We’ve recently been looking at brand utility and how what a brand does online can be an actual embodiment of its brand values. Put simply – can brands be useful online in the same way that their products, services and brand are useful in the real world? It has started to take me down a path of looking at some online brand activity as being more about product design and less about communications.
In an article on Dieter Rams (Braun designer) in this weekend’s FT Rams restated his ten rules for good design. Reading them it occurred to me that if you substituted the words ‘good communications’ for ‘good design’ it still holds together pretty well;
- Good design communication is innovative.
- Good design communication makes a product useful.
- Good design communication is aesthetic.
- Good design communication helps a product to be understood.
- Good design communication is unobtrusive.
- Good design communication is honest.
- Good design communication is durable.
- Good design communication is consistent to the last detail.
- Good design communication is concerned with the environment.
- Good design communication is as little design communications as possible.
The full article is here and as you read Rams’ explanations of each point it still resonates by and large as a manifesto for good communications.
As a footnote it’s worth noting that Rams is the mac daddy of living designers and has influenced all sorts of people including Jonathan Ive whose calculator interface on the iPhone is supposedly in homage to Rams’ design.
Communications are, Leo, good communications are…
Grammatic pedantry aside, I really like the modified scheme, but I’m not sure about 7, 8, or 9:
7: “good communications are durable” – surely some of the best communications are precisely the opposite because they are specific to a time, a place or an event? Political comms, I’m thinking of here, particularly. James Carville’s “It’s the economy, stupid” made perfect sense in 1991, but would not really have swung in 2004. Ditto New Labour’s “New Labour, New Britain” seeemed just right in 1997, but makes little sense after 10 years of Labour government. Maybe it should be “good communications are in context”?
8: “good communications are consistent to the last detail” – this leaves little room for big-picture work. Surely an over-concern with tiny details can mean the loss of the a brand’s metanarrative? Brands are capable, I would suggest, of holding within their values two opposing standpoints. Consider the Republican Party brand in the US. Major values: Freedom and Sexual Repression. Seems hopelessly inconsistent, but subsume it under a big-picture metanarrative like “Family” and, whump, there’s your inconsistent, wildly successful brand communication.
9: “good communications are concerned with the environment” – this one’s a real stretch. I guess it works if you’re talking about the moral good, but if you mean the effective good, ie furthering brand profits, then a concern for the environment within comms is only good in a market which rewards such concerns (ie: hippies). Of course, on the third, imaginary, hand, we could take “good” here to mean internally coherent,a nd that good communications are concerned about the environment in which they operate, wherein ‘environment;’ means the immediate socio-cultural surroundings. A concern for (qua knowledge of) that environment would make for better communications.
Agree with the rest of it, though!
Grammatical mea culpa – or alternatively “good communication is”. (I know I’m supposed to strikethrough – but it’s just too ugly a typo to leave there).
As for the other objections – first I fall back on my qualifier; “by and large”. That said I’m not sure that I actually agree with all of them;
Point 7 Durability; I’ll give you this one – although you could consider the durability of the emotions they are appealling to rather than appealling to a fad. (stretching?).
Point 8 Consistent; This could refer to what is currently called integration, the holy grail of communications in this age of multiple and ever fragmenting channels; do I get the same message no matter what channel I experience the brand in? That said – breaking unexpectedly out of consistent set of communications could also be extremly effective – but potentially confusing to the audience.
Point 9 Concerned with the environment; As a modernist Rams certainly has a clear concern for The Environment. But as a designer he could (although doesn’t) refer to the environment that his products exist in. Being the bleeding heart liberal that I am – I’d like to think it cuts both ways.
Overall I was intrigued with the way that the manifesto chimed with the objectives of communications. And whiel there are myriaqd examples of famous communications that don’t adhere to these maxims – could it be that they are clever communications rather than good?
My next task? Reverse engineering the manifestos of Corbusier and Gropius into a rough guide to web application usability.
Corbusier: “Let’s make the web entirely uniform. It will be beautiful on paper and, indeed, beautiful when first it is built. Then let us neglect to paint it and let it slowly look more and more awful over a period of years thereby engendering the sort of urban degeneration last seen during the sack of Rome.”
Gropius: “Ze internet vill haf lots of spiky edges and sharps bits pointing out of it. Und it vill be cheap!”
sorry
Gizmodo finally stumbles onto the fact that Jon Ives has been ‘referencing’ Rams for lots of Apple’s new products; http://gizmodo.com/343641/1960s-braun-products-hold-the-secrets-to-apples-future
[...] while ago I wrote about brand utility in the context of Deitre Ramms and his description of good [...]