Four years ago George Bush stood on the deck of an aircraft carrier and declared an end to the combat operations in Iraq. Today, four years into the continuing war, after a pretty long creative brief for a client in Atlanta, I started thinking of that Mission Accomplished banner and the process of creating it.

I’m not just talking about the design piece itself, but the overall ideation process. As a work I supose it’s functional – but it’s certainly not elegant. There’s really no underlying metaphor, no connection to any intentional emotions, (I’m sure the intent was to evoke patriotism. In fact, maybe it continues to, but that emotion is contextual and it’s hard to say whether the resulting patriotism is in fact the intended kind of patriotism the designers wanted). Granted, it’s trite and unimaginative – it’s also one of the most notorious works of design in the 21st century. In terms of notoriety it ranks up there with the iPod.

Where the banner fails from a creative standpoint is the one area where no work of design ever should – ideation. Now, I can’t hang it’s shortcomings on the designer himself (Funny I think it’s a man who did it, but doesn’t it just look like a guy did it?).

Ideation is typically the work of more than one person. Where it get’s tricky is that it’s often an amalgam of multiple – often competing – agendas, and no one recognizes this. Failure becomes eminent when none of these agendas win out over the other and all “win” (people call this compromise) and “get to be” rendered into the final, core message.

It’s this phenomenae of distilling competing or contradictory messages into one core idea that undermines any potential for good design. Fail to get past this and you’re left with twenty feet worth of ink, paper, and regret – Mission Accomplished.