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March 02, 2005

Under the Influence

After Michael Bierut posted another in a series of Design Observer entries about young designers imitating other, more famous designers or photographers (another example here), influential designer Art Chantry (who may have been posing as young design student Jessica Simpleton earlier in the thread) shared some of his opinions about imitation in the design profession:

do you REALLY think kruger INVENTED that look? don't you have any idea where she got that? do you really think that no one EVER did work that looked that BEFORE kruger??? are you kidding?!?!? lordy, sometimes i think that you ny design culture folks really think you folks invented the wheel. she was drawing off very long design traditions and ideas that LONG redate her work. i always looked at her work as total copycatting. the big difference is that she lived in ny and claimed to be an artist instead of a mere designer. otherwise her work leaves no impression of originality of even novelty. i swear, sometimes i think you new york design culture folks live in a bunker.

as for owning a design style, perhaps you should buy our buddy chuck anderson a cup of coffee sometime and kisten to his story about his battle with the gap/old navy and tell me if a person can own a "design style". the man is a living hero for all of us designer folks and nobody even knows about it.

man, if we could truly "own" a design style, i'd be filthy rich.

Following some other commentary, Chantry discussed how designers can create entire subcultures and underground movements through skillful marketing tactics:

the impact of heckler & associates is an interesting case. when they did the rainier beer campaign, the figured out how to use satire and stoner humor to sell beer to the hip young audience (aka - kids), without aiming directly at them. they turned a 12% market share product into a 65% dominant product in a little over 2 years. rainier put other breweres out of business in the market.

with k2, they helped promote and build the dominant downhill ski company. as their market aged, they looked around and saw skateboard punks and saw the fledgling burton snoboard biz and saw renewal in their sales. snoboards had been around since the snodad (a sno surfboard) in the 60's. but k2 decided to create a culture and started snoboard magazaine and began sponsoring major boarders and began competitions creating stars. THEN they began to design product to sell to the culture they created. they virtually created the snoboard culture as we know it today. it was a marketing ploy that they exploited mercilessly. first create a market by creating a culture.

heckler & assoc. desided to do the same thing on their own. red hook became the first major microbrew. in fact, the word microbrew was coined to describe red hook's market creation. sure, private brewers have been around since antiquity, but red hook created the microbrew culture and then exploited it as a marketing plan. the same thing was done with the coffee shop and starbucks.

my point is that there is no vernacular or lowbrow. there is only human planning. kruger exploited by creating a fine art market for tabloid humor and launched a thousand ships. but, the originators are often obscured by our ignorance of the process we all exploit.

how do you thing "grunge" happened? we all sat around up in seattle and made it up. no joke.

Though these points are open to question, it is still fascinating to think about. How often do marketers create cultures out of thin air?

Posted by timothompson at March 2, 2005 10:36 AM