What a Designer's Working Day Looks Like
1.8.2012
arndtteunissen managing director Benjamin Arndt in the August issue of the magazine Co&Co on his guidelines for a designer's working day.
Article published in Co&Co, 08/2012
The Commandments of a Strong Corporate Design
What standards do we set for ourselves and our assignments? What do we measure ourselves against and take our bearings from in our daily work? How do we secure lasting differentiation, uniqueness and exclusivity for a brand? We should keep the following commandments in mind in our daily work, in order to develop strong corporate designs for our clients.
Be run-of-the-mill.
It is not about developing a design that satisfies fashionable, stylistic criteria. Nor is it about simply arranging image and text somehow. It is about developing a look that showcases the product, the company, the brand aptly. No matter what is currently in vogue. It is simply about a unique presence.
Dress your company in the right clothes.
A corporate design must stand credibly for the company. Credible means: logo, typography and colour must be congruent with the brand core, the history, the culture and the daily behaviour of its employees. Corporate design may be an outward matter, but it always stages and illustrates the inner life of the company. Anyone who tries to speak a language that nobody believes will find it hard to be noticed. A strong corporate design is therefore always tailor-made.
Give your brand a radiant complexion.
Customers – so the unanimous opinion goes – want to be seduced. But how? The simple answer: through beauty. The better answer: through beauty that questions forms and norms and at times turns them upside down. Strong brands are therefore characterised by striving not for what conforms to the rules, but for what is exemplary. In this way, something unfashionable, out of step with the times, wrong always emerges. Or put differently: something timelessly beautiful.