As a designer, it becomes extremely frustrating and insulting when people continually insist that with a simple package like PaintShopPro or Coral Draw they could successfully undertake whole branding projects. This is, at best, completely delusional.
This ill-informed attitude was recently perfectly explemplified by an article written by Emily Gosden of the Times Online, who wrote an article about the lack of merit in using professional agencies, or rather paying for the services of professional agencies, to undertake the task of rebranding.
She was writing mainly in response to the design, and cost of design, of the NHS 60 logo.
Tory MP Greg Hands added his precious opinion which sums up everything we as designers constantly fight against: “Surely adding two digits doesn’t need to be
outsourced at all. Civil servants can do this themselves. Modern graphic
design packages surely allow anyone with an average brain to design
something as good as, or better than, what we see in front of us here.”. The question must surely be - why didn't they? If it's so blindingly simple why didn't Mr Hands himself do it? Or is his brain decidely below average?
In response to this article, and Mr Hands' opinions, Design Assembly sent an open letter to Emily Gosden. This is quite a heavy read, but their response made me shout "Yes!" out loud.
In response to Emily Gosden’s defamatory article on the Times Online, we at Design Assembly felt compelled as a collective to address the issues raised in the hope that the apparent lack of appreciation and awareness of our profession is addressed.
The following has been sent to both Emily Gosden and MP Greg Hands. In the absence of a Trade Union for Designers we are often left without a voice when under such public criticism. We hope that speaking as a collective our voices can be heard.
Dear Emily Gosden
As a collective of qualified and practicing designers we at Design Assembly felt compelled to address some of the insulting and unfair claims made in your article on the NHS 60 identity.
Graphic designers are professionals that depend on reputation and trusted client relationships to earn a living. We work hard to win jobs, often through tough, competitive pitching processes, only to be used as scapegoats by the press time and time again, in this instance when a government funded scheme falls out of favour. We’re sure you can understand how being repeatedly misrepresented as devious con artists attempting to overcharge clients and pull the wool over the eyes of the general public could be perceived to be both insulting and damaging to not just the agency in question, but to our profession as a whole?
To begin, the words of Greg Hands were truly enlightening:
“Surely adding two digits doesn’t need to be outsourced at all. Civil servants can do this themselves. Modern graphic design packages surely allow anyone with an average brain to design something as good as, or better than, what we see in front of us here.”
So, from Mr Hands’ words of wisdom we can glean that designers have, on average, average brain capacity while civil servants with programmes such as Microsoft Word or PaintShopPro are to be considered more capable than a qualified designer. By Hands’ reckoning, the superior intelligence of civil servants actually negates the need for an entire industry. If only someone had told the Olympic Committee 12 months ago they could have saved Wolff Olins a whole lot of bother and got those clever people at Whitehall to brand London 2012 instead, right?
As an industry we often face critics who think that because we make something look simple, they ‘could have done that’. The same audience who think that with the budget they could have made something more visually thrilling than Avatar, or pioneering as Citizen Kane, but the sad reality is they couldn’t. They didn’t.
While I’m not elevating this identity scheme to the same pedestal, it serves the point that there is a terribly misguided belief that anyone with a “modern graphic design package” can perform to the same standard as a qualified designer. Tools do not maketh the man. The tool kit in your garage does not make you a mechanic. The first aid kit in your kitchen does not qualify you as a nurse. You have a calculator here on your computer but this does not make you an accountant.
We all have a long list of things that need doing around the house that we’d rather claim for on expenses instead of dipping into our own pockets. Similarly, we’ve all watched Question Time once or twice and, without any specific qualifications to do so, we could all master the art of pointing the finger of blame quite quickly. Perhaps therefore if we feel we’re not cutting it as designers we should start considering a career in politics? It’s probably not as difficult as trying to get the hang of those tricky design packages after all.
Furthermore, for politicians in this country to accuse any hard working professional of abusing tax-payers resources is an acute and embarrassing case of those in glass houses remembering not to throw stones. Government records show that Mr Hands has claimed his fair share of expenses and it would seem that politicians think that the general public have already forgotten the exposure and scandals of last summer – a series of revelations that made perfectly clear the contempt in which politicians hold the public they hope to serve.
Consider this. When plans are publicly opposed for a new tax-payer funded building, it is rare for the architect to be made the scapegoat. The public should be led by the media to respect and trust qualified and reputable professionals to do their job to the highest standards just as they would trust an architect to design a building that won’t fall down as soon as you walk into the foyer. Derogatory comments and damaging articles such as those made in your article simply do nothing to help our cause and will certainly not help us win the respect and understanding of the public.
Your article infers throughout that various government initiatives fail because those who hold the purse strings are duped into paying over the odds for design work.
“Other work commissioned by the department included £33,400 branding for ‘Cleaner Safer Greener Communities’… The logo is a green silhouette of a leaf with white writing… The campaign has ceased operation.”
