Customer Reviews

Do Good Design: How Designers Can Change the World

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You might expect a book with "good design" in its title to showcase elegant communications pieces for savvy clients. Not this book. On the cover, the word "design" is crossed out. "Do good" is the message.

But first, Canadian designer David Berman shows us bad design. Really bad -- and not in the aesthetic sense of the word. He bombards us with offensive, sexist print ads for cigarettes, cars, fast food, beer. According to Berman, the multinational conglomerates selling these products are an axis of evil far more dangerous than Al Qaeda, creating an addiction to mass consumption that is leading to the demise of the planet's environment. He also bombards us with words: exploitation, deceit, junk, greed. "Designers are at the core of the most efficient, most destructive pattern of deception in human history," he writes.

Is it fair to blame designers for these evils? Should graphic designers, who generally work in small firms, be lumped together with the global ad agencies that create Coca-Cola and Marlboro campaigns? And where does the responsibility really lie? Are designers responsible for plastering Coke billboards on every surface in third-world villages? Berman, who is the ethics chair for the Graphic Designers of Canada, asserts that we are all designers and we are all responsible; we've collectively created the mess and must clean it up. Does that include lobbying the local landlords who sell the space where the ads are posted, and the authorities and politicians who don't legislate against it?

David Berman is a man of conviction and passion. But to whom is he preaching? To design firm owners ("Next time you pull out a disposable pen at a client briefing...")? To clients ("If you can't find a promise to make about your product that you'd feel comfortable making to your children or best friend, redesign your product")? Or to students? Perhaps only young, naïve students are unaware of many of the facts related in the book: "Cigarettes are the most highly advertised product in the world." "Extreme women serve as billboards for fashion brands."

Nevertheless, I truly hope this book gets in the hands of students. As required reading in first-semester communication design programs, it could help them begin to look at the uses and possibilities of design. If only a few are inspired by the picture of a girl on page 27 with a tube going from her ear to her mouth, the book will have succeeded. The caption reads: "...technology designed for quadriplegics. A person without use of their arms or legs can surf the Internet by combining neck movements with puffing air through a tube." Perhaps a student who peruses the babes-in-bikinis ads and then sees this photo will think, "Maybe my ultimate career goal shouldn't be designing CD jackets. I'll take engineering and physiology classes and become an industrial designer who creates products that heal people, and the world."

Healing the world is a key theme. Some of the book's most compelling bits are the "Doing Good" sidebars that describe remarkable things designers around the world are accomplishing. "There is no reason why you can't make an extraordinary mark on our world," Berman advises. "Recognize the independence, power, and influence of your role as a professional." I hope his next book will show more positive examples and explore in greater depth the projects he mentions including the ballot designs the AIGA is sponsoring, the Canadian cigarette packages that graphically depict cancerous lungs, and the design programs that celebrate indigenous cultures.

The book itself is an exercise in non-wastefulness. Its mass-market-paperback, Adbusters vibe has more in common with Jerry Rubin's 1970, counterculture Do It! than any design book on my shelves. However, the message might be more effective if the paper and printing were of better quality and the visuals were larger and more legible.

Today, a book is not just a book. It's part of a user experience including a Web site, and in this case, a pledge. Taking off from where British designer Ken Garland left off with his "First Things First" manifesto, Berman asks us to take the "Do Good Pledge, which includes: I will spend at least 10% of my professional time helping repair the world." As I write this, his site shows that 80,184 hours of doing good have been pledged. What could be bad about that?

One of the books I received from Amazon Vine last month was Do Good Design: How Design Can Change Our World by David B. Berman. Actually, it was a book I heard about from a few other bloggers who I respect, so getting the opportunity to pick it up for review was perfect. Overall, I thought his premise was interesting and thought-provoking... Designers have an obligation to "do good" when it comes to crafting messages, and that our current mindset of mass consumption is not sustainable in the long run. He shows plenty of examples to back up his views, and you can't help but consider how much "mass deception" we've succumbed to. But to buy into his message completely, you have to think that most everyone out there is bent on seducing you in ways you haven't imagined. And I personally don't think that everything is a conspiracy theory...

