In the coming months this website is undertaking significant change, which in effect reflects much of the changes required by this studio and practicing designers to define new meaning in the future.

One of our many activities has included bringing our design product to the public. Our activities started in 2004 when we dreamed up Australia’s first boot market for design – The Ready Made Market (which we named) with the National Design Centre, it was then renamed The Melbourne Design Market. We have taken this idea further by now taking our products to the internet, via global community shopping cart site for musicians, artists and fashions designers – bigcartell.com

Visit our shop, tell your friends, suggest new products here

Another initiative is to use existing internet media channels to communicate ongoing studio initiatives and activities. We have brought together existing channels such as Twitter, Linked In and a Facebook fan page. We will be using less of this website to document our daily chatter, and continue to create more resolved and lasting content from the findings and feedback uncovered in our work and day-to-day experiences.

All of the pages on this website are linked to FaceBook. If you like a post, hit the “FB like” button at the end of the post, which with then communicate your ideas and feedback back to FaceBook.

– Facebook members can become a fan of Studio Pip and Co Forever here
– Twitter members can follow the Studio Pip and Co here

Why? Some open thoughts…

The concept of design is enjoying unprecedented community interest. Our televisions are spewing from its bowels entertainment that charges people to go forth and design. Across the world hundreds of design schools are being created which in turn are churning thousands of design students inspired by a wealth of design reference. There are also brigades of international design mentors, mainly from the UK and the US, who crisscross the world presenting their version of design at conferences, design love ins, or out performing each other on Ted TV. To top off design TV, the design student glut, design celebrity, there is also new inexpensive hardware and software technology, marking what was once impossible and specialised, quick to learn with infinite possibility. In 2010 everyone can be a designer, backed by the will and technology, a body work of inexpensive and convincing communication awaits.

The net result is that in twenty short years, the highly specialised profession of graphic communication and design seems to have lost it’s specialised quality. At the design sector’s extremes, there are a handful of established studios commanding respectful design fees and profits, and at the other, there thousands of creative service providers scrapping for awareness and client share. In market flooded with so many options, clients are also prepared to accept a lesser quality of work to cut costs, as long as it look good – even if the look compromises the brand’s value

Longevity and loyalty in design services are off the agenda, in a market flooded with choice because clients can :

– afford to jump from studio to studio without effecting the quality their marketing, in the short term
– the quality of the design work is high, the design fees are inconsistent,
– there are many new players in digital and media offering new and exotic products
– there are an abundance of studio’s willing to undercut each other and keen to work with jumpy clients

Designer seem to be in a strange uncertain place. In our supply and demand world a good carpenter, plumber and lawyer are rare and therefore enjoy enough demand for their work to create certainty. In comparison a good designer in market of many designers, finds they are competing aggressively to win a good reputation, yet even at this end, there is no guarantee of having enough certainty to sustain a stable career.

To change this situation designers need to reinvent themselves, to develop new qualities, skills and processes an define new roles, purpose and desire that a skilled computer operator, a design aware audience or client can not replicate. In a way, designers have to reconnect with the alchemy which makes creative thinkers unique, move beyond the “designer” cliche which seems to saturate mainstream past time and interest.

Maybe it is time to call on some age old adages – of finding a new balance, to be less of a conformist and more of a maverick, a wonderkind, or even find one’s zeitgeist.

What did George Bernard Shaw say again? “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends upon the unreasonable man.”

If you have ideas or feedback, your comments are welcome here, on FaceBook, or on Twitter

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