Peter L Phillips, a veteran of contemporary design with more than 30 years of work at the highest level, uses in his book — Creating the perfect design brief— a highly suggestive metaphor to illustrate the context in which design and designers are viewed by customers.
He draws on an illustrative example from some industry, that of transport, and says that there is a substantial difference between a transport expert and a taxi driver. The expert gives you a vision, a multitude of solutions, justifies his choices, preferences. Unlike him, the taxi driver takes you directly, on the shortest road, the fastest. Two fundamentally different types of benefits.
And in branding and marketing communication, too many designers are content to be taxi drivers. To carry from one point to another the desires and the briefscustomers. Tell me where to start and what point to get to, pay for this service, and I'll take you where you want.
But designers are not mere carts, carriers of customer requests. They have a clear, defined expertise that allows them to actually be more - consultants, experts, able to imagine and execute complex graphic ideas.
Therefore, it is good to ask the designer for solutions, options, visual strategies and identity, not simple logo moves a few centimeters apart or color changes in the print.
Because the designer and the agency have the resources and potential to cover much more complex distances and routes of a brand.
And also in that book, Peter L Phillips poses another problem. More nuanced, but just as important. Everyone offers their services, he says. All of them and call them creative services, design services, communication services. Sounds like they are some kind of provider of any kind of service. Wouldn't it be more correct and comprehensive for the designer not to be a simple graphics service provider with a partner? They just work together with the client on important, essential projects in the life of a brand — identity, strategy, brand revitalization.
Of course in their own sense, legally, commercially, they are services but on a deeper level, Phillips is right - designeris a brand partner, an extremely important element in the brand-target-market-communication equation.