December 4, 2004
form condensed, 5
More from my monthly column in form, the German design magazine.
Logos to go.
Who needs graphic designers when you can just get logos online for a few dollars?
At last there?s a colleague who does away with a myth: designing logos and other graphic ephemera is the beginning of an extensive process in which the company first has to 'find' itself, before it, aided and abetted by management-, style-, advertising and design-consultants, reaches the apex of Corporate Design: the logo.
I quote from a web site:
"We involve up to 5 graphic designers on your behalf in order to get as much variety of designs as possible. We now offer a new logo design, done by at least 3 different graphic designers, for just 199 Euros."
There you are: if 1 designer makes a bad logo, 5 designers can make 5 bad logos. One can hardly get a decent meal for that sort of money these days! But there's more:
"This is a unique offer, well below the common price structure in this business of between 500 or even 2000 Euros."
Wow! 2000 Euros? Weidemann was rumoured to have been paid 200,000 old Marks for his DB-logo back then. That must have been one percent for the work, with the remainder as damages for countless presentations, corrections and re-submittals over the course of the two years, the usual time span these things take in a government agency.
"Why are our prices so low? Our designers work from home. Our services are based on communication via electronic media between designer and client: e-mail, SMS, Chat, Internet. And our designers work in economically well-placed regions."
So there. While they're sitting at their computers all day chatting, they might as well do a few logos on the side. And obviously these regions are in the Eastern bloc, where the Euro is hard currency, software is quickly appropriated and intellectual property is valued about as high as the Russian Rouble, but where every other person is a Grand Master in chess and ace programmer. Go for it, all you clients who keep complaining about the high cost of labour. Here's another service, apart from Call Centers, which you can delegate to people without much knowledge of German. It'll save money and tiresome discussions. And if you don't like the results, simply order another half dozen logos. That will keep 30 graphic designers busy and create jobs, albeit far away. We need to think global!
form condensed, 4
From my monthly column in form. The German design magazine.
Of Chief Pencil Sharpeners and Senior Meeting Conveners.
About meaningless titles and unnecessary hierarchies
A recent study about the economic situation of the design profession in the US listed six hierarchies for the positions in an average design firm: owner/partner/principal; creative/design director; art director; senior designer; designer; junior designer. This reasonable list attracted a lot of attention in online forums and weblogs, with large agencies submitting their lists of up to 18 levels of titles in the design department alone ? from junior designer through copywriter and media designer to Chief Creative Officer. Not only does this take on inflationary proportions, rendering them increasingly meaningless, but there is also a contradiction in the terminology:
Some of the titles denote where someone is placed within the ranks of their company, while others explain what they do there. Titles, roles and job descriptions are all confused. We have already learnt in this column that unprecise language indicates unclear thinking. What, then, makes an agency use such confused language, which they would never tolerate in a client briefing? Their employee?s vanity? And what of designers who have progressed to design director after a few years, only to have entered the end of the career street? And if you want to name a dozen hierarchies, you need three times that many employees. Which is why small studios love to fake it by giving an impressive title to every intern (how about Research Assistant?), while the cleaner is upgraded to Vice President of Recycling Operations. And even in Germany, those titles have to be in English, the more to impress gullible clients with. Unfortunately, the Chief Design Officer sounds very much like a military rank in German.
The people who are most impressed by this sort of language tend to be the ones who cannot really speak it. Apart from designer vanity, another reason quoted for titlemania is often the fact that clients would rather call a Design Director than a lowly designer. The director gets paid for taking the call and then relays the message to the lower levels who do the actual work. In the real world, however, teams are neither run nor dominated by the people with the top title, but by those who command the highest respect from their peers. Unfortunately, the soundest teams often tend to take on new colleagues only if their competence is below the group?s average. Over time, everybody in a small team will have risen to Senior Designer level at least, but at the expense of design quality. The desire to keep the status quo tends to be stronger than that of taking risks.
Designers, too, fall victim to the Peter* Principle: Employees within an organization will advance to their highest level of competence and then be promoted to and remain at a level at which they are incompetent.
* After Laurence Johnston Peter (1919?1990).