Lately I’ve been reading Paula Scher’s Make It Bigger. Although this book is almost five years old, I would highly recommend it for anyone with even a mild interest in advertising design. Scher is something of a design industry icon, a partner at Pentagram, and arguably one of the most influential figures of the last 20 years in the design community.  The average joe would recognize the CitiBank logo and the classic Boston “spaceship” album cover among her vast body of work.One of the questions raised in the book is What is the Value of Design? Scher notes the damage that is done by treating design as a freebie that is included with a media buy:

Copy and design are thrown in for free. And if they’re free, they’re worthless. There is nothing to defend or protect, no standard to bear, no paradigm to change, nothing to elevate. There is no extra value in something intelligent or well crafted. If the “creative” is thrown in for free, then all that has value is the media space itself. If you take that thought to its logical conclusion, what fills the media space is essentially irrelevant, as long as the client feels satisfied enough to continue purchasing it. That creates a completely amoral design climate.

Tags: brand image, design, Make It Bigger, Paula Scher, Pentagram, value of design