15 Feb 2010 2133H

Perhaps this is a bit mean to say, but

Look.

If all design is merely form giving, then can you really complain about the people who are working at the tail end of the design process, primarily aestheticians — alright — decorators — who are tasked with the job of making something look good, that is, what Viktor Papanek called “shroud design”, rather than actually working upstream, engineering user needs and requirements into functionality as it is experienced? Because then are they not only doing their job, but the better the form giving, the better the job they are doing.

Now, to the degree that almost anyone equipped with the tools and cognizant of the proper signals of style can mimic good design, and that the average person, viz. your client(s), knows as much about design as can be fooled by even a hapless teenager with a pirated copy of Flash and a dogeared copy of Comm Arts, if that is your value proposition, if that is all it takes for you to be beaten out by someone who can do exactly the same work for a lower price, then I say you should be beaten, and beaten repeatedly, until you find some reason for someone to actually pay you for your work.

And if that person is going to go with someone else solely on the basis of price, you know, a kind of race to the bottom, I say, a) you get what you pay for and b) that’s probably not a client that you would want, anyway.

So there.

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