Gavin Baker

I have this quote (picture above) by Bruce Nussbaum on my wall. I put it up about a year and a half ago and I still believe it’s true. This isn’t a post on a radical new idea, but rather recalling it as a reminder. Here’s the quote:

Social media is upending relationships between customers and corporations, brand owners and brand creators, consumers and producers, centralized authority and anarchistic periphery and-pay attention here-designers and their audiences. People want to design their own experiences, or at least have a big voice in it. With Web 2.0 technology and blogs, they get that voice. People are increasingly designing their own shoes and clothes, their own screen pages, their own interfaces, their own homes. And when they’re not, they want designers and managers to really understand what they have to say. Nike is changing the way it designs and manufactures because of social networking. So are dozens of other companies. Yes, we will always have our brilliant geniuses who intuit their audiences and create wonderful experiences for them. Ive and Jobs at Apple. Bang & Olufsen and its incredible designers and designs. But even Apple is getting hit very hard on the sustainability issue because it isn’t listening to its social networks. Brands have ideologies. They stand for things. People believe in those things. When the culture of Apples’ customers changes, as it is happening today, it has to move with it. You, as designers, can’t just do ethnology anymore. You have to join with those you’re observing to be in their culture and create with them.

The sections I’ve highlighted above and will discuss below are:

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I was down in the ATL aka hot-lanta aka the dirty south early last week and got the chance to connect with they guys at Matchstic, which is a branding identity house. They’ve done some great work for some friends and they sure know how to throw down.

I was fortunate enough to get a quick tour of their house and meet the crew,  (Half of them are from Knoxville) as well as spend some time with one of the founders of Matchstic, Craig Johnson. We took about 45 minutes to share our projects, our goals and backgrounds. As we talked, it became evident that we seemed to share a lot of the same philosophy regarding brand strategy, creativity, business goals and how that final package should look.  It’s awesome to see someone like Craig and his team doing such excellent work and having a lot of fun in process.

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