Volume 111: Everything in Life…

1. Everything in Life Doesn’t Have to Be so Useful All The Time.

tl:dr: Usefulness is to design what purpose has been to strategy.

Brand purpose has been talked to death, so I’m not planning to re-hash it here. But, for summary purposes, it’s an approach that works for some brands but isn’t necessarily right for most. And the further removed the brand’s purpose is from the business, the less valuable it tends to be. (As an aside, if I’m linking to brands that cause cancer and diabetes and where both claim to be creating a better world, that should pretty much say everything you need to know about the problem with purpose).

But, what’s particularly interesting, is that what purpose has been to strategy, usefulness appears to be for design.

What do I mean by this?

Well, arguably, the push to purpose had less to do with consumer demand and more with marketers and their agency partners feeling the need to do something, anything, more meaningful than simply selling product. I’ve talked before about the institutional guilt that manifested itself post-2008 financial crisis (its story three at the bottom of the page), which created a fertile breeding ground for the concept.

With design, I’ve railed against the shift to boring, commodified minimalism. While there are many arguments for it, they’re mostly boosterism rather than a meaningful insight into what’s going on (My favorite excuse is that the “Gen Z” branding aesthetic was created to stand out on Instagram. A quick trip to Instagram quickly shows this to be a myth. These brands don’t stand out; they blend together in a bland scrolling melange).

Anyway, in a similar way that purpose became the word du jour in strategy circles, usefulness and its cousin usability are words that repeatedly appear on designers’ lips.

And, in a similar vein that the people pushing purpose were often doing so for personal reasons rather than commercial (there must be more to this than simply moving the merch), the same has been happening in design. If everything is useful and usable, it’s valuable. It has a purpose; it solves a problem, gives the user a more useful experience, and, most importantly, makes what I do as a designer important. It makes me feel I’m more than just the shapes and colors department. It makes my work feel meaningful to my peers and to me.

Unfortunately, in the same way that purpose often disconnects the strategist’s work from the brand they’re working on, the fetishization of usefulness often makes the designer’s work become joyless, overly earnest, largely interchangeable with the competition, and boringly forgettable.

You see, everything in life doesn’t have to be useful. I love my dogs, but they’re not useful for much beyond laying on the couch, barking at the neighbors, and crapping in the rose bush.

Art isn’t useful; we love it because of how it makes us feel. Fiction isn’t useful, but it transports us inside our minds. Music isn’t useful, yet it’s life-defining for many. And supporting Liverpool FC right now isn’t very useful for my emotional state, haha.

If you look around, we surround ourselves with things that lack usefulness all the time, and that’s OK. But, just because something isn’t useful doesn’t mean our lives aren’t richer because of it. And, if everything in life had to be useful, our lives would be desperately dull.

I got into the branding game because of two brands; Orange and Goldfish. They blew me away, not because they were useful but because they were full of joy and whimsy and were quirky and different. At the time, they staked out a totally different emotional territory. I felt drawn to them in a way that I’d never felt drawn to the likes of British Telecom or HSBC.

We need more of that. Not to go back to a nostalgic time that never was but to move forward resolutely in a way that says it’s OK to be quirky, whimsical, and full of joy. It’s OK for something to be novel, and disposable, and maybe even (shock-horror, whisper it very, very quietly) decorative. These things don’t make a brand less useful; instead, they make it richer and more interesting.

I love that VW put a little flower vase on the VW Bug. I love that Genesis turned the gear selector into a weird, flippy crystal. However, I don’t love that there are so few examples I can think of and literally zero brand identities in recent times that have had even a modicum of joy in them.

So, let’s remove the shackles of usefulness, embrace our inner uselessness, and find a quirkier, richer, and more joyful side to our work. And let’s stop viewing things like quirkiness and whimsy as frictions to be removed because they’re not. On the contrary, they’re essential parts of what moves people and, thus, what makes them want to connect with, and maybe even love, our brands.

2. RIP Figma.

tl;dr: Adobe buys Figma, likely to wither slowly on the vine.

Whenever you hear the term “strategic acquisition,” it typically means two things: First, the company doing the acquiring over-paid to the point that no one else would do the deal. And second, the buyer believes overpaying will be good for shareholders because the acquisition will unlock significant new value. For a great example of this in action, Disney bought Marvel for $4bn, which at the time looked expensive, but today looks like an astute bargain when we consider what the addition of the Marvel IP portfolio did for the Disney business empire.

However, a much more common reality is that they’re overpaying because they’re scared of what they’re buying and are deeply concerned that it’ll represent a long-term competitive headache if it’s left on the chess board. So, better to remove it now before it gets too big to do a deal. For examples of this, look no further than Google’s purchase of YouTube or Facebook’s purchase of Instagram.

With that in mind, Adobe just announced the intention to purchase Figma for a cool $20bn, which makes this the largest acquisition of a privately held startup in history, eclipsing the previous record held by the $16bn acquisition of WhatsApp by Facebook. Notably, this deal is pretty dilutive–Adobe announced that in addition to the stock it will issue, it’s likely going to have to take on debt to pay the cash part of the deal, which is yet another indicator of how concerned Adobe was about the likely future competitiveness of Figma.

