I have always loved glass packaging. Whether it be the nostalgic glass Coke bottles I remember buying at the corner store as a kid, or some of the supremely creative bottles at the local liquor store, I reckon I’ll always be subject to the glass bias.

Solid yet fragile, simple yet versatile, and clean yet primitively natural – the feel of glass gives an instant impression of quality.

When a prospect approaches me outright with the statement, “We’re looking for the lowest bidder”, I’m tempted to just let them carry along on their merry way. They’ll find their bargain, because with every other twelve year old hanging out their digital shingle, added to the increasing encroachment of slave-labour rates from developing nations, unqualified people calling themselves designers are a dime a dozen these days.

However, before bidding a polite but firm “goodbye and good luck”, I do try to impart a little knowledge and foresight. Because in the end, these people actually end up paying more for a vastly inferior product – and that’s not good for anyone.

Companies hire corporate designers to craft solutions that clearly and memorably communicate their brand’s message, directly to their market. They understand that without a full comprehension of consumer psychology and the user experience (UX), they may as well be chucking paint into a corner.

Effective strategic design is somewhat like a composition written for a symphony orchestra, in that it requires several instruments working symbiotically in order to achieve the desired result.

One of the biggest mistakes made by business owners and inexperienced designers is to attempt to build a brand in a vacuum. It may seem a bit odd to hear this coming from a designer, but to focus on visuals alone is foolish.

Unfortunately, the design field is filled with people who don’t know what design for business really is – and they’re selling this lack of context to business owners taken in by a flashy (but ultimately meaningless) portfolio.

Being mindful of your actions is not simply good advice for living… in business, it is a requirement.

A few days ago, my incoming Twitter feed took on a fiery tone. Anger spewed forth with abandon from one of my fellow business owner contacts. He was incensed, having discovered that a particular spammer had gone the extra mile to target his company’s clients as a group.

Once in a while, I get the feeling that everything’s been done. I become bored with what’s being toted as the latest and greatest – and these days, the buzzword is green.

My mother was a carpenter and a forest ranger… also an intellectual, a bit of a flower child, and an intensely caring individual. So as you might imagine, I was raised with a certain amount of appreciation and respect for the natural world. When it became apparent that more people in my own demographic seemed to be acknowledging and embracing concepts like social responsibility and environmental awareness, I was thrilled. I thought, finally – the middle class is starting to open their eyes.

These days, everyone is trying to figure out how to connect with other people. It used to be simply, you just placed some ads in whatever newspaper that was most suited to your product, but now that world is becoming ever more irrelevant. So how do you connect with other people today? And more importantly, how do you do it tomorrow?

In this article, we are going to take a little tour through the history of information – or more specifically where to focus efforts if you want get in touch with other people. It is really exciting time, because we are currently in the middle of the most drastic change since the invention of the newspaper.

The best short term projections for the global economy are sobering, at best. The year 2008 left Canada with record-breaking rates of job loss, the likes of which have not been seen since the 1991 recession.

The story is the same with our American and British comrades. And with the Canadian federal government in a state of (incredibly expensive) upheaval, nobody’s quite sure where it’s all going to lead us.

The corporate design field is somewhat unique. It is a field on which nearly every successful business in the Western world depends, yet is simultaneously one about which very few people are actually educated.

The issues are alarming, to say the least.

On the one hand, we have the dime-store design trend chipping away at the integrity of the industry, and the amateurs passing themselves off in the marketplace as legitimate professionals, who happen to think that $100 is a fine price to charge for a thoughtless, conceptually barren logo, assembled from clip-art on stolen software. This is all exacerbated by the actual professionals who succumb to pressures to lower what was a fair market price, in order to compete with contenders whose qualifications, process, and quality of work are not nearly in the same league.

I’ve always been somewhat of a realist. So naturally, I had to take a bit of a step back when I happened upon my Chinese birth-year “animal” traits.

The most creative sign in the Chinese zodiac, those born in the Year of the Sheep are artistic, sensitive, sweet and charming. Shy by nature, these people are well-mannered, but will occasionally say the wrong thing at the wrong time. Still, with their charm and innocence they never lack for protective friends and admirers. Once they find work that makes use of their considerable talents, they are passionate about what they do. Typically surrounded by beautiful things, they have an ardent love of creature comforts and are almost always elegantly dressed. Conversely, they have an innate love of nature and the outdoors. In business, Sheep enjoy great success in creative professions, as artists, actors, or designers.