Designing for your personality type.

I have just completed David Keirsey’s personality test and found out that I am an ENFP or a champion Idealist, as less than 1% of the population I feel quite special! It describes me as an unrelenting idealist who looks for the good in all and who is most comfortable dealing in abstract concepts. It also says that I have "outstanding intuitive powers and can tell what is going on inside of others, reading hidden emotions and giving special significance to words or actions" all qualities that help me with design. It also says I am... "Fiercely individualistic, Champions strive toward a kind of personal authenticity" Although this too has helped me with my career it has also lead me to become disillusioned about design projects in the past.

This has occured most frequently whilst working with large global manufacturers (although some smaller companies too). The brand and marketing managers involved are often operating in a hostile atmosphere where stress and fear seem to reign supreme. They are fraught in their job, and fairly often have not been enpowered to make even small decisions so exasperating their insecurity. This atmosphere makes it impossible to be authentic because they have little idea of what they are being true to.

These situations often lead to poor quality of brief and in turn unispiring, mostly ineffective designs. There is also a huge lack of trust. Brand managers are not allowed to take ownership of their projects and are acting as a mouthpiece to distinctly absent management who in turn are responding to the needs of their shareholders. The disillusionment on my part arose from a feeling that I was not trusted as the expert in design that I was being paid to be! Trust is the key word here, an atmosphere of fear and mistrust is in turn naturally passed onto the design company trying against all odds to make some kind of sense of a confused brief.

As well as studying my own personality type description I spent time looking at the others. Covering the full spectrum of society these are the people that my designs have to communicate to. There are four distinctly different personality types with more specific descriptions within those four. The majority of the popualtion makes up two of these types, but even so there are obviously differences within them. People are complex creatures also and although these types of personality profiles are insightful, they are not all encompassing. There are those that cross types and when it comes to the products we buy it doesn't just depend on our guiding values but also on our current whim. With this in mind it seems difficult to try and create a design that appeals to different people. I wonder why then, so many of the brands that I have worked on try so desparately to be all things to all people. The logic is, sell to more people and you make more money. These brands often appear confused, projecting mixed messages. Even worse they are the bland brands, those that look like everything else. They often fall into price wars and 'me too' new product development. If they were at a party you might think they were either trying too hard or even worse you wouldn't realise they were there at all.

In contrast those brands that have metaphorically taken the personality test and so have insight into what they are about have a strong sense of self. They are the easiest and most inspiring to work on for me and the clients involved.