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A Future Economy Led by Designers

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Above: a mood tableau from Ben Pieratt’s client-less brand “Hessian”.

“It’s all about control,” Janet Jackson said on her breakthrough album, Control. “And I’ve got lots of it.” The album saw her depart from her father’s management and strike out on her own. “I was a young adult coming into my own and wanted to carve my own niche in the world,” she says. “I wanted to be in control of my life, my loves, my song, my dance.”

Two branding projects have caught my eye in the past two weeks, and in both I see designers grabbing the reins of their profession and leading their community into a world that is wholly their own. Ben Pieratt’s Hessian (pictured below) is a brand without a business—a fully realized visual identity waiting for someone to come along and scoop it up (for just $18,000). New England’s Pieratt is no stranger to entrepreneurship in design—he’s the designer and CEO of fashion curation site Svpply.

The other project is by Andrew Kim, a Los Angeles-based designer who rebranded Microsoft based on his personal experience with the company (below). What strikes me about these projects isn’t that they were designer-led, or that they were done outside the strictures of standard design practice (working without a client, no testing, etc.). The most important thing about these projects is the way the feel—they feel right.

How can an identity for Microsoft feel so right when it was created outside the bounds of standard design practice? Without a close relationship with the company’s key decision-maker, an intimacy with their audience data, and months of rigorous brainstorming, how can Kim hit the nail so close to the head? I believe these projects signal a new value chain for branding, and are harbingers of a new designer-led economy.

In this new economy, designers will use the same model that venture capitalists do to create value. Their primary task will be to actively seek out worthwhile companies in need of improved branding, research the company, create the new brand, and then offer it for sale. The one or two sales they make every year will pay for the several projects they weren’t able to sell. I predict several emergent values in this framework:

• The company is able to bring creative services on wholesale, preventing a long-term drain on their resources (sourcing, vendor management, project management).
• The designer is always working on brands they feel passionately about, boosting professional morale.
• Designers will take an actual lead in the development of the economy, selecting from the marketplace only the companies they feel are worthwhile.
• This “force of design” will become an evolutionary force, promoting the survival of worthwhile businesses and the demise of poorly-conceived or unnecessary ones.

Janet Jackson would be all over this. These designers didn’t wait for someone to offer them work. They actively entered the marketplace, discovered a need that they perceive, and synthesized a solution. This shift has the potential to change not just the world of design, but the function of our economy as a whole. Are designers brave enough?

If anyone would like to discuss this idea further, please email me. Topics like this—“design futurism”—are immensely fascinating to me. And huge kudos to Ben Whitla for our great discussion on this topic.


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