New Traditionalist | Ian Thomas

Bal­samiq: Even though it appears to use Comic Sans, I reckon it’s still a ground-breaking innovation

Until now, I’ve res­isted the urge to make any pre­dic­tions for the new decade, but a link posted on Twit­ter yes­ter­day by 37Signals’ Jason Fried just about broke my resolve. (Besides, I’d already made my pre­dic­tions in a post at MRM’s site in Novem­ber last year…)

It’s for a really smart app called Bal­samiq, which allows teams to rap­idly trans­late ideas for soft­ware, web­sites or apps into live mock-ups.

So what’s this got to do with brand building?

Well forget what Bal­samiq does for a moment and think, instead, of the effect of its applic­a­tion: It com­pletely messes up the for­mu­laic, tried and tested, chartered-institute-of-chartered-charterers dogma that has the tend­ency to squeeze the life out of great ideas before they’ve seen the light of day.

An applic­a­tion like this offers a tool for genu­inely agile design of web-based ser­vices; it allows people — espe­cially inten­ded users — to road-test ideas without those count­less meet­ings and doc­u­ments that are inten­ded to fine-tune a spe­cific­a­tion (which prob­ably only works in theory anyway).

Bal­samiq is fur­ther evid­ence of a shift away from the packaged-up-to-perfection pre­scrip­tion of the mass media model.

Why? Because it enables teams to col­lab­or­at­ively har­ness the poten­tial of the social web in order to design, build, test and launch an idea more swiftly than would have been pos­sible only a matter of months ago. It cuts out layer upon layer of unne­ces­sary bur­eau­cracy in order to let people use it and — so — improve it.

Just con­sider how counter-intuitive a tra­di­tional mar­ket­ing approach would seem stacked up against the idea driv­ing Balsamiq.

Last Novem­ber, I pre­dicted that three vital dis­cip­lines would sur­vive the col­lapse of the tra­di­tional mass media model: live events, inter­ac­tion design and con­ver­sa­tion. (I explained why in my ‘How to build a brand…’ presentation).

Like Jason Fried’s own Base­camp, Bal­samiq offers real evid­ence of the emer­ging sig­ni­fic­ance of these dis­cip­lines and the col­lapse of the mass media model (that’s the model that spawned news­pa­pers, radio sta­tions, tele­vi­sion chan­nels, call centres, web­sites, market research­ers, media plan­ners, advert­ising agen­cies, event and hos­pit­al­ity agen­cies, spon­sor­ship agen­cies and public rela­tions consultants).

In the past 12 months signs of the dis­tint­er­me­di­ation of the tra­di­tional mass media model have been remark­able: Ashton Kutcher beat CNN to a mil­lion fol­low­ers on Twit­ter, Carter Ruck dropped an injunc­tion in the face of pop­u­lar dis­sent over its Trafigura gag­ging order and Rage Against The Machine beat the X-Factor’s Joe McEld­erry to the Christ­mas Number 1 in the UK.

Des­pite the effects of the shift — which will only accel­er­ate in 2010 — I’m still left won­der­ing how many people in the mar­ket­ing pro­fes­sion have recog­nised the redund­ancy of the tra­di­tional mass media model and, so tra­di­tional pro­mo­tional approaches?