Paul Rand and the role of design in customer experience

Quick addendum to last week’s post on giving your customers an experience they’ll want—no, need—to tell their friends about: this Fast Company story about the Paul Rand exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York ties in nicely with my point:

Rand’s pioneering work in advertising design in the early ‘40s helped shift the way businesses approached branding. ‘He was very revolutionary in the ad industry,’ [exhibit curator Donald] Albrecht says. Rand knew an ad’s point was to sell a product, but believed that in visually conveying that message, a designer should be artistic. […] ‘People could look at an ad and have an aesthetic experience.’ […] In the ’80s, the power of IBM’s visual communications program inspired Steve Jobs, a longtime admirer of Rand’s work, to hire Rand as a designer for NeXT, his educational computer company. ‘Rand was the first and only designer Jobs looked to,’ Albrecht says [emphasis mine].