Interaction & Graphic Design
I am a designer, from deep in my soul. My father is a designer. I breathe design in my everyday life since I was 8 years old. I can’t look at anything written and not guess what font it is printed. I often find myself looking for the “Command+Z” for some shit I did in real life. I’ve been like this for 10 years now, since I started working on graphic design for real. When I was at the Design School, I was 100% creation oriented, I do think most of the good designers are like this. “Desktop men” if I am allowed to steal the expression from my father’s friend. But when a designer is out of school, you have certain responsabilities that you can’t forget. Other people trust you their money, in some business they are running ( or starting ), so you can do a good job and find a market position for that product or service and make a nice package for them too. If you can’t think about marketing positioning for a product, the product will fail, your client will waste their money,you will loose your client, and you will ultimately fail. That’s bad, very bad.
A couple of days ago, I wrote a post about the Samurai Vodka, a concept design by Arthur Schreiber. An astonishing high quality of the 3D image ( by Pavel Gubin ), that made me think if it wasn’t a real picture. The execution is masterfull. A great idea, a great bottle design, a nice label, and very nice box. Everything is awesome. But Arthur forgot about one “small” detail. Market positioning. It would be a lot easier to sell that pack design if the liquid inside the great pack was Sake. Samurais are a japanese thing. Vodka isn’t the “oficial” drink in japan. Sake is. Samurais are a very nice market appeal for japanenese people, but japanese people like Sake instead of vodka. If it wasn’t a concept, things could have gotten ugly for Arthur. I do hope he sells this package, cause it would please me a lot to see a great bottle like that on the shelves. But I’d rather drink sake from it, cause it feels more natural. At least to me.