting into the nuances of aesthetics (which to be frank I thought was shite) the work they came back with failed technically to work as a brand mark. Namely it had to work online and small, it had to work embroidered (not too dissimilar) as well as all the other apparel variations. The thing I found shocking was the client’s response; he genuinely couldn't see why it was awful. Anyway the bottom line with this is that there simply isn’t enough main stream design understanding and there is a massive hole there waiting to be filled. In part its the job of designers to do that with clients but when you look at the amount of interior or architecture mainstream media it makes one wonder why? Is it graphic design is some how irrelevant to people’s everyday lives? my feeling is it's a mixture of shoddy designers baffling clients and the fact that it’s simply not presented as well as other design...an opportunity me thinks.
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