Every year, more and more of the business magazines are coming out with their own design annuals. Recently, Business Week teamed up with the IDSA to publish 158 product design winners. You can read the article, a companion article on Design Strategy as well as spend a half hour looking through all 158 winners.
It’s nice to see business publications embracing this new awareness of quality design being a sound business strategy. Unfortunately, the infatuation still seems focused primarily on product design. I see little in the way of glitzy spreads highlighting the benefits of embracing graphic design, better web strategies, more sellable packaging, easier to navigate support systems, etc. Granted, I don’t linger in the business section of the magazine rack as much as I maybe should. Has anyone seen business focused articles on graphic design? If not, why is that? Should the AIGA be calling up Business Week and making a pitch for an article?
All that aside, it’s always fun to look through the designs. Apple, of course, makes a showing. The Mac Mini, Airport Express, and Shuffle all show up on the list. And, of course, Apple’s influence tends to rub off on others as well. An obvious example being JBL’s iPod speaker stand and a not-so-obvious one is Johnson Control’s Room Temperature Sensors. It’s also nice to see Microsoft make the list for once as well with their Windows Home Center.
For the graphic designer looking for some more hardware bling bling, there’s a new Wacom Tablet, the ‘Octopus’ LCD monitor, and—a staple of any trendy designer’s desk—a modern desk lamp.
Some of my favorite “why didn’t I think of that” products include the self watering plant pots and the cup sponge.
Closer to the ‘graphic design’ category are two nice examples of packaging design: Method cleaning supplies, which always attracts my attention while walking the aisles of Target, and an Ikea-esque wine packaging solution which is both unique, and incredibly practical, as it turns into a modular wine rack.
And I’d like to make my own honorable mention for this thermometer—not for the quality of the product itself, but for the photography—perhaps the nicest photo of a rectal medical device ever produced. ;o)
Has anyone seen business focused articles on graphic design? If not, why is that? Should the AIGA be calling up Business Week and making a pitch for an article?
I made the exact same observation. Even much of this new attention and focus by the likes of Tom Peters on design and his calls that designers should be more involved in business matters, tends to focus more on product designers and less on interaction deisgners or print designers.
Should the AIGA be pitching stories? Yeah RIGHT! That's really the problem, though. The ID industry is far more organized and is better able to sell their worth to the business community. We're more of a cottage industry made up of hundreds of thousands of independents, all moving in separate directions.
That there is no one organization who could or would take the initiative to try and get such a story into a magazine like Business Week is a big part of the problem.
.chris{}
On Jun.29.2005 at 06:59 PM