Uselessly beautiful
Yesterday, I received these two lovely pieces of mail:
I love the utilitarian, government-issue look of the first one. And everybody loved the rich pattern and texture of the second. But because I have no interest in collecting coins or buying more insurance, the money spent on two good designers was completely wasted on me and on 99% of of everyone to whom these pieces were sent.
Of course, the Royal Mint and HSBC have done the math and all the money (if not the trees and carbon) spent on creating, producing and posting these two beautiful objects will be recovered with profit. That’s nice for them, but there is a question for the rest of us whose communication is about convincing people to do something different:
How many beautifully useless messages are we sending? How often are we wasting our limited time and resources on a pretty message sent to the wrong people in the wrong way at the wrong time? I’m sure we could do better.
Seth Godin’s Tribes is a good place to start.
23 October 2008 Jeff Gill
tags: communication,
design,
failure
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