There's a new book that is worth your time. It's called "Glimmer" and is a new way of looking at design -- as a way of helping business, but also tackling some of the world's problems.
In the business part of the book, it also argues that "design is the new advertising" -- meaning marketing today has to be treated more like a cohesive design project than a series of one-off ads. Something StrawberryFrog has been aligned with since we started ten years ago.
Here's a link to a blog all about the book.
Glimmer is written by Warren Berger who is a respected scribe who's written about our industry for a long while and is famous for capturing cutting edge agencies and campaigns for magazines such as Business 2.0 and Communications Arts.
Glimmer spends time getting to know the designer Bruce Mau. Warren spent two years hanging around Mau and a dozen other of the world's top designers, studying how they think and solve problems. I spoke with Warren and asked him what he'd glimmered from Mau after all the time they spent together.
You have to read the book to find out the answer. His secret is probably just recognizing that advertising is not about graphics or how things look, etc. It's about "the human capacity to plan and produce desired outcomes." (Mau's definition of design). And Glimmer tries to break it all down to plain English -- what is design, how does it work, what can the rest of us learn from how designers think.