And they had good reason. In addition to being a tacit acknowledgment that the Adobe XD product isn’t good enough, Adobe has looked into the design tea leaves and realized two things: One, that Figma represented a material threat to Adobe’s Creative Cloud business, and two, that the addition of Figma to its Creative Cloud would instantly cure Adobe’s weakness in tools that support collaborative web design, while also eliminating any need for it to compete based on…I dunno, actual product innovation.

So, from a shareholder value standpoint, this kind of defensive acquisition is a no-brainer - it takes a major player off the chessboard, adds a predictable source of new revenue to the mix, and eliminates the risky variable of competition. (And, yes, it is a costly deal. But that’s the thing about strategic acquisitions; you’re paying a huge “shitting my pants about what you might become” premium).

However, as good as it will be for shareholders, this is likely much less of a good thing for the customer. First, the following statement from Figma leadership is likely to prove absolute nonsense:

“We plan to continue to run Figma the way we have always run Figma — continuing to do what we believe is best for our community, our culture and our business…Adobe is deeply committed to keeping Figma operating autonomously.

More realistically, prices are probably going up, whether directly or much more likely, by making it so you can only access Figma via a broader Adobe Creative Cloud subscription (thus rendering moot those who may have switched from Adobe Creative Cloud to Figma). It’s also highly likely that innovation and product development will slow to a crawl, that user-friendliness will entropy back to Adobe standards (e.g., not at all user-friendly), and that any product features designed to disrupt Adobe Creative Cloud will be removed from the roadmap entirely - leaving designers with a clunkier product that costs more, works worse, and that requires “integration” with other Adobe products to work.

In an ideal world, this kind of deal would face considerable antitrust scrutiny from the FTC, representing as it does a deep consolidation of design tools under Adobe. However, it isn’t clear that this will happen. Not only is antitrust scrutiny only just starting to find its feet again after years of kowtowing to industry, but it’s facing a barrage of “we dare you” acquisitions by Amazon (Some feel that Amazon is deliberately making a slew of acquisitions to overwhelm those responsible for antitrust, and thus render their actions irrelevant)

So, anyway, it’s a huge deal for the founders and owners of Figma. It robustly supports the case for design’s continued value and power within business. And it’s likely the beginning of the end for a product that many love. It had a good run. I’m a little sad that it’s over. RIP Figma.

However, rather than feel down, I’d like to wish luck upon anyone spinning out of there (or inspired by the $20bn exit) to set up the next, better design tool. Because goodness knows, nobody willingly chooses dependence on Adobe.

3. The Arcana & Ephemera of branding.

tl;dr: In defense of diving deeply down the rabbit hole.

It’s popular right now to focus on how fast things are moving and how short our attention spans have become. And while there’s very little evidence to support the former (I’d argue the Victorians moved faster than we do), there’s good evidence to support the latter: Media has fragmented, advertising formats have shortened, and trademark registrations have increased sharply (very simply, this means more brands are competing for our attention, which is becoming harder to attract).

But, hidden amid the drive to explain brands using fewer words, to make everything efficient and frictionless, to make ads last 5s or less, and to eliminate anything that might be viewed as superfluous, is that the Internet didn’t just shorten our attention spans; it also gave us the means to dive down any rabbit hole at any moment instantaneously.

Compared to previous generations, we now have the unique ability to go from completely ignorant to dangerously informed on any subject we choose using nothing more than the supercomputers we carry around in our pockets.

The first time I paid attention to this phenomenon was a few years ago when my son was into Minecraft. As any parent of a Minecrafter will know, while it looks ultra-basic, it’s a complex and powerful game…that comes without instructions. This led to a vast ecosystem of instruction springing up on platforms like YouTube showing people what to do. Which, in turn, led to interesting social interactions, where, for example, I’ve witnessed Minecraft skills acting as a form of social currency among pre-teens.

Anyway, this isn’t intended as a post about Minecraft; it is intended as a discussion about the arcana and ephemera of branding. You see, if we take the view that everything is moving fast, that people have tiny attention spans, and we need to get them to the sale as quickly as possible, then the last thing we’re going to do is invest in the complexity of backstory, narrative arc, and the kinds of rabbit hole defining stories, artifacts, and ephemera that operate not just to support our brand, but to define it.

However, if we consider that those who are interested are likely to be the most engaged and thus the most likely to tell others, then we can see why this might be a valuable use of our time, money, and energy, especially for those brands seeking to feel special and justify a price premium.

Fashion and luxury brands, for example, have long used their arcana and ephemera to establish a sense of value via history, craftsmanship, founder stories, and the like. The Omega Speedmaster is valuable because astronauts wore it to the moon. The leather used by Louis Vuitton is unsurpassed. The coffee made by Ralph Lauren is going to…I dunno…taste like a sweaty polo pony?

But, how often do most brands take arcana and ephemera into account in order to create and curate it effectively? How often do they actively make use of it to drive their narrative, support a price premium, and reiterate how their brand is more interesting and more engaging, and, yes, more rabbit hole-friendly than other brands?

Yeah, you’re right, almost certainly not often enough.