As business owners we are often faced with a lot of daily obstacles. From something as small as organizing our messy desk, to major issues like budgets, staff and the all-important search for new and better paying clients. We grow in short and often violent spurts and before we know it, our once small operation is now a multi-personnel jigsaw puzzle of challenges. Somewhere along the way, many business owners become overwhelmed in parts of their business and let certain areas fall behind. Oddly enough, they are often the most important areas. No, we’re not talking about remembering to buy coffee filters. We’re talking about a business’ mandate. Their message…their original reason for being and more importantly, how the rest of the world knows it and understands it.

Somewhere along the way many small businesses will become to busy to continue to invest the same attention to their company’s identity as they once did. This is to be expected. After all, for your business to last long it needs this success and you the owner need to control all aspects of that growth and success in an intricate juggling magic trick. It is common with in these times of growth, that you will take a minute out of your day and look over your company with pride and then you will notice it…through all the growth, you have lost your visual edge. The look of your company has become dated or inconsistent or worse…maybe it was never really united to begin with. Many owners start their business the same way.
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Art is (or it should be) a value-free creation. It merely is. The artist had a vision of something and created a physical manifestation of that vision. Because the artist had no particular goal in mind, just the act of creation, no one truly has the right or ability to say art is good art or bad art. In that sense, what’s hanging on the fridge is equal to what’s hanging in the Louvre.

Designs, on the other hand, can be good or bad largely because of the functional nature of the concept. Looks aside, a chair, for instance, can be well-designed or poorly designed, good or bad, in terms of its ability to function as a chair. Art has no such functional component.

Here is where design gets interesting in a way many in the various design fields may not consider, and it brings us back to my previous point (Aug. 10 article) that design is not a single concept, but a bifurcated one. I want to expand on my earlier ideas.

Design includes both a functional component and an aesthetic one. Art is concerned only with aesthetics. I heard an Infiniti commercial recently that touched upon the idea that the car must be both functional and beautiful. But I don’t hear the functional/aesthetic split discussed much, at least not among the graphic designers I hang around with. I think it helps explain, however, why we see so much bad design.
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“All the visual elements constitute what we generally call “form”, …The
way form is created, constructed or organized along with other forms is
often governed by a certain discipline which we call “structure.” — Wucius
Wong

Structure is inherent in the order of nature. Plants and animals are held
together by a self-sustaining structure. The planets, galaxies, atoms and
particles of atoms, are held together in a structure. Structure is the order
and arrangement of elements together and in relationship to one another,
which create and supports the whole. Design is the structuring of chaos.

“Every living organism — be it a plant, an animal, a human being, or a
social structure — is a relatively constant form… A plant, for example, by
the perpetual process of metabolism, draws upon sunlight, water, soil,
retaining only what it needs to keep its organism relatively stable. To
maintain the same constant structure, every living organism must achieve a
dynamic unity. The plastic image is no exception. Only by dynamic order can
it become a living form of human experience.” — Gyorgy Kepes
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Only in San Francisco would a filmmaker bring together a leading mid-career architect, an ex-hippie junk collector and the city’s building code inspector to complete a month-long project creating a beautiful, architecturally sound home made entirely of scrap from the salvage yards. Only in San Francisco would that building stand on the lawn in front of City Hall as a monument to the abilities of a community committed to exploring alternative design methods in unconventional settings. And only in San Francisco would such innovative architecture find so much support that a year later the film documenting the project would be screening as part of a month-long tribute to architecture in the city.

“ScrapHouse” was the pet project of Rachel Weidinger, a filmmaker dedicated to doing work which contributes to the world around her. She had the idea to film the process of a design team coming together with a construction team to complete the creation of an environment-conscious building constructed entirely of junk. There was a time when she was certain that the project was not going to come to fruition. There was no funding, there was no organizational plan, and there was no concrete group of people to complete the project.
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If the thriving, ubiquitous presence of Dunkin’ Donuts and Starbucks locations around the USA is any indication, Americans sure do love their coffee. According to the Dunkin Donuts website, it is estimated that more than 100 million Americans drink a total of 350 million cups of coffee a day. That’s a lot of caffeine (and decaf) consumption going on from coast to coast. So how does that translate into profits for the country’s two most recognizable coffee purveyors? How well does each company’s brand capture their share of this sizeable market?

To any casual observer, the stark differences between Dunkin’ Donuts and Starbucks, and their respective demographic, is relatively easy to identify. While many Americans prefer the pleasant, flavorful blend of DD’s 100% Arabica coffee, there are countless others who crave the decidedly stronger, darker strains of high-quality, whole bean brews and Italian-style espresso beverages offered by Starbucks. The former, with its trademark hot-pink and orange logo and limited seating (at least in most locations) tends to draw in a “hit and run” type of crowd, looking for their morning shot on the way to the office. Starbucks, on the other hand, with its wireless connections, comfy chairs, contemporary fixtures and up-to-date musical ambiance, offers the perfect “gathering place” atmosphere, whether you’re an entrepreneur conducting business, a college student surfing the internet, or a hip guy or gal, looking for a “third home” to hang out and read the paper.
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Colman’s has been mixing the strong stuff since 1814, and boy do the English love it! The thick and spicy English Mustard adorns millions of refrigerator shelves across Great Britain and has done alright for itself in more distant parts of the world, too. There was even a tiny glass jar of Colman’s in my parent’s house, right next to the oversized bottle of squeezy American-style mustard. On rare occasions, dad would crave something a little stronger than the squeezable, fluorescent yellow goo on his sandwiches and out would come the little jar, patiently providing tangy, eye-watering spread for years to come. That tiny jar was bottomless. Dad would dig a small smear of yellow out with a butter knife and carefully wipe it ever so thinly onto his bread, taking great pains to spread it evenly. He hardly put any on at all. Once, when the big squeezable jar was empty and I’d grown tired of trying to dress my bologna sandwich with the driblets that flew out with a loud ‘FFFT!’ sound, I substituted a good spoonful of Colman’s and mentally scoffed at my father for never using enough of the stuff. One generous bite and I barely knew what hit me. Tears were streaming down my face, my tongue was burning and there was a terrible bitter taste clinging to the roof of my mouth. My poor sandwich was ruined. What kind of a mustard was this?
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Design is a ubiquitous human undertaking. Nearly every human artifact is touched by someone involved in its design. Buildings are designed. So are newspapers, corkscrews, business cards, road signs, home interiors, web pages, freeway interchanges, tools, furniture, software interfaces, golf clubs, coffee pots, and so on.

But what actually is design? Is it a professional field? A craft? A philosophy? Why isn’t design alone a discipline in academe? People studying design almost immediately break off into balkanized and narrow fields, such as graphic design, interior design, furniture design, automotive design, human-computer interface design, among many others.

Perhaps most importantly, Why is there so much BAD design?
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Creating your company logo is one of the most important and most difficult processes you will have to go through when starting a new company. Your logo should communicate the very essence of your company’s image in a single glance… a daunting prospect I’m sure you’d agree.

Simply typing the company name in a standard font and underlining it is not the way to get your company noticed. Unless you are an experienced graphic designer it is well worth the investment of asking a professional graphic design company to create a logo for you.

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