Government officials responsible for the running of the initiatives are the ones that should be held accountable for subsequent failures, but instead our supposedly ‘pointless’ design fees are used as a smokescreen. With all the vision, expertise and good intention in the world, should a design or branding initiative be deemed a failure, there is a certain limit to which an agency should be held accountable. The initiative failed. Oh well, it must have been because those pesky designers charged us way too much for the logo, it can’t possibly have been anything to do with the shortcomings of those oh-so-responsible government officials to maintain the implemented strategies and drive forward the values of the brand.
The way our profession is belittled throughout your article with what can only be described as a condescending placement of quotation marks, such as in the following excerpt, is confirmation of how ill-informed the opinions of the article are.
”The £153,522 bill for FERA’s launch last year included three designers spending five weeks developing ‘concept options’ in order that the agency logo would ’stand out in a crowded and homogeneous brand landscape’.”
You may ask why we bother actually attempting to do our jobs correctly by presenting a range of ideas and options that will benefit the process in the long run when we could just produce something in five minutes that looks like everything else it will be competing against? The answer is that we are a particularly proud breed of professional; proud to be able to rely on our thinking, working processes and the development of ideas into finished, tangible pieces of work that solve the challenge we are given. We do our very best to respect the fact that we have the tools at our disposal to make a positive difference to the lives of the public. We are thinkers as well as doers. We don’t rely on pie-in-the-sky ideals, peddling grim falsities and rumour or make empty promises to earn a crust. We work hard to provide solutions for people who come to us with problems that can be solved with intelligent and carefully considered design. And, as such, we feel that we are perfectly within our rights to feel irritated and aggrieved when disrespectful journalists and politicians make poorly informed comments about the profession we care so deeply about.
The comparison made between a branding exercise and the design of a £648 logotype in three days is insulting. It highlights the ignorance that surrounds our multi-faceted industry and what it takes to go about conceiving and executing ideas appropriately. As a responsible journalist, did you bother to find out what the £12,000 fee covered? As well as the initial meetings, briefings, (potentially free) submission of a formal pitch, any number of agreed rounds of amends that are necessary to get the job done properly, there’s also the expertise, overheads, equipment and artworking for production to take into account. Did the fee just cover the identity, or did it also cover consultation in how to implement the brand, how the scheme rolls out and how they market and promote the concept too?
However, what the fees cover somehow seems slightly beside the point next to the fact that, in the grand scheme of things, £12,000 would not be considered to be an excessive fee for an identity system by any stretch of the imagination, certainly not to a reputable agency. Considering how difficult working in the public sector can be (there are often too many decision makers to make a decision), £12,000 should be considered as a very reasonable price. In short, it’s a very obvious case of getting what you pay for. If you want the job done properly then you get the best people for the job. If you’re happy to cut corners then ask the civil servants with above average brains to take care of it.
While we take issue with many of the specific points made in the NHS 60 article, we feel that it has contributed to the much larger problem of the way the graphic design industry is misrepresented and perceived by the general public.
We appreciate that bad news sells newspapers and that the media in this country prefer to cultivate an atmosphere of negativity rather than taking pride in the achievements of those who are trying to make a difference. Perhaps it would be worth taking a look at all the positive changes designers and design studios contribute to modern society: typefaces created for road signage to increase legibility, countless examples of successful way finding systems in major cities or groundbreaking charity branding for organisations such as Macmillan. Then again, perhaps such stories wouldn’t provoke the necessary controversy and media furore needed to sell newspapers on a daily basis in this country (or in your case, draw web-hits. Pffff).
It is a widely understood maxim within our industry that a large proportion of good design can only do its job properly by going unnoticed; providing important information in the most unfussy, functional way possible. Perhaps this is the eternal difficulty that we are faced with as designers. Design for mass public consumption that does its job without fuss and integrates itself seamlessly into our everyday lives can be measured with a degree of success. As soon as a newspaper with a column to fill decides the work isn’t good enough or is too expensive, only then does graphic design get an (unwelcome) moment in the spotlight.
Graphic design in the UK is a globally respected industry, something that its practitioners and recipients can be proud of. As all industries in this country try to emerge from economic crisis, perhaps you can tell us, why the press and politicians must do their level best to criticise a national asset?
What seems most ridiculous of all about this article is that at some stage the design studio in question would have submitted costs for the proposed work prior to the project commencing. Fees those responsible for the scheme deemed a fair return for the task at hand and subsequently paid upon completion (to our knowledge). The designers didn’t sneak into taxpayers homes and steal their fee, it was granted to them. If you, in your opinion, believe this was an unfair return, please explain why you have not questioned those responsible for the budgets and briefing, but have instead deemed it necessary to accuse our profession of malpractice?
We look forward to hearing your response.
Regards,
Design Assembly.
Well done Design Assembly for fighting the corner of designers everywhere.
Queen Michelle
