In the three steps forward, two steps back world of design and ethics, I found myself putting the finishing touches on this year’s Ethics Chair report for the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada annual gathering (this year in Moncton) while in flight to a design conference in Georgia dedicated exclusively to design ethics (It was an amazing event: more on that in my next post).

And as the airplane to Savannah burned away at my carbon credits, I thought about what I’ll share with American conference delegates about Made-In-Canada design idealism, and found myself reviewing in my head just how far design professionalism has come in the past decade, creating a better profession both at home and abroad.

In November 2011, the Canadian-led development of the Icograda Global Sustainability Standard was unanimously accepted at the Icograda World Congress in Taipei by delegates from over 50 countries. This standard will set the bar for how sustainable a design project needs to be in order to be considered part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

Rather than being intimidated by the activities of the most environmentally-active agencies, rank-and-file designers whose focus is not entirely on green design will have a clear measuring stick to ensure that every design project is doing its part to help create a better world, while also fulfilling its other strategic objectives. And in Taipei, national design associations from around the world, including Canada’s GDC and Ontario’s RGD, agreed to expect their members to have the majority of their design projects meet the standard.

The standard’s metrics will be established by an international jury representing the top voices in sustainable design worldwide. And the voluntary compliance system will be online, and will define sustainability not just on environmental grounds but using a quadruple-bottom-line definition that includes compliance with one’s national professional code of ethics. The worldwide jury is being assembled this month, and will be announced next month.

This means that in order for designers in Canada to certify their projects, they will need to declare their adherence to their code of ethics of professional practice. Once again we’ve demonstrated our Canadian propensity for exporting good governance and high ideals, keeping ethical practice at the forefront of how we define professionalism in design.

Another key measured aspect of the standard will undoubtedly be universal design (also known as “accessible design” or “design for all”) and I predict that in the same way that environmental responsibility has marched from being considered extremist to mainstream over the past decade, we will see a parallel march around design that leaves no one behind, regardless of ability.

As chair of the committee developing the standard, I’ll share more details in later posts. However, this standard follows on global declarations and standards on speculative work and competition guidelines ratified in 2007 worldwide, which were substantially based upon policy developed through Canadian designers’ long experience of taking strong positions where ethics are involved.

The past twelve months also saw Canada’s design ethics structure shared with our colleagues in other countries: we directly helped establish a code of ethics for designers in Indonesia, and are now helping with the first steps for the same in Mexico. The common thread: designers seeking to make a stronger public commitment to their role in professionalism, in society, and the natural environment ... and recognizing the value of gaining from our Canadian experience.

I recently met a fellow design firm owner in the U.S. with a particularly salty view of competitive analysis. In his firm, if a designer is caught going online to research a client’s competition before a concept has been developed, they are immediately fired!

When he told me this—and trust me, he was dead serious—I was taken aback, but he explained that it is part of the employment contract his designers sign.

I was trained to view qualitative and quantitative market analysis as a vital step in a comprehensive design process. My studio has always used it in an effort to identify opportunities to differentiate clients in their marketplace. And like many of my design education colleagues, I’ve been propagating this methodology in my classroom for years.

The argument for competitive analysis has always been that it provides insights into market context, shedding light not only on what others have done well or poorly, but revealing audience behaviours, best practices, and opportunities to meet business goals.

However, my new friend’s argument was that scouring the work of others too early in a design process is not only lazy, but leads to mediocre work inspired by trends rather than being an authentic solution. Taping up prints of competitors’ logos, collateral, websites, etc found via Google searches not only lacks critical analysis, but can be more dangerous than helpful. He compared this process with looking for inspiration for an identity project in logo books—also verboten in his studio.

I think he might be right. In fact, in my gut I know he is.

I know what you’re thinking, so before you start bitching at me about how offside this is, consider the following: Every day we spent in design school, and every day following, was training so that we could respond to a project brief with appropriate and effective design solutions. Each graphic design project is another opportunity for us to better understand best practices—what works and what does not.

The longer I’m in this industry, the more convinced I am that our core value as creative professionals comes from our ability to ask smart questions and really listen to our clients. We’re translators as much as we are consultants or strategists, diagnosing and validating business problems that can be addressed through the use of visual language.

Certainly part of our job involves inquiry, but not as inspiration at the beginning of the design process. And to be blunt, I question most designers’ ability to properly conduct a comprehensive brand audit or competitive landscape analysis in the first place. And what do we really know about the audience and performance of these competitors?

