June 12, 2006, The Mandalay Bay hotel, Las Vegas and I am at the How Design conference. For the next 3 days I will attend a whirlwind of various design seminars, talk to people at the VFS tradeshow booth and also find the time to gamble some money away, and of course take in the crazy over-the-topness that is Vegas!

The conference was interesting and eye-opening. Graphic designers and interactive designers seem to be living in two parallel universes and it is time that someone opened a door and stepped to the other side. How Design conference is the Mecca of graphic design conventions. Print design was celebrated, paper was fetishised. Imagine a magazine that displays dripping wet luscious lipsticked lips that invite you to touch them, and when you do…hmm… the paper has been designed to actually have the sensory feeling of touching …lips! A bit creepy if you ask me. The world of digital design and interactive media seemed a bit foreign to most people there and the topic was really a part of the agenda at How Design. Not that there is anything wrong with that. The conference itself was just like most other conferences. Filled with people who were being paid by their employers to be there. Some were interested in being there; some were just there for the ride and the boatload of free paper samples.

Here are a few things I got from the conference. Some gleaned from the result of the “teachings” at the seminar and others just came from me glazing over from time to time.

1. The world of design is going through an evolution. For the first time, it seems to be OK to talk about Design in context to business. Even now design is often mistaken for something that makes other things ‘pretty’. Allegedly, BusinessWeek struggled with what to call their “design” section because early testing showed that if a section was named “Design” business owners assumed it meant something like Interior Design or Architecture and won’t click on it! They settled on calling it Innovation & Design. Moira Cullen, Design Director at Coca Cola contends that design lived under the pseudonym Technology in the 90’s and now lives disguised as the buzz-word Innovation. And as if to prove Moira’s point, going back to the BusinessWeek example, the URL for the Innovation & Design section is http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/ (where did the word design go?).
2. Branding and consistency may have a seemingly simple relationship from the outside (i.e. keep your brand consistent) but it is one that is highly complex and requires further exploration. Starbucks’s global creative director Stanley Hainsworth,  uses 5 mantras and one of them is to make sure everything is “hand touched”. They want to make sure that every marketing piece does not just rely on PhotoShop and computer graphics to create textures but they actually add little human touches such as smudges and paper tears to make that piece have the “Starbucks fee’. The color palette and the ad campaigns can be varied and diverse in their look, but that is one thing each of them must share.
3. I asked a question at the end of one of the sessions “What is the role of Interactive Design in your studio.” I got an almost defensive answer, “We know it’s out there, but if someone wants that, we just outsource it.” Interesting especially because this was shortly after listening to a previous session about cross-media campaigns and building natural tie-ins that create product interest by using the web to build the hype. Will print shops suffer or value from having the ability to think outside their typesetting press?

There was more that I doodled and puzzled over, but I won’t bore you with the details (for now). Bottom-line, I came back to Vancouver as an ‘inspired fighter’. I will share what I know and in the process break down a few barriers. Some mine and some that are held in place by others.