WC: Are you talking about advertising agencies?
EJ: As well. But increasingly more designers are preoccupied with these kinds of marketing concepts. And we find that a pity.
WC: For whom do you make your creations? Yourselves, or the public?
EJ: We don’t really see that division. In our opinion, target-audience-based approaches do not automatically result in more functional designs. Designs that have a sort of built-in resistance, a certain stubbornness, could very well be the ones that function the best in a society, in the way that a grain of sand can produce a pearl in an oyster.
WC: Nevertheless, I think that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. The heart of the matter is to create intelligent and self-confident designs focused on a target group, without being outsmarted by that target group.
02.
WC: I really like what advertising agencies such as Kessels/Kramer are doing. Interesting things are happening in all sorts of areas, both on the commercial side and in the cultural sector. But in contrast to the commercial side, the cultural sector allows the designer carte blanche, obviously.
EJ: In our view, the exact opposite is currently the case. The role of the designer at ad agencies is actually quite free of restraints. This type of agency is usually divided into two camps: the creative section and the business section. The agency extends a relatively large chunk of autonomy to the designers. They have complete freedom to launch ideas; and then, as if drawing from a ‘lucky dip’, the business side pulls out a few ideas, which they may or may not use. At a small design agency like ours, however, this division does not exist. The business and creative aspects coalesce completely. As designers, we have very short lines of communication with our clients. That is another reason why we never work for advertising agencies: in advertising there are excess filters between the designer and the client. A superfluous layer of middlemen, which results in a great deal of interference.
WC: What you are specifically referring to are the large, old-style advertising agencies. To me, the modern, smaller agencies seem to be organized differently.
EJ: In fact, it’s that old-style function of advertising that appeals to us much more: that the potential users of a product are informed from the point of the intrinsic characteristics of that product. Advertising now is heavily focused on projecting an image onto a product from outside the product itself. We really dislike that side of advertising.
WC: That is the old discussion that I have encountered a great many times. As a designer you want to be informative, yet in advertising they think far more in terms of atmosphere and mood. Take my experiences with Nutricia, for example, where I designed packaging and advertisements a long time ago. I was taken on a guided tour of the factory where evaporated coffee-milk was produced and was immediately fascinated by the hygienic working methods and the technology that was used: the gigantic stainless-steel kettles for heating milk to various temperatures. I wanted to show that process in my advertisements. But they would have no such thing! I was told that they might as well just shut down the factory if I did that. They wanted ads showing people enjoying coffee at special moments and ads about the rich colour that their product imparted to coffee. And, there is no changing that way of thinking. So perhaps it is true that designers ought not to get involved with that. It’s probably better to leave those activities to others.