Contents:
The Creative Brief - Disarming the Weapons of Mass Deception: Start Now; Beyond Green - A Convenient Lie; Pop Landscape; The Weapons - Visual Lies, Manufactured Needs; Where The Truth Lies - A Slippery Slope; Wine, Women, and Water; Losing Our Senses
The Design Solution - Convenient Truths: Why Our Time Is The Perfect Time; How To Lie, How To Tell The Truth; how We Do Good Is How We Do Good; Professional Climate Change
The Do Good Pledge: "What Can One Professional Do?"
Appendixes: First Things First Manifesto; Excerpt From The GDC's Code of Ethics; Excerpt from AIGA's Standards of Professional Practice; The Road To Norway And China; Notes; Index; Questions For Discussion; Acknowledgements; About The Author

If you're not in the habit of questioning what you see, Berman will open your eyes in the first section on disarming weapons of mass deception. Yes, you've got the typical ads that are heavy on sex, enticing male viewers to equate the product with fulfillment. But he also goes after products like Fiji Water that attempt to position themselves as an environmental alternative. But we're talking about, as he puts it, "shipping water from the South Seas in plastic bottles from China to the US and Europe in container ships". When you start looking at ads designed with those deceptions in place, you realize that the drain on resources to support that type of selling is not something that can be sustained on a global basis before the environment takes heavy damage. Coke takes a pretty heavy hit with the ubiquitous use of the familiar Coke logo spread all over the world, cementing their products in people's mind through sheer mass exposure. He also exposes myths like Bailey's Irish Cream, which tries to evoke the image of centuries of handcrafted excellence, while it's really only about 40 years old and is a result of a corporate campaign to get more young women to drink whisky.

He intersperses these examples with others that show responsible and truthful facts in advertising, such as cigarette warning labels that tend towards the graphic depiction of what tobacco can do to you in the long term. All this culminates in a commitment to the Do Good Pledge: the time to commit is now (immediacy), I will be true to my profession (ethics), I will be true to myself (principles), and I will spend at least 10 percent of my professional time helping repair the world (effort). In other words, instead of doing whatever it takes to get and keep the large clients, take a principled stand that you will not feed the mass consumption beast and you will instead try to make a difference in the world.

Personally, I got a lot out of the book even though I'm not a "designer" in terms of the audience he's addressing. We *do* need to change our mindset as consumers, and stop being manipulated by images designed solely to make us want to buy more stuff we don't need. On the other hand, there's a fair amount of grey area over what constitutes responsible selling vs. manipulative selling, and I don't know that I fall as far to the left of the scale as he does. But if nothing more, reading Do Good Design will make you look at the images and icons around you in a new light. And hopefully you'll act a bit differently as a result...

When I first started reading this I was a bit cynical. Yeah, much of graphic design deliberately skews its message to influence the viewer. As a designer myself I pretty much take this as part of the game. Whether selling a product or person the idea behind design is to influence behavior.

As I got into the book however, I realized that I am not as jaded as I thought. Yes influence is important but so are clarity, honesty and appropriateness. I recently looked at a cover of Psychology Today and am pretty put off by the blatant sexual overtones that the magazine regularly uses. Do Good Design covers that subject and raises the question of how tying a product to the implication of sex with an attractive partner plays out in the long term. Will buying that beer or soft drink get you the supermodel? Obviously not. Yet that's what the drink ads not so subtly imply.

Spiekermann suggests the long term fallout of such manipulative practices is negative for the advertiser. It sure hasn't hurt Budweiser, so I don't quite buy that argument. On the other hand, I recently turned down a job for a firm that wanted me to use sexually suggestive material for their website. I found the project offensive.