Competitive analysis, done poorly or too early in a design process, undermines our ability to solve a problem authentically, and worse, results in solutions that falsely differentiate from others. Often the resulting work is nothing more than modified appropriations of others’ ideas. There is a time to examine the competitive landscape, but I argue that is only AFTER a project has reached an initial concept phase.

If goals, needs, feelings, and language have been agreed to by both the client and designer, THIS is the time to begin exploring visual graphics in pursuit of a genuine solution. Only AFTER all parties agree to the solution should we look outward to test how it stands out against the marketplace. Iterate as needed.

So on your next project, try resisting the urge to see what everyone else is doing until you have a solid concept you’re ready to test. Certainly ask your client to identify their competitors and provide insights into what about their brand or marketing they like, dislike, and why. Gather as much useful intel as you can, but resist the urge to scour the internet looking for ideas; instead develop your own ideas based on your design training, experience and best practices.

My bet is that if you trust your own instincts more, and view competitive analysis as a test rather than a source for inspiration, you’ll find your work provides your clients with a genuine competitive edge and better results than merely responding to—or worse, appropriating—the work of others.

Now I need to decide what to do the next time I find one of my design team buried in Google, claiming they’re “doing research”.

Hi. I’m proud to be sharing my first blog post with Design Edge. We’re calling it Do Good Design, in honour of a famous book of the same name. For those of you who don’t yet know me, I’m David and I’m passionate about how we can all use the power of design thinking to create a better civilization.

Our common love for tigers is obvious (two Siberians born at the Calgary Zoo made national headlines earlier this month). Yet consider this: the world’s tiger population today is only 20% of what it was the day I was born. That’s hard for anyone to hear and especially difficult for me; the tiger has always been my spirit animal, and I hope that by the day I die there will be at least as many tigers alive as there were on the day I was born.



Every year, Pasquale Volpe and Gabriella Morelli from Milan organize the Good50x70 youth poster competition, and thus urge us all to focus on what matters most ... so I was proud and thankful to be a juror again this year.

According to my calculations, over 95% of the graphic designers who have ever lived are alive today, and it’s up to us to decide what our profession will be about: will it be about convincing people to create and consume stuff that destroy habitat? Or will it be about using our unprecedented power and opportunity to persuasively share the messages that the World needs to hear, in order to together design a more humane way of being human? The future of civilization is our common design project, and we’ve made all species our clients. We’re losing those clients at the rate of three species an hour.

Judging from the hundreds of submissions I examined as a Good50x70 juror, there is no risk of extinction of creativity and hope amongst today’s young designers. Across all the topics addressed in the competition, the typography, the colour and the cleverness came together to create messages that motivate and educate. These designs reassure us that our tigers and our hopes and our dreams for a just society are safe in the hands of the next generation of design professionals who will earn a living while creating a better society.

So whether you’re interested in taking part in next year’s competition, or you’d like to see more amazing work, visit the good50x70 site.

I’ll be sharing how I’m working to save tigers through design thinking in a future post. If you’d like to share your examples of design doing good, please contribute to our Do Good Flickr feed or leave a comment here.

Seriously, they’re not. Not really. Think about it. Our clients’ clients are our clients.

Before any fellow design instructors flip out, insisting they spend a good deal of time teaching their students how to interview clients, develop target audience personas or write project creative briefs, ask yourself honestly how often this is really done. How frequently are young designers actually speaking with those for whom their identities, marketing pieces or websites are actually created? Not often enough.

Over the past decade, I’ve seen more design portfolios than you can probably imagine. Some (shockingly few to be honest) go beyond pretty pictures, providing case study descriptions outlining context, objectives, or approach — and virtually none demonstrating results. But when I ask how many end users they actually interviewed that led to their solutions, I can count on one hand those who have actually engaged directly in this crucial research.

The industry is saturated with talk about target audience research, demographics, ethnographics, personas, etc. But let’s be honest here — it’s mostly a bunch of bullshit. Proposal questionnaires sent to inexperienced clients including the question “Who is your target market” often results in a cursory list of gender, age, education, profession, income, etc. Extrapolating a myriad of audience attributes may impress an inexperienced client, but offer little useful insight compared with actually spending time with, talking to and observing real people.

One difficulty with this situation that I’ve observed firsthand, is that our clients themselves are frequently in our way, obfuscating the real problems and opportunities with their nervous hesitation to let us speak privately to staff, partners, clients, and prospects. But isn’t it our responsibility as design professionals to show confidence as experts and insist that we’re granted access to those we’re designing for?

