Recently received the official announcement about Adobe CS 5 followed by another email which, the image part is curious. Actually, it kinda doesn’t make a lot of sense.
And here’s the thing… that’s okay.
It’s been well over a decade since I worked at Adobe and I’m not sure how they manage their advertising and marketing, internal or hire and external agency. I don’t know exactly the entire point of the visual of this email, how exactly the text relates to the image and some other things about it. I see some of the thread, trees, wood, paper and stuff rising up from nothing but it’s not very concrete or very sticky (to quote from Made to Stick)… and that’s okay. Seriously, it is okay.
From nearly 20 years in the creative field you can sorta tell when you’re looking at something done by one or a couple people without the overbearing oversight of some group-think. This is fairly clearly done by a small group, potentially of one even, who had the say and were able to design something and get away with it. Getting away with it is what designers should be allowed to do, especially if design should be considered art, and there’s a pretty good argument it should.
A committee could have overseen this design and a group and it could have been micromanaged into a concept like a sledgehammer, very safe, wide-targeted, non-artsy, corporate, and devoid of soul, and it’d have shown to most as being just that. Arguably had it been micromanaged to death like sadly 99% of all design these days is, including my own, it’d have gotten more people to make sense of it, and maybe bought CS 5, but someone in the chain said “you know what, I trust this designer(s?) and/or copywriter to do whatever, it’s what we’re PAYING them to do.” What they’re paying them to do.
If a person takes a car to a shop, almost nobody would micromanage their mechanic to do the repairs. If a person goes to a doctor, though it’s good to be your own advocate for healthcare, you’re not going to tell say your surgeon how to cut you open to take care of whatever needs taking care of inside of you. Hire an accountant to do your taxes you probably don’t tell him how you want your deductibles taken care of. So why is it people feel the need to tell a designer, a professional, how to do their job? As I’ve often said with an odd negative reaction to, at that moment to me as I fire them, ex-clients, “I don’t tell you how to do your job, don’t tell me how to do mine.”
Clients should hire agencies or designers to make their lives easier, hopefully make them money, get them visibility, do that design thing they’re being paid to do, not micromanaged or armchair designed. Sometimes a designer won’t quite get it right, other times they’ll nail it though, so let them design, it’s what they do.
Kudos to Adobe for letting this go out, it takes guts to allow this stuff to go out, and I admire that.
Currently in the process of mulling a very large healthcare push full spectrum to medical professionals about a series of conditions and how to train to treat them. It’s potentially something very full spectrum for deployment, in both print, poster, traditional ad channels, various web channels, interactive to smart devices.