Monthly Archives: March 2018

Learning the language of beauty helps us find it

30 Friday Mar 2018

Posted by in brand experience, Bruce Mau, Design, Design Thinking

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#11 Compete with Beauty

This is an ongoing series, based on conversations with Bruce Mau, to help people working in the brand-experience medium embrace and apply the 24 Design Principles. I believe that spending time with these interrelated, non-linear habits of thinking can help us realize better outcomes — at work, in our personal lives, and in the world at large.

Those of us in the business of creating live brand experiences all appreciate the importance of connecting visually — graphically — with our audiences.  From directional wayfinding to vast interactive exhibits, this is what we do. But even in our industry, efficiency tends to dominate our priorities. Take CES. We have only a few days to build what is essentially a small city, and then we dismantle it in even less time. The work is so challenging, that success means getting everything where it needs to be, when it needs to be there. One of the most beautiful things about it is that the miracle happens year after year, just as planned.

Even so, as design thinkers, we are all called upon to raise the bar — to push our designs to a place where both visual aesthetics and functionality are elevated. With the 11th Design Principle, Bruce Mau challenges us to compete with beauty. “It’s not just, ‘I love beauty, and I’ve dedicated my life to beauty,’ … it’s more than a passion, it’s more than my profession,” Bruce says. “It’s got to be a competitive idea.”

It’s easier to grasp this notion when we look beyond our own industry. Steve Jobs took a technically revolutionary phone and made it beautiful to look at, to hold and to use. Elon Musk could have put his innovative technology in a knock-off van body and people still would have been impressed. But instead, he elected to capture people’s imagination with Tesla’s beauty. Bruce explains that this is what all winning brands do: “They go beyond the engineering and actual functionality to integrate the experience of beauty into the product and delivery…. Elon Musk made the coolest car on the planet that was also the fastest. And that combination put Tesla into a class of its own. He launched the brand instantaneously at the top.”

Where does that leave aspiring design thinkers who want to elevate our brand experiences by integrating beauty, but who struggle to articulate our concepts? How can those of us who aren’t actual designers convey our idea of “beautiful” to the long-suffering art directors, designers, builders and creative people trying to help us make it real?

Bruce has been on the receiving end of that frustration and has some advice we can all use to think about beauty. By considering the ten distinct dimensions of design, we can better articulate what beautiful looks like. Try using this vocabulary: Color, Contrast, Proportion, Shape, Material, Texture, Typography, Time, Image, and Content. Think about each separately; whenever you evaluate a design, look at it through each distinct lens.

For example, Bruce suggests that the dimension most relevant to our business is contrast. “Every client that I’ve ever worked for wants to be in the foreground against a noisy background,” he says. “Our work is to help pull them into the foreground, so people see them, and not just the noise behind them. And that is essentially contrast.” Clearly, if we’re doing what everyone else is doing, we’re not going to stand out. We need to think about our design in terms of what’s around it – the relationship to the background and to the audience — and include an element of contrast that will pull it to the foreground.

Color, proportion, texture and the other dimensions of design can be used to create contrast. And that’s why beauty is essential to what we’re doing. It sets us apart in the marketplace; it gives us a competitive edge.

At Freeman, everything we’re doing points in the direction of helping our customers compete by integrating beauty into the design. Our new FuzionSM event technology integration platform is all about making data beautiful. It offers an elegant solution for working seamlessly with a variety of digital products – connecting data points from across the event ecosystem – to help event planners formulate effective, data-driven strategies. Beautiful! And we will soon be launching a new exhibit system, Flex by Freeman, that allows us to radically upgrade the beauty of any show, while introducing a new level of efficiency in material application and speed of installation.

These two products would never have been created if our customers didn’t articulate a need. They would not be as elegant — as beautiful — if some design-thinker hadn’t pushed for that. Enlightened by the concept of competing with beauty, and empowered by the language of design dimension, how will you approach your next opportunity? When you sketch out your ideas — and when you provide feedback during the build – don’t forget to use your words. All ten of them.

When Promoting from within is Wrong

16 Friday Mar 2018

Posted by in Uncategorized

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Bringing in “outside” talent means management is investing in you

As someone who grew up in Indiana, I’m still a die-hard Colts fan. If it’s clear that my team needs a new wide receiver, I want the club to invest in the best player available. When they do, I’m pumped; I feel that the Colt’s management has placed a bet in my favor. Conversely, when they ignore the problem, shuffle players around or try to make due with last year’s sixth-round draft pick, I feel cheated.

I believe most fans feel this way. Whether we are cheering for Manchester United, the Mercedes Formula 1 race team, or the Victorian Roller Derby League Queen Bees, we have equity in “our” team and we expect management to invest in a way that builds toward a championship.

I wonder why we don’t feel the same way about our place of employment; I wonder why we don’t demand that management invest in the top picks. Throughout my career, I’ve listened to people express dismay whenever a position isn’t filled from within the company ranks. Even when the job demanded some pretty esoteric credentials — players not readily available within the team — there were still people who had hurt feelings or who felt indignant at being passed over. But in almost every case, these people had consistently been promoted, given raises, given better titles, and shown plenty of love.

So, what is it about “going outside” that raises people’s ire? I think there are two factors at play here.

First, everyone likes to see loyalty and dedication rewarded. At good companies, it is rewarded. Consistently. Reaching outside for a high-ranking, highly qualified professional isn’t a reflection on the good people already in place, who have been promoted and will continue to be promoted. More likely, it’s an indication that the company is experiencing quick growth in a rapidly changing environment. It means that management wants to diversify the leadership team and bring in someone with a unique skill set. (Even though it is easier and less expensive to fill the job from within.) In this situation, everyone should hope that the company invests in the best player possible, because that will directly impact their retirement plan, 401K, job security, and future career opportunities.

Second, I wonder if it’s simply a case where bringing in a new person is more noticeable than an internal promotion, and that provokes resentment. Even when there are 40 internal promotions for every single person brought from the outside, it’s the outside talent we focus on. Maybe it’s just that when a colleague gets a promotion, we assume they were in line for the job and we don’t begrudge them getting it. But if it goes to anyone “outside” the firm, we all imagine the job could have been ours.

Freeman is a perfect example of a company that is rapidly expanding into new markets, repositioning our services, and growing internationally, all while trying to manage for extreme market volatility. We owe it to the organization to invest in top-pick talent who will complement our leadership team by bringing greater diversity in skills, backgrounds, perspectives, and business experiences. I hope our people see this for what it is, a vote of confidence that the job they are doing merits the best team of leaders available.

Whether it’s in the sports arena or business field, top-ranked teams remain on top by investing in their players – all of their players – to amplify the capability and equity of the entire team. When that happens, it’s something we should all cheer for.