…:) learn to live with your mistakes… i guess that is what you just wrote here ralf.

so blogging teaches me some designers’ thinking… pffft… good thing.

so what will happen? the fact that you can buy a cashmere sweater at aldi or at any discounter does not bring the prices down from the wonderful ones you can buy at dior (unfortunately..:)
what will happen is that people will get a clearer sense for quality and for what they realy want. they will also find that just having a logo means nothing - it’s how it is used, that makes the difference…
people will learn that.

honestly, when today people pass me their cards… often it makes me smile because you can see it has been done by a service like logoworks. ok it is a little annoying, because i more or less get the same sensation when seeing these *hot design furniture* that you can buy in the everadge warehouse proudly presented in a privat home i visit. … die welt war schoener ohne den glasfacettenschrank …und wurde aber deutlich besser durch ikea…
but also with discount design at ikea… that can be an incredibly great thing. and no house is harmed when you buy a couple of pieces… only as soon, as you start to buy all your stuff at ikea, you have kind of lost it…

same with logoworks - if they get a grip on their qualitiy problems - the obvious plagiarism - why should they not be the new logo-ikea?

i doubt that they will actually harm anybody. they will steer up the market a bit… but hey, look what the china challenge does to the us currently. america has discovered design management as secret weapon against the chinese manufacturing power.

would not think you consider that a bad thing, ralf….

Unfortunately, I will now be limiting comments due to recent rude and unprofessional behavior in addition to continued problems with pornographic websites and profanity being posted. I simply cannot properly police an open forum for discussion. But I welcome your comments by mail, email or fax.

Oh puhleeze! She clearly will only be involved in a dialogue that she entirely controls and can’t deal with the responses she got. To bring up the spam issue - and every blog owner deals with comment spam - as a way to justify silencing a powerful conversation - is just absolutely abhorrent.

I still think she’s worse than the LogoWorks people. They are interesting with Christopher Gee, with Laura Ries, with others to address this issue. Laura is shutting it down where she can’t keep utter control over it, and it’s too late - we all see her for what she is; for what she’s doing.

well commented ;-) This blog and the interaction with people like You, Steve, Arturo & Jens and their different viewpoints gives me so much back from what I try to give. And this also includes to withstand the pressure of conflicting views.

Keep commenting ;-)
Ralf.

I agree this has become a much more interesting story about how blogs work and the nature of this medium and the humility required to be part of networked conversations. . . and what it means to be “expert”.

I wonder if we will begin to see that “expertise” does not reside within one individual (only) but within the community holding the conversation?

Just thinking out loud. Keep creating, Mike

thanks for your comments!

Jens: yes, you’re mainly right with your first posting: In the end it’s the customer who decides. However (and this is how I understand Chris Gee’s initiative) it’s also a question to compete on a fair basis. You as a german fellow will definitively know where this “Geiz ist geil” mentality has lead us to. Once the customer isn’t aware of the “Value Chain” of a product or service any longer, price is the only transparent criterion which remains.

Steve and Arturo: Well said ;-) Interestingly this story (at least from my very marginal perspective) now turns away from the initial issue of LogoWorks business to net rules and I love to watch this. Not because I see the failure of an “expert” but rather because there’s much to learn from this case. Being able to admit that you’ve been wrong and correct this opinion is something which still seems hard to be accepted by the management/business side. Seeing it from a “Design Thinking” perspective it’s far easier to tackle: prototyping, testing, iterating …

Cheers, Ralf.

just read the open letter to wsj. - ok. now the whole thing is a slightly different story…

good to know.

if you know how to use it… you can get quite some results that are actually not too bad at all.

tried a similar service on behalf of a client and had it run parallel to the design studio that worked for us.

we were all - the design studio too - quite impressed.

there is nothing bad about a service like this. it’s the real world. the real market.

if you fear that logoworks is better than you, then you are simply not good enough.
and i can tell you - of course they have got their weak points. they were just not as outstandingly bad as we had all thought.

Now… Your screencapture is scary, why? because is simple incredible that the daughter of Al Ries, and a big time consultant & errr guru… has such a lack of understanding of design.

Agree with Steve´s comment she is not interested in replying, she never made a single attempt in confronting, just take the whole thing off, ironic I recently read a quote from Ries something like -the main problem with ad agencies is that they not use their own advice on them, soooo I guess not only advertising agencies has this problem ;)

“It’s more disappointing than disturbing” actually Steve I think both

But to delete the post without responding? I guess she hasn’t read The Cluetrain Manifesto, because, markets are conversations.

Given her supposed expertise, she’s behaving exactly in the opposite manner one would expect. It’s more disappointing than disturbing. Ah well.