Great design has never been so important, says Burson's Lucy Doolan

Design often takes a backseat to messaging, but its importance has never been greater, says Lucy Doolan, creative director at Burson.

When I started in PR, I was overwhelmed by words. Loads of them. 

Every pitch deck I saw was filled with reams of text, and it was like wading through a dictionary. With a background in design, my world was pictures — articulating an emotion or an idea in an image or design system, so it took me a while to adjust.

That was over seven years ago, and today PR (and my career) looks very different.

With new channels, formats, media and voices – earned creativity is broad and untethered. It has seamlessly stepped into social feeds and entered the vernacular of traditional advertising agencies. The funnel has been obliterated and excitingly the possibilities for communications feel endless.

With that, I believe that the power and importance of design have never been greater. It’s a facet of communication that hits you in the gut quicker than reading a headline and transcends borders, boundaries and languages.

Design is a shortcut to authentically speak to subcultures, disrupt the status quo, start a conversation and earn attention in its own right. It gives us a symbol to stand behind (or up to) and crafts the expression of an idea to truly make it land. Make your audience feel.

So what is great design?

It’s making choices in the expression of an idea with intention and sophistication. It’s often emotionally driven and solves the bigger problem in the brief in an aesthetic way. It is not about making things look pretty. It is a series of smart decisions that cuts through the droves of visual ‘sameness’ and makes your eyeballs pop wide open.

Too often, design is an afterthought. The final stage of the process that brings in brand typefaces and colours or ‘pretties up’ a page. What if we thought about it as an integral part of the idea, the communication? Bringing smart design-thinking into the room when we’re coming up with earned ideas in the first place?

You might end up with campaigns like Trash Isles – which created the most incredible identity for the ‘island of trash’ in the North Pacific, including its own flag, passports, stamps and currency. The level of craft in the execution was standout. And the intricate detail of these assets amplified their shareability.

Design Bridge & Partners’ Forest Carbon identity gave nature a voice as they worked with bioacoustics researchers to capture the sounds of Southeast Asia’s endangered ecosystems — transforming them into incredible, unique visual patterns using custom-built software and making us see and feel nature in a totally new way.

And, despite the Cannes controversy, Plastic blood, where OKA Biotech visualised microplastics in the most shocking, wonderfully absurd exhibition, was promoted with visceral 3D logos and provocative typographic statements on blood-plastic-extruded packaging. You couldn’t ignore it, and the whole thing was perfectly grotesque.

If you take the design aspect out of any of these campaigns, they fall flat. They’re less likely to make noise, resonate, surprise, shock or delight, and they all use design as a discipline to earn attention. I’m advocating for more of that in PR.