Product Design & Ad Campaigns

With Blak 2 launching this month, I thought this would be a great time to write a little something about the similarities between product design and advertising. Much like creating a campaign, product design requires many of the same fundamentals, in particular consistency. In the case of the new Blak2 line, that was materials, the ebony, mincarta, gray pearl, leather wrap, and stainless steel were my brand guide, and the strategy was to create modern elegant designs that exuded an upscale image that were different from the competition.

Over the month I spent designing the line, there must have been at least 40 different designs, which were the equivalent of rough campaign comps. Just like a great ad campaign, once you have your concept nailed down, your going to look at a variety of executions for it. What's the strongest, which one really speaks to the target audience, and which ones can we produce on budget! If you can't execute a great idea, it not a great idea. This is where product design gets far closer to the broadcast or digital workflows than that of print. As with broadcast or digital comps, there isn't much in the way of a tangible comp, sure there are scripts, storyboards, sounds, and a passionate pitch as to why this is the direction to go, but it's nowhere close to a completed finished product, whether its a cue or commercial.

Off to prototyping, this is as close to casting and pre-production as you can get without "the talent". It costs money, you're never happy with everything you see, and there is still more work to be done. The script originally called for this shot, but that's going to require a crane and we're going to need to shut down a street for 6 hours, or in this case we would have to retool the machinery completely to use this inlay material here. There are always sacrifices and compromises when it comes down to the bottom line and executability; storyboards are reworked, scripts are tweaked and so on. The nice thing about prototyping, is you can re-cast the campaign so to speak, which in comparison is not nearly the nightmare of having to re-shoot something, or re-cast for that matter.

Finally off to the editing booth. Here you can tweak and massage things in an effort to create the best product, but with product design its a different story. When manufacturing is a go, no more changes can be made, well not without significant downtime, and you certainly can't re-cut it with a day in an editing suite.

In the end they really are quite similar though, research is research, competition is competition, and everyone wants their creative product to be the best it can be, and if they don't, they should.