Design is More than a Quick Pretty Fix

Design is visualized corporate strategy. Through creative consultation you will soon tap into a new field of business!

The economy has a new commission to award: creative consultation!

During volatile, insecure and ambiguous times, design gains new significance. Management consultancy has thus found the term designthinking. You, being designers, have always practiced this. It is about time you used it for your success.

This book is the first step towards a new way of understanding design and the self.

It paves your way to creative consultation, to more satisfaction and say.

As designers, your creative activity has always revolved around the customers of your clients. You are not primarily designing books, leaflets, websites and more, but the communication between brands and people. Only: Until now, you didn’t calculate this.

Instead, you discuss colors and favors- and you are informed about strategic positioning in passing during the briefing.

You want a seat at the table earlier? More responsibility? Also: more money?

Maren Martschenko advises medium-sized businesses in building and guiding their brands and companies. She includes design early into this- and that with great success. And she wonders why designers with their competences are not involved earlier and more intensely into processes. Processes, at the end of which always come visualization, thus design. She observes a design-dilemma in which a lack of appreciation and reimbursement play a major part. She is convinced that it doesn’t have to be like that.

Step by step she exploits a new territory for you in which- no matter how novel it may seem to you- you will feel at home surprisingly quickly: creative consultation.

Design is more than a quick pretty fix. Design is more than form and color. Design is created management consultancy! This is your expertise. And your opportunity. Grab it!

A note on the language

This is the first of the Schmidt-books in which we made every effort to formulate in gender-inclusive ways. Maren Martschenko and we have tried many variations. We often failed with capital “I”s and gender stars together.

We finally made a decision to, hopefully consistently, only rarely resort to the use of gerundive forms. Language is alive and language shapes our thinking. If we want to take equality seriously, it is important to illustrate this with the language we use. If this is still unusual, we need to get used to it. We achieve this through practice. We don’t know which form will catch on. Books are witnesses of their time. This one, no matter its content, will forever be the first one in which we at least tried to be consistent…

Other authors, male and female, will continue to express what they are about in their own words. This freedom is important to us.

Features and design

This book was created in close cooperation between Maren Martschenko as the author, the publishing house as sparring partner, and intense conversations with designers whose wishes and criticism, pain-points and experiences became the guiding lines of the writing process. And Claudia Siebenweiber, being the designer of this book, had been involved long before the actual commission for design. Maren Martschenko and her family live in a very environmentally mindful way. With awe and admiration, we listened to reports of regular Sunday negotiations about even more intentional handling of resources. It then became clear: the paper for this book will be recycled paper, the print will be climate neutral, and the CO2-compensation will take place where we live and work, where we help secure jobs by printing there: in Germany. Not because of nationalism, but because our responsibility begins right on our own doorstep. The cover material comes from France. Where good espresso belongs to the style of living, paper fibers were turned into the mocha FSC-certified cover material.

Design is More than a Quick Pretty Fix
The economy has a new commission for you: creative consultation
design: Claudia Siebenweiber
176 pages with 15 diagrams
printed climate-neutrally in three special colors on high-quality recyclingpaper
size 16.5 x 24 cm
thread-stitched hardcover with rounded back and two linen bookmarks (white and coral)
cover made from through-dyed mocha PopSet paper, bi-colored silkscreen print and refined with relief varnish
(simply more than a quick pretty fix!)