About 5 years ago, I spoke at the HOW Design Conference in Orlando on the topic of "Good Examples of Bad Design." It was a gratifying experience to be speaking at the same conference that in it's history featured such luminaries as Glaser, Carson and Mok, and from the reaction of the crowd, my endless chattering onstage about lousy design clocking in at somewhere around 50 minutes, was well-received. So, apparently I'm an "expert" at sniffing this kind of stuff out.

I occasionally indulge in energy drinks -- usually as a nectareous reward for my jaunty morning runs around Prospect Park in Brooklyn -- and my racing heart and instant case of the jitters on the subway is hardly a pleasing after-effect of my eager slurpage of this caffeinated nectar of the hyperactive gods. I passionately search for alternatives to Red Bull because if they still can't manage to pull their package branding together with their cartoonish television ads, I refuse to support them. It's my "creative civic duty", or so I've convinced myself anyway...

This morning, as I was browsing the available energy gulps behind the frosty glass at the bodega -- skimming past several fiendish looking, yet interestingly designed cans of mighty "Crunk Energy Drink" -- my eye-googlers spied one of the most undesirable energy drink can designs I've seen.

This performance potion, disguised to be what resembles a health elixir and a death tonic at the same time, intrigued me enough to buy it simply so I could have a rant.

Now, why some nice tea company would try to make their performance drink look like capital punishment in a can by featuring the word "Caution" in the most visible section above the logo is a shock -- but I'm sure that there were several marketing geniuses who fought the owners of Arizona drinks -- eventually getting their way, in a vicious battle to preserve "creative irony."

You can decree that it worked -- that it intrigued and seduced me to purchase it -- but I'd say the reasons for my cash acquisition hinged somewhere between terror, amusement and simply doing my civic duty to keep a drink, openly disguised as a poison, out of the hands of some maniac high school kid looking for a morning rush. The hearty fluid inside the "Caution Can" met its untimely demise by way of the sewer drain on the corner of Fulton and Clinton Ave -- to likely mutate and fuel a generation of super rats to wreak unholy havoc on the city sometime before the shopping season is mercifully over and the real nasty snow begins to fall -- slathering Brooklyn with a coat of fresh slush and preventing me from taking my morning park runs until the global warming-induced thaw, sometime in July.

Dave Fletcher is a Founder and Creative Director of theMechanism, a maxi-media firm in New York City and London. He finished two cans of blissful Crunk Energy Drink in preparation for this rant and has been repeatedly clutching at his heart like Fred Sanford since the second paragraph.

I read a book published by Metropolis Magazine called Design is"¦. It features a series of essays related to graphics, architecture, writing, criticism and print, and tries to get to the bottom of what makes design such a compelling force. It prompted an internal desire to get to the bottom; the minutia; the "crux" if you will -- of what design is -- all in a single word if possible.

If there is one thing that is present in the graphic design field, it's the understanding that design is about a decision. A decision made by a professional "creative-type", which either results in good design (positive audience reaction and good will transacted around and through the idea) or bad design (a forgotten idea, concept or product launch). It is the one certainty in all of the subjectiveness related to design criticism, admiration and worship.

Design is a decision. A single opportunity for a creative mind to resolve a problem (reach a decision) and produce results which apply to the problem at hand. Yet, this decision is based on external factors such as a client's motive, the climate in the industry (both graphic and industry specific), and finally, the internal motives of the designer. Artistic expression, on the other hand, is a largely internally focused decision, solving a problem posed by the artist themselves.

There is an ongoing debate (mainly propagated by non-designers) that the graphic design profession is not about interjecting one's personality into a creative endeavor; that this approach undermines the final solution, taints the profession and ultimately, the worlds' view on the profession into thinking that graphic design is purely driven by the quest for fame within the industry.

Well, part of this is true.

To examine the upward mobility and acceptance of "superstars" such as David Carson, Carlos Segura, Stefan Sagmeister and Matt Owens in their respective categories of graphic design, you can say that it was their specific personal approaches that gained an initial audience. It was a style that enticed the "gravy" projects: music, movies, and/or television to approach them for a specific style. However, from the historical perspective, it is obvious that the only style that should be held on to in graphic design is an intelligence of decision and the ability to convey the message that will add success to a client's endeavor.

Personal style is something, that over time, becomes outdated. That is the only certainty in the profession.

If you examine MTV, a network that has defined and brainwashed youth and pop-culture style since it's inception, you notice that it changes it's logo to suit it's style at the moment. The same concept should also be applied to your business. If you know that you have outdated uniforms, then maybe it's time to find a custom uniform supplier.

Getting back to the idea that design is a decision...

If you look at anything organic or inorganic in our universe, there are decisions that have been made either by evolution, a "higher power", if you believe in it, or the hand of man. These individual decisions effect us in certain ways, and either it is embraced as a good idea and flourishes or it is forgotten. Good design relates to creative output that transcends a good decision. A bad decision, whether it be a bad typographic, interface, photographic, manufacturing or paper choice, will result in a flaw to the audience it intends to influence. Flawed design is not remembered, and injures or confuses people. The decision is what results in turmoil or positivity. If design is a decision in its purest sense, inversely is every decision a design? If you agree that design results in an experience whether tactile, visual, auditory, olfactory or through taste, then we are all designers in a very basic sense. There is the professional side of this idea -- that we must have separation between the "real" designers and the "non" designers, but if you look closely at the motives of many designers, it is far removed from decision-oriented thinkers and closer to those who think that this profession is a way to push a personal objective.

