The Essence of Giving Power to good Designers who are Inspired, Visionary and Determined

I have just watched Jacek Utko's TED talk, where he sought to answer the question: "Can Design save the newspaper?"

[caption id="attachment_224" align="aligncenter" width="254" caption="Jacek Utko"][/caption]

Jacek Utko is a polish designer who suggests that it's time for a fresh, top-to-bottom rethink of the newspaper. In his work, he's proved that good design can help readers reconnect with newspapers.
Despite being a little-known newspaper designer, his redesigns not only win awards, but increase circulation by up to 100%. In the following TED talk, Jacek says in no uncertain terms:

"you can live in a small poor country, you can work for a small company, in a boring branch, you can have no budgets, no people, but still you can put your work to the highest possible level. And everybody can do it. You just need inspiration, vision and determination. And you need to remember that to be good, is not enough."

You can watch this talk, read reviews and download the video on the TED web site.

On the day the Daily Metro (a publication of Nation Media Group), gets retired, the following insights from Jacek Utko's web site are worth thinking about:

7 Steps to (Design) Success

1. Strategy and goal
   What do you want to achieve? Increase sales? Attract new readers? Change image?


2. Newspaper content
   Is the change of content necessary? Is the paper structure clear? What are the reader's needs?


3. Design
   Is design coherent with strategy and content?


4. Focus Groups
   Will readers accept it?


5. Organization and planning
   How to improve workflow and planning?


6. Marketing
   How to self-promote our content?


7. Implementation
   Presentation and training, style book, supervision

This post will be especially  helpful to those in the creative, publishing and marketing services industry. In a broader perspective however, the above design insights and TED talk are useful to anyone who is in the business of adding value.

That undoubtedly includes everyone, with no exceptions whatsoever.

Let us learn, share and purpose to add value both in our lives and those of others.