November 17, 2005
To Design or Not To Design - That is the Question
What is the value of design? How important is design in terms of marketing a.k.a in terms of dollars and cents? Design can be tangible or intangible - you can look at it or you can touch it. In the case of music cd cover design, you can "listen" to it, so to speak, because a look can be a motivator and entice someone to take an action i.e. buy a music album, or listen to a music cd, or attend a band’s music concert via the mediums of cover design, poster design, website design, and other forms of promotional collateral.
You don't have to be a graphic designer to understand the value of design- just take the following companies as a few examples: Nike, Apple, Target, McDonalds, MTV, and United Airlines. What all these companies have in common is that they recognize the value of design and they know how to use art as vehicle to produce sales.
Which brings us to the point of this article: do you think they just hand off art direction or graphic design responsibilities to their sales or accounting department? The answer is no - they understand that it takes professional artist to operate the medium of design. Now this doesn't go to say that you need be a huge corporation to utilize design. Design comes in many sizes, and can accommodate any budget from children working a lemonade stand to Bill Gate's working Microsoft. When applying this understanding to music, why would one spend so much time toiling over the way the music sounds just to sabotage all their hard work in the end by giving their album packaging no consideration, or by delegating the job to untrained relatives with a computer, or attempting to do it themselves having no artistic training? The reasoning is lopsided and a degenerate approach to the sum of the work done. Let us not work towards a music industry of unattractive visuals but towards one where there is equal thought placed on the look of an album cover as there is on the sound of the music. Professional designers are trained to help individuals translate their thoughts, emotions, words, and sounds into the global language that is design.
Todays designers are in a sense yesterdays Rembrants, DaVincis, and Michelangelos. Their art was also commissioned for then commercial reasons. In conclusion - don't do it, leave it to the pros.
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Comments
Cool article. I definitely agree that the art is very important when deciding which CDs to buy. Although, in my case, I listen to the whole CD before I buy it, there is still a natural tendency to be attracted to the albums with more visually pleasing artwork.
Posted by: Aaron Cooper at December 17, 2005 04:21 PM