Design is not politics, yet is in many respects, a very political organization, depending on your chosen camp. Good Design is a good decision, and anyone is entitled to a good decision. That is why the graphic design Muse may visit a myriad of people, resulting in a wide variety of solutions, some embraced by groups of people (e.g. viral marketing: the use of guerilla tactics to ultimately, and unintentionally reach a huge audience).

It is only, however, a talented designer that can train themselves to repeatedly make good decisions which result in myriad client success stories.

Dave Fletcher is a Founder and Creative Director of theMechanism, a maxi-media firm in New York City and London. He hasn't read Design is... for several years and found this unfinished essay loose on his hard drive while cleaning up some space. With this understanding, he realized that Design is not only "Decision", but it is also understanding that Design can also benefit from finding stuff that you did in the past and repurposing it for the present.

I'm going to bemoan a well-known, yet half-witted deception in our glamor profession. It's always fished out of some ol' art directors "bag o' tricks" when their feeble minds have really lost touch with today's changing audience. The trick -- which I reckon you guessed from the title -- is the placement of sunglasses on a tired or new brand in order to make it seem (to regurgitate the antiquated slang slung around creative meetings that produce this drivel) "hipster" and "with it". Recently, I've witnessed sunglasses added to my beloved Pepperidge Farm Goldfish^®, who's crack advertising group has ridiculously renamed Finny on the "Xplosive Pizza" flavor (note: changing "ex" to "x" for added "zip" is another mark of idiocy in the field, but we'll bait n' tackle that another time). It's clear that sunglasses are being used as pawns in audacious attempts to revive old weathered brands -- from The Muppets, adding a little "edge" to their otherwise dismal puppet lives, to giving a little "kick" to Fruity Pebbles by adding shaded eye-googler covers to aged toons Fred and Barney, turning them into a couple of "cool cats", right? Wrong!

In this age of obviously poor judgement from rock stars and politicians alike, do we creatives really have to follow suit with this hocus pocus? Isn't there anything else that can be used to revive a tired brand or enliven a new one? Every time you see a Ray-Ban donning cheetah hocking cheese snacks at the local grocery store, I advise you to punch it squarely in the snout on principle alone. How far from the tree of greatness has the mighty graphic designer fallen to continually unleash this tired cliche on a clearly "suspecting" audience?

What is it that makes sunglasses look cool? It wasn't Corey Hart. According to Wikipedia, the global source for highly accurate (suspect) and 99.999% truthful (mis)information, sunglasses have "been associated with celebrities and film actors primarily due to the desire to mask identity, but in part due to the lighting involved in production being typically stronger than natural light and uncomfortable to the naked eye."

So, then one must assume, what insolent designers are attempting to accomplish by adding sunglasses to cartoon rodents, rabbits and bears, is to ultimately brainwash unsuspecting children into thinking that these beasts are celebrities? I've got a news-flash for you -- kids aren't stupid anymore, and aren't buying that these bloodthirsty creatures are celebrities. It didn't work in the long run for "Salisbury's Camel", and it's not working for anyone else. Mike Salisbury either created or abused the stupidest cliche in our biz by not only creating a phallic-faced, smiling creature that kids would be attracted to like rats to a pipe(r) -- but to add insult to injury, he also slapped sunglasses on it! That statement alone demands that he be ousted from any Art Director's Club immediately with surfboard and smokes firmly in hand.

I've also been privy to this nonsense first-hand. Back in 1991, as an intern for a long defunct advertising agency in Buffalo, New York, I witnessed a rotund (and usually hung over), art director adding sunglasses to the mascot of a local amusement park for a series of billboards welcoming 2 months of summer to the region before our 10 months of miserable Arctic temperatures that could only be compared to the chill of being dropped at at the midpoint between earth and the moon in a wet bathing suit. Thankfully, his aesthetic rubbed me the wrong way -- not only because he was applying sunglasses to the mascot, but because the mascot for the amusement park was indeed, a smirking sun!

If you're a designer, I implore that before you apply a pair of sunglasses to your cute little snail mascot you've whipped up for your next project, rationalize that the problem with the design might not be the fact that you're appealing to an audience by anthropomorphizing a slimy garden pest in protective eyewear -- it's possible that you've begun to run out of ideas. With God as my witness, last Tuesday I saw sunglasses on Barney^® the dinosaur...

It's like slathering Rite-Guard^® on a dead skunk.

Dave Fletcher is a Founder and Creative Director of theMechanism, a maxi-media firm in New York City and London. While he's been known to wear a pair of orange-tinted sunglasses to block out the rays of Mr. Sun, he insists that he is neither a tired brand or anthropomorphized bird or beer can, so it's ok.