1. We Are All Designers

Learning the language of Beauty Helps Us Find It

#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.