Is your design timeless?

You can mostly classify all popular design today into four categories: timeless, retro, grunge, bleeding edge or high tech. Pretty much anything you see is going to, in some way, fall into one of these categories. Some really masterful design is able to incorporate pieces of each into a single design making an artistic melange of creativity and style.

The thing is, each of these styles means something, it conveys a given message to your audience. For established companies a great concern may be the shelf-life of the design they have.

I have some close friends who would essentially say that the freshness of their companies design doesn’t really have an effect on their perceived ability as a company. They may even take it further to say that their design simply doesn’t matter, that as a company they have to have a design because they need to get information out and that it is expected, but that that design doesn’t necessarily matter.

This just isn’t the case. Let me compare this to something that we are all consumers of, the music industry. There are a lot of songs from decades ago that we still listen to. We all know Van Morrison’s Brown Eyed Girl- in April 2005 the White House officially announced it was on regular rotation on W’s ipod. But it was released in 1967. How many songs from 1967 can you name?

The simple fact is some of them went out of style and some never made it and even others popped in and went out before we really noticed (Milli Vanilli?). What we are talking about here is style. Some of these artists were able to create styles that were cutting edge for their day but didn’t last, some created styles that weren’t even noticed for years, and some created styles that have been recurring hits for 40 years.

You might say, “Well that was their main job but style isn’t my main focus.” Not true, their main focus was to make music, they could have done it a la Mozart or James Brown, it was how they did it that we remember. Artists such as Aerosmith and U2 have been able to prove that they could produce music in many different styles, from ballads to head-banging metal music. Again this just proves they could have presented their message in many different ways, the way they chose made them icons.

In the coming weeks I’m going to talk about the different styles and how I think they impact companies and the marketplace in which they exist. There are pros and cons to each but ultimately it’s about a fit. The design has to fit you and your company. Hang around and see if you think your design is off the rack or custom tailored to your needs.