Welcome to Direct Design

4mph — Peter Jackson talks about developing his new business idea with Direct Design:

"I met Gerry Diebel in November 2006.

What become 4mph had been in my head for almost 10 years and had actually been ‘on the ground’ – that’s to say I had actually been delivering it - for about two. In short, I knew my product. I had also been talking to some other people about brand and brand strategy. So I also knew where my product fitted in my own business and in the marketplace.

What I needed – I thought – was a logo.

Our first meeting put that fallacy to bed pretty quickly. “The graphics are easy,” Gerry told me. Great, I thought to myself, we should be done and dusted pretty quickly … “but it’s sharpening up what you want to say about the product that’s more tricky.” I so wanted the easy bit, but it was Gerry’s calmness, assurance, and impressive track record that persuaded me that this was something worth exploring. And, of course, I do value exploration. So started a process which I came to think of as coaching – and I should recognise it when I see it – as much as design. Maybe they’re the same thing.

When I meet clients for the first time they often have a clear idea of what they want solved. It’s not my job to decide whether that’s right or not, but it is my job to ask questions so that if there’s something else behind it, it has an opportunity to come out. And it often does. And so the tables were turned. As Gerry asked me about the product, its scope, its limitations, its market, its purchasers, its USP, its values, its motivations, new ideas came into my mind; different perspectives; better ways of saying what I wanted to say.

The main driver was to really understand what it was I was trying to communicate. We did a ‘walk’ together where Gerry became a ‘client’ for the day, and used that to get a really good idea of what the concept meant. Emails were exchanged; words, stories, and ideas at first, then graphics, photos, and layouts. Always questioning what was being said and whether it got to the heart of what I wanted and needed to communicate to my target audience.

The thing that most impressed me about this process was that I felt I was making more of a creative contribution than I would have imagined I had to give. In turns, Gerry was enabling my own creativity, introducing new possibilities, turning those possibilities into concrete designs at the same time as holding me to account on the need to communicate clearly to the market.

One of the key concepts we returned to again and again was that the experience of viewing the website should in some way mirror the product it is presenting. It’s not easy to make six web pages feel like a two-day walk. It’s not that easy to imagine how you would start to go about it. But that’s why you use someone who understands the design process. The result to my mind is elegant, imaginative and effective. It almost feels like part of the product itself and, even, part of me."

Take a walk over to the 4mph website here.