September 24, 2006
Design Language
I’m not sure how familiar lay-people are with the term design language but design language is used to describe the family of physical attributes associated with a particular brand.
We can speak of the BMW design language, for instance, and although the phrase might be confusing, we can conjure an image of what a BMW looks like; we can remove the badging and see the car and know which company designed and made it.
The concept is fairly new, but the attributes are as old as Plato.
What I am beginning to suspect however is that contemporary designers are spending more time creating products that reflect the design language of the brand than are perpetuating beauty.
For instance, it seems more important to create a car that looks like a Pontiac than to create a Pontiac that is beautiful.
Looking at cars that were created in the sixties, for instance, it appears that the emphasis was on design rather than with branding.
For some companies (think Apple) the design language is beauty, to create extraordinarily aesthetically realized objects; in those instances, the design language of the company reaches for and achieves the exemplary. The design language of the brand becomes a byproduct of the beautiful forms rather than the master of them.
comments
The general comment you make, that designers these days sacrifice originality and authorship in design (my interpretation of your word “beauty”) for consistency in a brand (my interpretation of “design language”) is interesting and can be proven in many instances. However, your counter-example of Apple actually made me think of your argument differently.
Design language is a great definition of a brand’s visual expression. Language is ever-changing. I think the problem you point out in Pontiac is that they do not change, at least in the right ways. Apple, on the other hand, has a narrow design lexicon (the rectangle for the last five years), and very carefully (and creatively, and beautifully) evolve their language. Therein is something quite beautiful in the eyes of the designer, always struggling with structure and free creativity.
Direct reference on kottke. Well, well, looks like somebody hit the big time.
Your selection of the 60′s as a time when things were “different” is interesting. I think that many things were different then. To take another example, NASA in the 1960s aggressively pursued *real goals* (and achieved them; it was the “failure is not an option” era), as opposed to today, when they don’t really seem to be accomplishing much of anything.
Zero tolerance policies are another example. Instead of taking responsibility for making *decisions* on a case-by-case basis as to what’s best for the children involved, our school system would rather have a rule that they can hide safely behind so that noone can say they haven’t done a good job. Everyone’s so afraid of making a mistake and suffering the associated political consequences that they’d rather take no responsibility at all, and the kids are the ones that suffer as a result.
The whole world seems to be more concerned today with appearances, image, and “winning the status and influence game” than with actually achieving real progress.
I think you’ve noted yet another example of this same trend.
Interesting point, however you’re forgetting one major point that renders this argument null and void. Designers as commercial artists are hired by clients to create design. Ultimately the client has final input in regards to design language and will bring any attempts at thinking outside their ‘box’ back into it 99% of the time. Which is why a Pontiac will always look like a Pontiac. Also, in your example, you’re dealing with a corporate behemoth whose various internal bureacracies will inevitably stifle innovation without making drastic changes from the top down. People want to protect their jobs, not take risks that could jeopardise their jobs, and ultimately the company, like many others, will whither and die like fruit on the branch. In design as with everything else there are politics at work that do not necessarily dictate good end results for the end-user.
If you have a beautiful brand, beautiful products will follow. Realizing your brand is ugly is very hard because it’s very expensive to find beauty.
I was about to comment “If you have beauty in your products, you will inherently have beauty in your brand” right before I read Nathan’s comment.
I agree with ya, Deron. The way I think about Pontiac is that they, like Chevy, aren’t trying to be beautiful. They try to appeal to those who don’t know beauty, or at least don’t know subtlety. It’s an American thing, you wouldn’t…
So, here’s my answer the question we were talking about on the side, “Why aren’t Jaguar and others still making true sports cars, and why are the sports cars that are being made not near as beautiful as the Ferrari 360?” I think that it’s not that designers are worse now. They are just answering different needs. The 50′s and 60′s were the culmination of the auto. 50-60 years of refining the the design that was started at the turn of the century. (Focusing on America here) First of all, the sports car. The US didn’t have one until the 50′s when I expect racing started getting bigger and we made a couple of cars to compete. The Vette, then the Mustang. The Cobra is a European chassis. Everything else was for drag racing. So, American cars don’t really count. We only do true sports cars to compete with the Europeans, as does Japan. The sports car is a European thing for European roads. Ahh, I just thought, for old roads. You didn’t need a lot of speed for those small twisty roads. So, you had a light, nimble car for weekend drives into the country, for sport.
There’s no purity to it now. Most don’t drive, or live that way. So very few build cars for that lifestyle. Straight highways, higher speeds, more demand for comfort, more demand for safety, so many people on the roads and so having many other recreational opportunities have changed our needs. A big, fat, high sided car is perfect for cruising straight and keeping the occupants safe and comfortable. Look at the Elise. Who really wants one of those? It has to be a second car, and even if I had the money, I might not get one. You have to be a fairly serious enthusiast to take it out that much. How am I going to fit it in with climbing, mtn. biking, etc.
So, the changing landscape is leaving only a few marques (I love using that word) to keep the past alive. And many of those relatively pure companies like Porsche and Aston Martin still make fairly big cars. The 911 got fattish looking, the Vanquish is big. The sports car is fading, and the GT (Gran Turismo-Grand Touring) is taking its place.
Something else that struck me is the population. The world pop. is twice as large as it was in the 1960′s. I feel some of the design change reflects the feeling that one needs to be isolated and protected from others. Hummers, and just the fat, thick, insulated, construction of autos in general seem to illustrate this. It would be interesting to look at other societies (insects, rodents, etc.) and see what changes in design happen as populations increase. If changes do exist, and I bet they do, I expect that the changes, for the scientists studying those societies, are an indicator to predicting overpopulation.