The trained eye

When Steve Jobs asked him for the NeXT logo, Paul Rand replied that he would not present options, one solution, take it or leave it. Jobs paid a hundred thousand dollars and took it. Rand, the man behind IBM, ABC and UPS, did not sell drawings, he sold a way of seeing, the ability to look at a problem and recognise the solution that was already there, invisible to everyone else.

This is the part of the craft that does not show. In front of a poster, a home page, a feed, a trained eye catches in three seconds what an ordinary eye will never see, the wrong hierarchy, the colour that clashes with the message, the button nobody will find, the logo suffocating because nobody defended the space around it. It is not taste, it is diagnosis.

Now that anyone can produce an image with a sentence, this ability has become more precious, not less, because the problem is no longer making, it is seeing what is wrong and knowing why.

Companies are not looking for the hand, they are looking for the eye, and the eye cannot be downloaded. I wonder whether those who look at a campaign with me see the same campaign I see.