GBi column published on the value of design

This column by Scott Geiger appeared in the January 2003 issue of Format magazine.

Engaging the Full Potential of Your Graphic Designer”

Are you fully mining the potential for added value and greater success your design team can bringto your company, your products, your services? In our world where technical features are easily copied and products and services are quickly commoditized, many of the most successful companies are utilizing design as a major part of their core strategy to create and sustain their success.

Good design is good business

Design has the power to differentiate, build a personality, attract a target audience and establish a bond with them, enhance customer experience, make the complex more understandable and create systems to enhance sales.Companies that are successfully tapping the power of good design are rising to the top. A great local example is Target Corporation. Target appears to have embraced and harnessed the power of design at the core of its being. Design pervades the company from its print and broadcast campaigns to the packaging and products they sell in their stores all the way through to the cups in their cafeterias.Design should not be confused with art or considered as merely decoration. Companies that relegate design to just the decoration role will forever be leaving opportunities unrealized. Potential will be left on the shelf. Management guru Tom Peters and super CEO Steve Jobs agree that design is a major competitive-weapon. While design certainly involves aesthetics, it also involves utility, efficiency, comprehension, connection and fulfillment. In this context, you begin to see how the process of design can be used to create not only brochures, Web sites, or logos, but to design experiences and to build sustainable competitive advantages throughout an organization.

So, now that were thinking big, how can you more effectively engage your design team to begin realizing some of the benefits of good design?

• Bring your design team in early — the earlier the better. Designers are adept at accurately defining a problem and boiling it down to its essence. They have a strong ability to visualize a problem. By the nature of their training, designers usually bring a different way of thinking to the table. A greater variety of perspectives enhances the dynamic of the discussion and widens potential.
• Let your designers do their jobs. Let them use their minds, training and creativity to develop unique solutions that add value. Don’t just view them as “hands.” Unfortunately, a common scenario is where an executive comes to the design team with a design brief already in hand that states something like “we need an eight-page brochure, four-color printed on coated gloss paper, 8 1/2 x 11 and saddle stitched.”
• If this is the level a design team is approached, the true power and potential of design is being left on the shelf. Good designers can, and should be eager to, operate on a strategic business level.
• Provide any and all research you can for your design team. Inundate them with it. This includes exposing them to all aspects of your business — from a manufacturing plant to the sales force to your clients and more. Oftentimes, the unique solution already resides within a company, it just needs to be recognized and extracted. Other times, the true root of an elusive problem may be uncovered. Research is the fuel for appropriate, effective solutions that increase value.
• Don’t isolate your design team. Whether an in-house design team or an external resource, look for opportunities to have your design team collaborate with other people in your company in ways that may be unexpected or nontraditional. If you’re lucky, you’ll not only pull more potential out of your design team, but their knowledge will be enhanced and so will that of the other employees on their work team.
• Challenge your design team to try to improve a company process. It could be anything from an assembly plant operation, to the flow of paperwork, to the cafeteria layout — anything. If you ask your team, you may be amazed at the ideas the design process can yield.

While many companies are beginning to grasp design’s full potential, a large number are still mostly uninformed. Because of this, design offers a real and immediate competitive-weapon in today’s marketplace. Its potential can be fantastic.You may already have the talent on your staff or within your outside providers. If not, take advantage of the Twin Cities’ reputation as one of the top design centers in the world. If you’re not sure where to start your search, you can call the Minnesota Chapter of American Institute of Graphic Arts at 612-339-6904 and request a copy of the Minnesota AIGA Design Resource Guide.

Resources like these will help you think bigger about design and the role graphic designers play in your organization. The untapped potential may be right outside at your office door.