“Marketers need to escape the ‘urgency trap,’” Flint McLaughlin writes:

They need to transcend the urgent with the important. And this cannot be achieved with yet another “how-to” series. We need to contemplate; indeed, we need to make contemplation part of our normal work cycle.

Marketing, he argues in his book, The Marketer as Philosopher, is as much philosophy as it is science. Scientific marketing experiments like A/B testing can give you data about your customer, but only reflection and thought can help you use that data to understand your customer. And understanding, not clever tactics, is the key to successful marketing.

This is a fascinating explanation of why you sometimes need to make dogleg turns on otherwise straight rural roads:

De Ruijter soon learned that these kinks and deviations were more than local design quirks. They are grid corrections, as he refers to them in a new photographic project: places where North American roads deviate from their otherwise logical grid lines in order to account for the curvature of the Earth.

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Neil Jenkins on designing Fastmail’s credit card form:

So, the design and labelling is focused on making it as clear as possible what data the form requires and where to find it. The other part to a successful form is making the data entry itself simple and error-free.

This level of thought and care is all too rare on the web.

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Design, like all aspects of marketing, should serve a business need. Too often, this doesn’t happen, Paul Adams writes:

Too many designers are designing to impress their peers rather than address real business problems. This has long been a problem in creative advertising (where creative work is often more aligned with winning awards than with primary client business objectives) and it’s becoming more prominent in product and interaction design.

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Ana Swanson:

In those early days, engineers were focused solely on efficiency — how to serve as many customers as possible without cutting into a company’s profits. It wasn’t until 50 years later that researchers began to realize that there were subtler factors influencing people’s experience of waiting in line, including ideas of fairness, mismanaged expectations, and the strange and inaccurate way that most people perceive both time and pain.

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