The point that the author makes is that appropriate images work better if they fit with the product they are designed to promote. The basic idea is truth in advertising applied not just to the textual or spoken content but to the images used as well.

Images are powerful and can touch us on a subconscious level. Did you know that Coke is the second most know word in the world behind okay? Coke ads blanket not just the industrial world but outlying villages in Africa and Asia. A coke costs about the same as a malaria pill. With the extreme poverty rampant in malaria infested areas is it right to promote sugar water sales where such a purchase may keep the customer from being able to buy medicine?

As I went through example after eye opening example of the power of product promotion through design I realized that Do Good Design makes me recall the old phrase consciousness raising. The book certainly raised my consciousness about my work and the power of design for both good and ill.

Obviously, design is just a tool and it's the underlying motives of the people who use it that is the real problem. As we see the results of corporate greed and how it has hammered the world economy. Do Good Design is a timely reminder about motivation and manipulation.

I am usually leery of design manifestos. But I felt that this one has a timely message of the problems of design and how designers can improve lives with good design. Though it's a bit too short to fully explore all of the topics that it presents, it does provide information on websites for further reading and for further action.

For the most part, the photos and diagrams here really add to the book.

I agree with other reviewers here that the message of design exploiting women is mixed here since this book takes those images and pastes them all over the pages inside.

My other complaint about this book is the layout. For a book on good design, this is pretty messy with photos arranged in a seemingly haphazard manner and text running vertically on some pages.

This book has campaigns/images that illustrate the impact of design on the message being conveyed. Worth a read or to flip through to areas which are interesting to the reader. These types of books are better for those who are more advanced in design and more interested in the marketing aspects and analysis. Not so much a how to do book but a why and what is the impact book. To some, the book may a bit challenging but for those who are interested, it's another person's perspective which is value in the overall scheme of a marketing campaign.

Although much of what Berman talks about is advertising as opposed to the broader topic of design, the book makes its points clearly and effectively. The basic idea is that professional designers need to act ethically so we can live in a healthy environment. That includes the environment as we generally use the word as well as our psychic environment. Do you want your kids growing up surrounded by billboards for cigarettes or by messages that are creative and empowering. Or no billboards at all. Berman opens the topic up and points in a few directions, leaving it to you to take the next step. The book is a call to action. Well done.

An easy, quick read with many illustrations and interesting/surprising facts along the way. The book delves slightly deeper into what many of us already know about branding, images and advertising. This short, straightforward book is perfect for a flight or train ride.

As designers, we are all presented on occasion with jobs that challenge our sense of moral responsibility. This wonderful little book is an entertaining, informative and persuasive look at how to deal with ethical conflicts in the world of advertising and graphic design.
And it does much more than point out the problem and attendant dilemmas - it offers practical ideas on how to resolve ethical conflicts as well as solid examples of how Canadian graphic designers have risen to the challenge.
If you are a designer you owe it to yourself (and your children!) to read this book.

This unusual book treats design, not as simply an art, but as either a force for good or a means to mislead and degrade its intended audience. Design is part of culture and, as such, wields a wide and powerful influence. The author declares that designers have a "social responsibility" to do good, and not just promote overconsumption of products that hurt the environment and ultimately make our future unsustainable. He takes a broad view of design and attributes to it the "power to repair the world."

How credible is his argument that design can make a better world? A glance around us will show it is very credible. It isn't just that good design in our surroundings can make us feel better, but good design can actually save us from grief. I have for many years made a living as a technical writer, and I have always felt this is important work because having clear, understandable instructions for operating software or putting together your child's swing set can make a real difference. Consider a document that is written in straightforward, unambigious language, with correctly-spaced paragraphs and subheads and accompanied by meaningful illustrations, and compare it to one that is full of acronyms and unknown terminology, unrelieved words packed together and nary an explanatory visual, and you see what I mean.

