“Do You Matter? How great design will make people love your company” is a title that certainly isn’t afraid to demand your attention. All of the book’s details including the bright orange cover, monster san-serif titles, and obsessive grid-adherence just scream “I’ve been overdesigned to look simple!” Combined with the existentially accusatory title, it certainly succeeds in demanding audience participation, but it’s a book, not a graphic design experiment, and for it to matter to the audience, it needs to keep the reader’s attention too. So what’s it all about?
Robert Brunner, an industrial designer for some of Apple’s most iconic products, and Stewart Emery, author of Success Built to Last, pose a deceptively simple question: Do you (as a company) matter (to your customers)? Perhaps a more intuitive phrasing of their interrogative might be, “If you were gone tomorrow, would your customers miss you?” That’s nothing new in business circles. It’s just a retelling of product differentiation, a mainstay of marketing and competitive landscape analysis. The added value here is in the subtitle: “How great design will make people love your company,” and Brunner and Emery are here to explain the role design can play in the competitive arena. Well worth the read, for those in the design, marketing and business circles.
