Zeppelin Media Blog

Design is everywhere. #2

June 15th, 2007 by Chris Punke

Last week I encouraged you to look around you and try to notice the design of things in your daily life. I asked you to look at their effectiveness, perceived effort involved, uniqueness, and to try to come up with areas for improvement. I wanted you to look at other things, other people’s marketing materials, other people’s web sites. I wanted you to try to notice how these things made you feel when you interacted or learned from them.

What did you discover? Anything interesting?

The next step I want to encourage you to take is to look at your own brand touch-points: your marketing materials, web sites, packaging, advertising, vehicle graphics, invoices, sales letters, emails… even your office itself. Whatever things your customers or prospects receive from you or see about you.

Now go through the same list as last week, this time with your own materials. (I had you do this with other things and other people’s materials first as a warm-up of sorts, to get your brain looking at design, and without any bias.)

• Is it effective? Does it accomplish what it set out to do? What was it set out to do?
• How much effort seems to have gone into the design?
• Is it unique or different? If so, does that hinder its effectiveness?
• What could be improved?
• If I were the designer or marketer, what would I have done differently?

We’ll get together again next week to see what you discovered about your own materials. I really hope you gain some insight into how your customers are perceiving you in the process. If you do, please share it! (HINT: Try to look at these things with fresh eyes. Set aside your biases, your inherent understanding of them, and try to be your audience.)

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