As a brand strategy and identity designer, I am convinced that the first step in creating a successful brand is not only asking the right questions of our clients, but of those they wish to serve, thus getting to the heart of the issues that are driving the change. And by declaring this as a mandatory step in your process, you demonstrate that you are a designer who is concerned about results and helping them achieve their goals — not just doing the work. They’ll get out of your way.

Another issue can be a designer’s lack of time and budget leading them to skip this vital step. Fearing they won’t be able to engage in meaningful interviews with end users, they zip through a cursory research effort (often little more than a quick Google search unfortunately), and end up producing solutions rooted more in assumption or guesses than fact. It’s upsetting to me how often a young designer admits to not even visiting a company’s office or using their product, let alone interview their client’s clients.This laziness has to stop if we want to demand the respect we claim we deserve.

Identifying and interviewing our clients’ clients — real, living, breathing human beings — takes time and requires analysis. But it is this important step in any true design process that leads to understanding, discovery and opportunity. And it doesn’t have to be super complicated either. Depending on the context, goals and objectives of the client, interview questions need not be more than explorations using simple language into their experiences, needs, desires, pet peeves, aesthetic preferences, etc.

In my studio, we often do client surveys via email, interviews via telephone, and recently even sent our design team out into the neighbourhood where one of our clients was planning to construct a new residential building complex. We literally uncovered so many insights by just wandering the streets with clipboards that we were able to construct a brand identity so in tune with the client's audience that it modified the building design to suit. That project sold out in two weeks!

I think it’s important to remember that many clients are often motivated to hire communication designers because they lack the ability to adequately express their problem and form solutions. So why do so many of us take their rudimentary project briefs at face value and not convince them of the value in getting out of our way? By allowing us to test their hypothesis on their own staff, partners, and especially customers, we can provide real value in their business.

Most of us have heard a business person bitching about his previous designer or firm, how the designer “didn’t get it” or “didn’t understand the problem.” If you haven’t yet, trust me, you will. And if it comes from a prospective client, I caution you to slow down and insist on having access to her clients. Otherwise you’re risking taking on a client who either doesn’t understand the situation herself, or is unable to clearly express herself, and ultimately running the risk of failure because you didn’t thoroughly understand her situation, goals or customers.

So for those of you who regularly make this a part of your design process, keep at it. But those of you who gloss over this important step, ask yourself how authentic your solutions are. I challenge you to, on your next new project, insist your client give you access to his staff, vendors, and ultimately his final clients. And if he refuses? Decline the work.

The graphic design industry has driven me crazy.

OK, that might not be entirely true, but after more than two decades as a professional designer, I feel like there are so many more important topics to discuss other than whether I ‘like’ a logo redesign, what font so-and-so used, what the latest colour trends are, or what software or technology is superior, etc. And if I get into one more conversation about inspiration or see another circle "design process” diagram (Ooooooh! You do research too?), I think I might hurt somebody.

As I enter my 15th year of managing my own brand and communication design firm, the issues that keep me interested are things like how to identify and attract clients I actually enjoy collaborating with, how to create effective strategies and initiatives that create results for them, how to derive reward and happiness from my career, and of course how to make money while doing all of the above without feeling like an unethical sell out.

The communication design industry has been in a perpetual state of flux, more so the past decade than ever before, and design schools are pumping out more grads than there are jobs. With the intense competition these days, I’m so glad I’m not a design grad just starting my career. I’m not sure I could do it to be totally honest. So when I speak with young designers, many of whom seem to have been coddled and carry themselves with a sense of self-entitlement these days, I give them the straight goods if they ask.

So my plan for these posts will be to avoid theoretical rhetoric or the ubiquitous navel gazing I see too frequently among graphic designers, and tackle issues relating to what happens BEHIND design. Myths and motivations, tricks and shortcuts, practical tactics, and pragmatic issues that a communication designer may face at various times during their career. I’m known for strong opinions and a forthright — many say blunt — style, and my opinions will be my own and may rub some the wrong way, but that’s fine. Hopefully it sparks some intelligent discourse, and if I’m proven wrong, then I’ll admit it and we’ll all learn together.

I feel like if I was starting out again, I’d want to be told the truth so that I could turn it into a competitive advantage. An edge. And this publication is called Design EDGE, right? Right. So with these missives I plan to discuss issues that seem, to me anyway, to have been glossed over or skipped entirely by most design schools. I can’t guarantee that I have all the answers or that following my advice will work for everyone practicing design professionally, but I promise to tell the truth and provide some food for thought.

Hopefully together we can find ways to enjoy our design careers without going crazy.