Go ahead: Try to figure out which one is the soap. Zoom in all you want!

Imagine yourself on a business trip, trying to take a shower in the morning. Bleary-eyed, the shower is steamy and foggy, and without your reading glasses you can’t see anything within arm’s length. And all you want to know is which one is the damn soap. Not the shampoo. Not the conditioner. Just soap.

I’m sure somewhere there’s a brand manager who loved how the minimalist bottle design fit the sassy brand standard. An interior designer who loved how the how the teal bottle perfectly matched the color of the fabric accents on her mood board. And a graphic designer who is overly satisfied with the subtlety of their lime-green-on-desaturated-teal color palette and the precisely adjusted font kerning and those stylish diagonal dashes through the O and the R.

But in the end, if you are a professional “creative” who can’t create a basic customer experience correctly (such as by not making your customers feel like geriatric idiots when they’re standing in the shower), you are not adding value for your customers or your projects. You’re just stroking your own personal creative ego.

Maybe this is why corporate design groups have taken such a nasty hit in 2023? Too much creative ego masquerading as “brand management” or “creative process” or “design thinking” and not enough basic customer sensibility? Maybe if more designers focused on innovation process flow and successfully derisking ideas and creating customer value instead of being vapid fashion tastemakers in their pursuit of becoming grande artistes, design would have a serious “seat at the table”?

Still can’t see which one is the soap? Don’t hit your head on the bottle.