We Are All Designers

We are all designers. I don't mean everyone here at Better Proposals. I mean everyone in business.  The guy that writes the marketing blog, the lady that designs an 'Out of order' sign for the communal fridge and the Managing Director who's designed his keynote presentation. Some of these design decisions matter more than others but it's important to realise that every tiny component of your business is being judged.  I was recently helping out a lady who had signed up to Better Proposals. She couldn't get her cover looking right and wanted my help. When I logged into her account, I couldn't quite believe she'd done such a terrible job. How could she possibly think that looked good. Then it dawned on me

It wasn't her fault it looked shit. It was mine. 

We had designed a product that allowed her to make bad design decisions. Why did we allow her to pick an off-white colour knowing there was going to be white text on top of it, making it invisible.  Why didn't we let her know that she'd removed her logo and now had no logo there at all. These weren't design mistakes on her part. They were bad product decisions on ours. I don't know that its possible to make a product that can't look bad but I'm certainly choosing this as the goal.  I don't ever want to see anyone producing anything with our product that doesn't look outstanding. Every proposal sent should look like it's been designed by a world-class designer. This isn't a weekend job, or something you put on the road-map.  This is something that needs to be build into the fabric of the company.  We'll work on it ;-)