Design-Design - Designing for business, academia and the arts

We all make mistakes. Some people make mistakes very publicly as we have seen with politician such as David Cameron and his “Too many twits make one a tw*t” comment on radio, US Vice President Joe Biden using the F word to describe Obama’s health reforms live on air [though very muffled!] and interestingly enough, what looks like a mistake in The Guardian Guide where Andy Capper [his real name?] apparently seems blissfully unaware that Joy Division are a classic band from the early 80′s and their current single Love Will Tear Us Apart was the re-release of a classic!

The fact is, I’ve just written about Joe Biden and his health reform – I’m not the only one by a long way and there are many t-shirt designs to prove my point – also, David Cameron and his comments about Twitter and Joy Division’s re-released single. These apparent faux pas may be genuine but maybe not. Remembering that these people have reached the top of their game and experience many different types of public presentation – verbal and written to the mass media audience, it SHOULD come as a surprise that these mistakes are made. After all, these people will have PR and marketing people working for them 24 hours a day and sometimes the only way to get yourself noticed is to behave outrageously or out of character because this is the sort of news that people are interested in – serious public figures acting in fallible or indiscreet ways.

Nothing happens by mistake?

The question is – were these actions planned or not? In most cases I would suggest that nothing happens by mistake and that these mistakes are carefully orchestrated to keep the agenda afloat or at least keep the web talking about it and therefore raising the online profile of the subject matter via YouTube, Twitter or other social media. There can be an associated monetary or political value to this raised profile in obvious ways.

So, how should this apply to you as a company director, academic or even designer? Well, I would suggest that you don’t immediately publish your own agenda, promotional advertising or university paper with a raft of strategically placed foul language, ‘in jokes’ or deliberate mistakes to shock your reader but see these as examples of curious events that lead to wider coverage because of their unconventional nature. That is all. It is all about the wider coverage and [potentially] the way some of these examples may or may not have been carefully orchestrated.

If a blogger wants to get noticed within their subject area then the challenge is to write something about a subject that goes against or intelligently challenges the understood norm. The key here is writing on a very sophisticated or intelligent level and yet presenting an argument clearly and accurately but then bringing the reader round to another agenda or point of view in more subtle ways – which may simply be by allowing user comments to reflect the other part of an arguement. A YouTube video that recently went viral is Mental Designers Graphic Designer Vs Client video that represented comments that every designer had heard from potential clients at some point in their career – this is not so much following the apparent mistake examples already given but is a clever way of shocking people to get the message across – a message that contains many levels of angst and truth.