I found compelling the illustration in this book of the 2000 Florida ballot for US President. It has such a confusing design that many people apparently poked the wrong circle, thinking they were voting for Al Gore. As we all know, Gore lost that election because of Florida. The author later shows a sample of Canadian legislation documents, which were reformatted to be more readable. Yes, the format of documents, forms and ballots does matter.

But designers mostly work on commercials and ads, which bombard us constantly from our TV and computer screens, along our highways, and in public places. The author urges designers to create ads that accurately describe the product, not associate it with sex and success. The book is full of illustrations that do this. I had to get out my magnifying glass to see some of these, which are reproduced small and in black and white. We've all seen many of these, but there is also a collection of photos from other countries, including African nations that have a CocaCola logo on seemingly all their public signs. Companies are buying our mindspace by naming stadiums and events after their products, branding items that have nothing to do with their product and making their logos ubiquitous.

The author goes after cigarette companies and criticizes American auto companies for their ads, but, since I live in Detroit, I think he's a bit unfair on the auto ads. Foreign car companies also run stupid ads and the current problems of the domestic auto industry are more complicated than irresponsible ads. Yet... he has a point.

My personal most disgusting industry is the pharmaceutical companies; they want to convince us there's a pill (almost always a very expensive pill) for everything. The people in the commercials are always happy and smiling and having no more problems with their breathing difficulty or urges to use the bathroom. Then there's Cialis and the couples in those improbably ridiculous two bathtubs, and the Viva Viagara commercials, where guys sing about their ED problem. And drug companies want you to think they are creating "tomorrow's miracles" ... only if they can sell it at high prices to a large market. How much of our outrageous national health care bill is because of overselling and overuse of these hugely profitable drugs?

Yes, the author has a point here, but will this book make any difference? Perhaps it will jog people into seeing the power of design and just maybe it will get some designers thinking about using their talents in more productive ways.

This is quite the interesting book -- written by a veteran of the graphic design and advertising industry, "Do Good Design" is an interesting and remarkably harsh study of the effects of graphic design as a part of the advertising and publicity industries, going into great detail about the pervasiveness of advertising and the importance of understanding the psychology of design, demonstrating such things as the overuse of sexual imagery and the lengths that a company will go to in order to promote a product. (The photos of Coca-Cola-sponsored municipal signs in isolated third-world countries are especially creepy.) It's worth noting, mind, that veterans of the industries will already know this stuff; to some extent, it acts as a wakeup call to them, but even more it's a manifesto aimed at the up-and-coming graphic designer, calling on them to take mouse in hand and learn how to make a difference.

The author is Canadian, and as a result the political stance may be a bit jarring to an American audience; while not in any sense anticapitalist (the author stresses that the point is still to make money), it attacks many fundamental points of the ad industry, defending limitations on such things as billboards and cigarette ads as the responsible thing to do when dealing with industry attempting to skirt regulation and social propriety and attacking companies engaged in greenwashing and other insidious forms of fact distortion. In fact, it seems that Berman is, to some extent, trying to do a more mainstream approach to what culture jammers such as Shepard Fairey attempt to do; while nowhere near as radical as Fairey, for example, Berman speaks well of AdBusters and injects a fair amount of humor into the text as well. Overall, the message is a bit radical for American tastes, but well within the mainstream of other Westernized countries. (One point where I don't agree with the author is his evaluation of retro-style pinup images; while overall his point about overuse of sexualized imagery in advertising is fairly sensible (if a bit priggish IMHO), he seems to miss the difference between blatant exploitation a la Abercrombie and Fitch and the more artistic use of images reclaimed in the manner of a slur being adopted as a badge of pride.)

Things like the popularity of the Macintosh platform or the Sandia Laboratories report on marking radioactive waste dumps proves that the psychology of design is a very interesting subject that many people, both laity and trained designers, find quite interesting. This particular book, which nicely complements books such as Fast Food Nation or Trust Us We're Experts as well as standing on its own, does a very good job of tying that subject into the larger mesh of socially responsible business.