Seth Godin on Design
We all have skills and expertise. Seth Godin is a master at what he knows, what he does. I’m not sure he fits into a tidy box, but his skills lie in the marketing world, not every world. I value his opinions on marketing, building community around markets, know people and products - I do not value his opinions on design and design strategy. It’s fair enough I guess, I can value what he says in one space but not another. Take for instance my listening to Al Gore when it comes to lockboxes, but not the environment.
There’s so much about Mr. Godin’s post that’s behind the curve, misleading and lacking in technical and design insight that I struggled to believe he actually wrote it. He muddies the water of development, visual and interaction design to the point that I was coming up for air midway through. I highly recommend Mr. Godin stick to what he knows and leave design and design strategy to the professionals, let he lose credibility and mislead organizations into making terrible design choices.
Thanks for reading, Jeremy.
Once you are done coming up for air, I’d really enjoy hearing your take on what I missed. I don’t pretend to know much at all about much of anything, but I sometimes get people thinking. That’s the goal, anyway.
Thanks.
Certainly, it was intention to revisit and fill out my thoughts. In fairness to you I’ll do now rather than later.
My primary query is why you focus on ‘web sites’? Do you feel the same about other marketing media? Has every commercial been made, ever brochure or ad piece designed? To me you’ve singled out a medium for less than obvious reasons, maybe because you know it would rile people like me up.
To take issue with a single point I’ll just go with your primary:
“There are more than a billion pages on the web. Surely there’s one that you can start with? If your organization can’t find a website that you all agree can serve as a model, you need to stop right now and find a new job. ”
That’s precisely why you must be different as a brand, you must cater to your users in a compelling way. Because there are a billion sites out there, and you damn well want them to remember yours. And to make the broad assumption that swappin colors and fonts does that shows me that you don’t understand what designers do. Good designers anyway.
And I would say if your business can find an exact website that you can agree you then they all need new jobs. If someone else is out there, already doing it - doing everything you want to do in a way that you love why are you even trying? My hope is that every organization has something new or different to offer, and maybe a better way to present it to their users. You don’t accomplish that by copy and pasting other work.
You make sound as if designers have been faking their skills and simply copying and pasting photoshop for a decade, tricking clients into thinking they are doing something that adds value, we both know that’s nonsense. Web design is the confluence visual, interaction and technical design. It is not simply copying a competitor’s work. You would never recommend to a client that they simply copy the strategies of a competitor and send them a bill. Designers aren’t in business because they’ve fooled anyone, they are in business because they are needed…needed to present the brand to users in a way that meets the client’s goals.
Lastly, let’s look ay squidoo. I assume that project met your first two bullets:
*You were not trying to reinvent the idea of a web page–that the page is a means to an end
*You were working with other people
Did you follow this advice? Did you build a business on someone else’s design, someone who’d already ‘done it’?
Many projects don’t set out to change the world, but in the end they do. If they had followed your advice they would likely be overlooked and never even get a notice.
I appreciate your comments, and while I don’t agree with the post, I appreciate your asking some of these questions.