The changing face of design communication

By Adrian Kimpton
www.sableandhawkes.co.uk
@AdrianKimpton

For the last few hundred years we have been mass producing products and services, campaigns and careers. In the new world we are increasingly on our own. We can choose what we want to do, what to believe, what to think, for ourselves. Now is the era of mass individualism. Billions of people with millions of choices, and with the freedom, technology and means to make them.

And perhaps the most important consequence of this is the speed of information transfer. Today, more people, can know more things, more quickly than ever before. For your customers it means they can shop around, haggle, barter and purchase in seconds. And this ever-expanding access to accurate real-time information means that the traditional structures of business and communication are increasingly undermined.

As technology continues to embed itself in our lives, audiences will continue to accept things as they are, stop noticing how things are being delivered to them and concentrate much more on what is being delivered, the content. And the net result of all this change will be that the human face of an organisation will become much much more important. 

That is why design, marketing and communication are becoming the foremost professional skills of the future. Not the old school mass advertising PR style of marketing communications but a service with all the skills needed to build instant rapport and lasting empathy with customers and markets. 

And when our options multiply certain attributes take on greater importance, like intelligence, clarity, simplicity and impact. Understanding will become everything, intention nothing. First impressions will become more important than ever because people won’t have the need or time to stop, consider and get to know you.

And on the flip side, if you do manage to attract attention then your consumers now have the facility to find out all they need to know about you without even having to talk to you. So having that clarity of message ready and accessible will be critical to keep them interested, because if what your saying isn’t clear or consistent with what brought them to you, then google will present them with a myriad of alternatives in seconds. 

That is why we are here, that is what we do. 

At our heart we are a modern design communication agency, we are trained to understand how people think, to understand quickly the benefits of functionality and aesthetics, what something is, what it does and why that is good. And then how best to communicate that in the most compelling and receptive way. 

We are Sable&Hawkes.