I went there expecting the usual things: architecture, museums, good food, wandering around neighbourhoods and looking at things I don’t get to see at home. What I wasn’t expecting was how much the city would make me think about what happens when people stop designing everything for the broadest possible audience.
The graffiti is probably the most obvious example. It’s everywhere: on walls, buildings, doors, bridges and abandoned spaces. Some of it is beautiful, some of it is political, some of it is messy, and some of it is completely incomprehensible to me. But what struck me wasn’t simply how much there was. It was that Berlin seemed to have made a different decision about it.
The city has a complicated relationship with graffiti, but there is also a long history of making space for street art and recognizing it as part of Berlin’s cultural identity. The remnants of the Berlin Wall became a canvas. Empty buildings became creative spaces. Things that might have been erased somewhere else were allowed to become part of the character of the city.
That got me thinking about how much of what we experience every day is shaped by decisions about what we’re willing to make space for.
And then we went to a 52-hour drone and ambient music event in a warehouse.
It was called Sanctum of Sound, part of Mahalla, and it wasn’t really a music festival in the way I normally think about one. The warehouse had been transformed into something like fifteen different spaces, with DJs playing ambient and drone music alongside beds, couches, pillows and places where you could lie down and listen. You could wander around, stay for a while, leave and come back. There was no sense that you had to experience it in one particular way.
It had been designed around listening.
Really listening.
That specificity is what stayed with me.
We spend a lot of time designing for everyone
I think we do this constantly in business. We want our websites to appeal to everyone. Our brands need to feel professional but approachable, interesting but not weird, modern but not trendy, distinctive but not too different. We want everyone to be able to see themselves in it.
So we smooth things out.
We remove the strange bit. We make the language a little more generic. We choose the safer colour. We make the website look a little more like the websites people already recognize. Eventually, we end up with something that nobody can really object to, but nobody is particularly excited by either.
I’ve done this myself, and I think most designers have.
There is a certain comfort in designing something that everyone can understand. You can explain why you made every decision, point to examples of other successful brands doing something similar and make a perfectly reasonable case for it. But sometimes the thing that makes something memorable is precisely the thing that doesn’t fit neatly into a list of best practices.
It’s the thing that makes someone stop and think, “Oh, that’s different.”
Different isn’t the same as difficult
I don’t think every brand needs to be weird, and being different for the sake of being different can be just as predictable as being safe.
What interests me is making decisions that actually come from somewhere.
If you’re building a business for a particular group of people, you should know who those people are. You should know what matters to them, what they care about, what they’re tired of seeing and what they’re looking for. Once you understand that, you can start making choices that are specific to them rather than trying to make something that will work for everyone.
That might mean a strange colour combination. It might mean a very restrained visual identity. It might mean a website that doesn’t follow the usual structure. It might mean writing like an actual human instead of trying to sound like a company.
The point isn’t to be different.
The point is to be recognizable.
The right people don’t need everything explained
I think this is the part that businesses sometimes find uncomfortable. When you make something more specific, some people aren’t going to like it.
That’s actually okay.
The goal isn’t to create something that makes everyone think, “I could see myself buying from them.” The goal is for the right person to see it and think, “That’s for me.”
There’s a huge difference between those two things.
The first is about approval. The second is about recognition.
And recognition is much more powerful.
That’s what I felt walking around Berlin. So many of the things I loved weren’t trying to appeal to me. They weren’t trying to make themselves universally understandable. They existed because someone had a point of view and decided it was worth making space for it.
The same thing happened at Sanctum of Sound. Nobody needed to convince me that lying on a mattress in a warehouse listening to drone music for hours was a good idea. I was already the person it was for.
Maybe we need to design for fewer people
I’ve been thinking about that a lot since I came home.
What would happen if we stopped asking, “How do we make this appeal to everyone?” and instead asked, “Who do we really want this to be for?”
That changes the work. It changes the words you use, the images you choose, the colours, the layout, the tone and the experience. Sometimes it even changes what you decide not to offer.
It also makes the work easier in a strange way. Once you know what you’re not trying to be, there are a lot fewer decisions to make.
That’s one of the reasons I care so much about the strategic work that happens before the design. I don’t want to start with a colour palette and work backwards. I want to understand the business, the people it’s trying to reach and what makes it worth choosing in the first place. Then we can make the visual decisions from there.
The result isn’t necessarily louder.
It’s more specific.
And specificity gives people something to recognize.
I think that’s what Berlin gave me
I went there thinking I was going to look at things. Instead, I came home thinking about permission.
Permission to make a mess. Permission to take up space. Permission to create an experience that isn’t designed for everybody. Permission to decide that something can be valuable even if it isn’t immediately understandable to everyone walking past it.
Maybe that’s something we could all use a little more of in our businesses.
Not more content. Not more colours. Not more options.
More decisions.
Decisions about who we’re actually talking to, what we actually want to say and what we’re willing to leave out so the thing we care about has room to be seen.
Because when you stop designing for everyone, something interesting happens.
You finally have a chance to design for someone.
