A friend of mine, who happens to run a small design agency with his wife, feeling overwhelmed by the sheer number of free WordPress themes out there quipped, "This is really the end of web design."


I was reminded of my friend's realization when reading Paul Dunay's Facebook post last week. While I concurred with most of the commenters that Facebook as a platform may be too limiting for business purposes, I agreed with Paul's underlying premise that investing in costly website design and development nowadays seems more and more like a fool's errand. As Skittles' web makeover last month, and Modernista!'s last year demonstrated, the name of the game is no longer web "site," but web "presence."
As far as web design goes, I've been thinking of it more in terms of orchestration or arrangement than "design" in the traditional sense. It's no longer an issue of controlling a brand's image or policing brand standards. Instead, it's a question of monitoring, coordinating, and wading into ongoing and sometimes divergent streams of "brand activity," activity that is less and less initiated and undertaken by the brand owner and more and more by the brand consumer.
Around this time last year, design superstar Phillippe Starck made a lot of waves by declaring that "design is dead." I'm not willing to go quite that far given that "design," in the sense of "forming or decorating objects and environments to be useful, expressive, and aesthetically pleasing," seems to be a basic human behavior with us since the caveman days.
What I am willing to suggest is that, from the standpoint of marketing, graphic design (print design, web design, logo design, package design, etc.) is rapidly losing, and to a large extent has already lost, it's relevance and value. In it's place, we have the 3 Ps: Platform, Personality, and Presence. The ability to appear almost anywhere at anytime and engage people in a memorable and practical way steadily increases as the ability to project a visual identity into or onto the world dramatically recedes.
Designers need marketers because, at the end of the day, most of the work done by the former is done at the behest of the latter. The question is, given the proliferation of communication options (and I'm not just talking about channels) and the evolution of participative consumer behavior, do marketers really need designers?