"Art school taught me that design's not just about making something beautiful; it's about taking something beautiful and turning it into a clear message." I was speaking with a talent represented by Aquent's Detroit office, Dan Koenig, who recently took a full-time job with an ad agency. Dan started out as a print designer but overtime has come to focus more on interactive design, particularly creating algorithm-based animations in Flash. His experiences in both the print and web worlds reinforced for him the importance of creating things that can speak for themselves.
This was brought home to him in an especially pointed way early in his career. After presenting some work to a creative director, and going over the significance of each element in detail, she asked him, "And where's the little man?" "What little man?" he asked puzzledly. "The little man we send along with the design to explain it to the client." Oh, that little man...
Of course, Dan didn't have to rely on snide colleagues to teach him that the things we design are sent off into the world to face their destiny alone. It's a given on the web where people come to our work and, if it's not intuitively clear how to use or interact with it, very quickly click away. But even before he got into the web, he'd learned this lesson designing packaging.
Dan put it like this, "Package design is a very unforgiving medium because your competition is right next to you. The customer is standing there with their money in one hand and they're reaching for a product with the other hand. Will they choose yours? All marketing comes down to this moment of truth."
Creating and visually representing messages that persuasively influence behavior in "this moment of truth" constitutes both the challenge and true art of design. Because it's an intensely do-or-die way of learning how to do just that, Dan adds, "Every designer should do packaging."
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