Danger! Designers At Work

Designers are not marketing people. They don’t expect to know about marketing. In my experience, they don’t even pretend to. So why do so many business people- even marketing people- forget this simple fact? Why do they give designers free rein to use their brochure or a website as the canvas they would have been painting if they’d been prepared to starve for their art?

Take some examples.

Have you noticed how many pieces of theatre print due for bulk distribution- season brochures, fliers- do not have the name of the product at the top? Of course you haven’t. You didn’t notice them because, when they are put in racks, you could only see the top! Similarly why do they not have the name on the back? In the design studio, the world is perfect and designs are placed on walls. In the real world, print gets displayed in racks the wrong way round.

How often have you seen print in a 10 point sans serif typeface with hardly any space between the lines coloured pink out of orange or whatever? Beautiful to behold and very trendy but why didn’t the designer know that tests have shown most people find it difficult to read text unless it’s at least 12 point against a contrasting background? Answer: because to the designer the text is just one more building block in the quest for the perfect pattern on the page.

Look at websites.

The ones that pull every trick out of the bag may look stunning but why didn’t someone tell the designer that visitors to websites have no patience. Most people aren’t going to wait while those flash images download. They’ll be on to another site. While we’re on the subject, how often do you find all the interesting stuff down the right-hand side? Research shows that most people’s eyes travel down the left-hand side and flit across a couple of words of a headline or sentence as they go. They don’t even look at the right side!

Don’t blame the designer.

It’s not their job to be marketing people. It’s up to the client to know about marketing. If the client doesn’t have the knowledge, then don’t rely on the designer, employ a marketing person that does.

I think the problem is that we have too much respect for creativity. Creativity makes a difference and it is worth hiring a good designer, but if you want to sell your product you must get the basic marketing right first. Designers may want to be Michelangelo but businesses must want to sell.