The Economy, Design Trends & My Watch

The Casio Data Bank wrist watch

represents classic practical design and inspiring ingenuity. You may not realize it, but our beloved iphone wasn’t the first device that paired features like address books, calendars, clocks and calculators with hard-to-manage key pads. As a product of the 1980s, it was born from a similar economic climate to what we’re experiencing today, and it shows that great design happens when it is driven by function and rooted in sensibility. Our palettes as consumers, voters, viewers, and web users are changing. Substance, responsibility, sustainability, and value are taking precedence over image and gloss, and the greater design community must follow suit to remain relevant.

But what does it do?

We will not make time for useless, pretty things. Good design has a purpose whether it is selling, problem solving, teaching, or entertaining. From baby steps to giant leaps, every choice made during the design process should play a part in fulfilling that purpose. This is how something as simple as a logo can tell you everything you need to know about a company, and something as complicated as a computer can be easy to use right out of the box.

It’s not all about you.

Fully animated flash websites built to show us how sexy or cool you are won’t impress us anymore. Neither will ever-long sales pitches or over-fluffed image-based marketing. We’ve seen & heard it all before, and all we want is for you to get to the bottom line. If your book is good, we’ll buy it. If your car is safe and reliable, we may even buy that, too. Respect our time, get to the point and realize that if you spend too much time and money telling us about yourself, we’re going to realize you could care less about us.

You can’t photoshop substance in…

There is no substitute for quality content and well-written text is just the beginning. If you don’t know your audience, you will fail. If your message isn’t clear and concise, you will fail. If you’re more concerned with selling than providing quality, be warned… Our changed priorities have refocused our senses, and we’ll be able to sniff out a faker from a mile away.

but you can Photoshop
substance out.

As daunting as honoring content and initial concept with good design can be, it’s unfortunate that defiling it with bad design takes little to no effort. Design with care and reverence by honing skills in the arts of typography, information architecture and cleanly written code. We can all do better, and while getting back to basics is definitely not a new idea, I’m hoping that the times will help to inspire the greater design community to get back to our roots.