Design without story is dead

The further I get in design the more I understand that design is really nothing without meaning and purpose, it's the 'why' behind the design. You could call it 'the story behind the design.' Without this, design is just something pretty to look at, it has no depth or meaning. Can you imagine the world as being just something pretty to look at? How shallow it would be! Everything in creation has design but it also has purpose, and it's part of a larger, overarching story. Design is not just making something look good (I'm talking about graphic design on the printed or digital page), it either has to have meaning or purpose in itself or serve the meaning or purpose in someway (like a well designed table serves the purpose of communicating a set of numbers).

I used to work for an organization where brochures and websites were designed like there was no tomorrow. We made a brochure for this and a brochure for that and nothing really tied any of it together and it all just became really confusing for the public who were trying to understand what it was we were doing. The moment we tried to create a story for everything to fit in to, it was never really understood by upper management. "But the story will be something to draw people into and they'll find themselves in it..." we would say. Still, it was never understood and developed. It's when people can find themselves in a story that things start to make sense. That's why we create vision, mission and values; it's the what, when and how of where we're going and how we're going to get there. If other people can buy in to that story then that is a powerful story, and once you have a story it's almost easier to design for that than design for an empty nothing.

I recently worked a summer job with Payless Shoes and was fortunate enough as part of the internship to be exposed to many different facets of the Marketing department. This not only enabled me to form an overview of how design functions there but also gave me a bigger context for how design is either production related or it's creative in building brands and concepts from consumer insights and trend following. Really, their creative side is at this level, where they build stories and concepts from those stories. Without the information from research there really is no story created and with no story, there is no design and no sale. They have to create stories. They have to get into the mind of the consumer and find out what they want, how they think, even how they speak and this information helps create a story and a concept that will help sell the shoe. Even when the ad has gone into the magazine they do further quantitative research to find out if the story is working!