As a means of communication, it is a core element of business and social interaction, writes Sune Stassen (Published in the Cape Argus 8 October 2010)
IN THE world of business, marketing, advertising, brand or product development, the creative industry in general, and design expertise in particular, can have a deep impact on the success or failure of a venture or enterprise. Design in this instance is a form of communication, a prerequisite to building sustainable relationships between manufacturers, retailers, clients and consumers.
The re-design of a logo or reinvention of a successful brand, business or product has the power to destroy or enhance investments running into billions of rand. The creative industries nurture diverse visual disciplines such as graphic design, advertising and brand development, photography, packaging design and visual merchandising. It is design and the exuberant and creative activities within these disciplines that enable the building of successful, powerful brand identities and campaigns. These industries ensure the success stories of many leading brands such as Coca-Cola, Diesel, Levi’s, Nike, Puma, Reebok, Pick n Pay, Woolworths, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Audi, BlackBerry, Nokia and Apple, to mention but a few. Can you imagine the impact on any of these lifestyle brands if they had to lose their identity, their unique style, their consumer support and, eventually, their marketability? Sure, sometimes a brand gets a facelift in order to stay in touch with the changing times but these are based on calculated decisions with a capital C.
Losing sight of communicating the company’s core values, like those of delivering top-quality products and services, highlighting family values and trust or working together towards a better future during such a change, can be disastrous. Yes, in one glimpse a simple logo can communicate all that. Take, for example, the Nike “swoosh”, which on its own stands for all the values consumers regard as being true to the brand. This is the power of design, and design as communication. The strong popular response when top retailers Woolworths and Pick n Pay recently unveiled a new look was an indication of how strongly felt public brand sentiments can be – although consumers adjust when they feel assured that none of the core values they associated with the old brand designs have changed.
Society itself does not embrace change easily, as security in knowing and identifying with a favoured brand is often uppermost in people’s minds. On a grander scale, one can imagine what would be at stake if South Africa or Cape Town was not branded correctly or effectively. The creative industry has a vital role in positioning and branding the city and the country to the world. It goes well beyond tourism, influencing even foreign investment and the region’s future. A clever logo, tagline and advertising campaign, combined with a funky shape and the right colours, has the power to sell an idea and attract success. The creativity that goes into visual communication design is one of the most valuable assets for any business or brand.
Visual communication has become increasingly complex and increasingly important in our society. It is a means of telling stories, giving instructions, providing guidance, offering choices and aiding daily life, whether in the shops or the traffic, at home, work, school or in the playground. We still depend heavily on symbolism – simple motifs and colours, such as the heart shape for love or red for danger – to tell the correct visual story to the correct audience or to communicate vital information that can sometimes mean the difference between life and death. Such visual communication can also influence our emotions and alter our perceptions of who we are and what we are capable of. It is an interesting challenge to imagine having to design a visual conveying the idea that, for instance, South Africa is a “world in one country”.
How would you use and manipulate colour, line, shape, texture and type to communicate this message to those who don’t know the country? And what emotions would you want to express and evoke through this visual? This imaginative test gives, perhaps, some sense of the challenging complexity of visual communication and the skills that are required for it to be successful. It requires talent, observation skills, entrepreneurial thinking, and an ability to work with others and to be part of a collective. There is a strong element of common interest in visual communication. It involves understanding society and reaching out to people, being integrally involved in the daily life and the economy of the city and the country.
Design is often most closely associated with the world luxury goods and expensive lifestyles. But design is, in fact, far more fundamental than that – the most fundamental reason for design is to provide answers to basic human needs.
The designs of successful and innovative systems, processes, communication tools, products and environments that are life-improving to all are truly the building blocks of this industry. It is not a luxury or a “nice-to-have”. It’s a necessity that acts on very basic human needs, across the board, in urban and rural communities. Information design, just one sector in the visual communication design industry, plays a vital role in adding structure to our lives, to systems, processes and our environments. Its most obvious manifestation is in road signs, the common, universally understood symbols without which there would be chaos. The same is true for symbols showing the operation of instrumentation of various kinds, from lifts to heart monitors.
Just as our ancestors did in trade and communication, so we make use of symbols of one kind or another in interactive billboards, posters, social and digital media like Facebook and Twitter, film, animation, applications for iPhone and Black- Berry, iPad and Kindle, and other features of our new virtual world. In this way, visual design is inextricably woven into education, social awareness and change, business, and the aspirations of society. In the light of Cape Town’s bid for the World Design Capital 2014 award, now is a good time to showcase the power of our visual communication design industry and use our resources to create change in what we communicate not just about Cape Town but also about Africa. We have an opportunity, now, to stimulate a culture of design for the future.
Suné Stassen is a design education specialist, activist and the editor of Design>Education, an online
design magazine to be found at http://www.designmagazine.co.za/designed.shp
