Since its launch in 1995, Fast Company magazine has become the voice of the New Economy, chronicling how business is reinventing itself. Here, Fast Company's co-founding editor Alan Webber talks with Peter Lawrence, chairman of Corporate Design Foundation.

When you and Bill Taylor started "Fast Company," what made you feel there was a need for yet another business magazine?

We saw a world emerging where there were few fixed points from the past. Shrinking technologies laptops, cell phones, pagers were changing how work felt. Baby boomers were rising to positions of authority with different backgrounds and expectations than their parents' generation. Women in the workplace were affecting how people talked to and worked with each other. Business people were just as comfortable flying from Boston to Tokyo, Paris to Tokyo, as from Boston to San Francisco. And the Web and the Internet were on the verge of re-routing conversations and information so that an individual with a Web connection, a Rolodex and a good idea could literally change the course of an industry. Rather than highly structured, hierarchical organizations, we were seeing places where people mattered most. Work had become more than a way for people to put bread on the table it was who they were. They felt they could bring their own ideas, energy and sense of purpose into their work and find ways to do things that were fun, fulfilling, and profitable at the same time..

We began Fast Company with the notion that none of that was being written about in a magazine. The standard business magazine didn't look like the world we were living in. Most still looked like they were in the '70s and the photography, typefaces and presentation were pretty much reflective of the kinds of organizations being written about..

"Fast Company" didn't just introduce new content; it departed from the look and feel of traditional business magazines.

Design was a key element from the start. We felt the magazine had to be as much a personal tool as a laptop, cell phone or pager, and it had to have the design attributes and energy that those tools have. Early on we began to catalog the language of design emerging in business, in work tools and in hot products like Nike shoes. While editing Harvard Business Review, I interviewed Nike's head designer. The way he described how Nike came up with designs was transferable to imagining a new kind of magazine where the mythology of the shoe design came from looking at how actual people run and the kinds of situations that they find themselves in. Bill and I began to talk about the magazine in those terms the kind of energy on the page, the touch of the paper. The design, look, feel, touch, typography, printing quality, all of those attributes help to communicate the magazine's values, mission and purpose, and we wanted them to be right from the start.

It seems that more entrepreneurs are working with designers before seeking venture capital.

Yes. For Fast Company, we recruited Roger Black, one of the nation's preeminent magazine designers, to create a prototype with real articles in it. Having a handsome design aided our ability to attract highly regarded investors like Mort Zuckerman who financed our magazine. Investors knew we had a clear idea of where we wanted to go with the look and feel. It's important that design gets "cooked" into the product at the start, whether you're talking about software, office space, or a web design. It's not an afterthought.

Why is communication design so important to the Web?

The Web is the best, most immediate and most direct medium for detecting phoniness, hypocrisy and bad vibrations. It is so in your face that the character of the website is almost totally naked to the user. What's often observed is that designers and businesses bring to the Web all of the biases and mindsets of paper and other media, which frequently don't translate well. You have to open your mind and experience to what you know works in your own interactions on the Web and let design specs grow out of that experience.

Is the quality of design on the Web getting better?

Absolutely. Like any enterprise, the more people who take a hand to it, the more talent it attracts, the more you see people stripping away first efforts that were cute but not really productive. The instinct is always to overdo things at first and then gradually hone in on principles of design that work and are fun to engage in rather than self-serving, pompous or done to excess. Over time, quality, experience and sensibility emerge along with what works and that ends up becoming the dominant design sensibility.

What is the role of brand on the Web?

It's huge. The wonderful thing about the Web is that anybody can create a website. The terrible thing about the Web is that anybody can have a website, and does. The Web is so overloaded with clutter and information, brand becomes an important differentiator. Who do you trust? Why go there? What do they deliver not just the first time, but the second, third, fourth time? The Web has so much to choose from that in order to use it productively, you only want to visit the sites that keep their promises. That's what a brand is. A brand is a promise to the user that gets kept consistently. The companies that perform in ways that respect your time, intelligence and the limits of your technology are sites you're going to want to see again.

Explain "Fast Company's" premise that design is a critical part of how we communicate, collaborate and compete.

We have a long-standing slogan at Fast Company: The new MBA is an MFA. At the heart of the New Economy is the challenge of design. It's not a narrow definition of design. It's not just organizing type on a page or arranging an office interior. It's the design of a business model. It's the way you design the relationship with your collaborators, your network, your customers, your employees. Those are design issues.

Business people probably don't appreciate being told that they should learn to think like designers.

Let's be honest, there's been a history of animosity. Business people look at a designer as somebody just interested in doing pretty things. And the designer looks at the businessperson as a barbarian willing to sacrifice quality to win at the bottom line. But in the New Economy, the capacity to talk to each other and see each other as necessary collaborators is more important than ever. What do successful entrepreneurs and business people in the New Economy do? They reconfigure reality. They reimagine the space in which their company is going to compete. They redesign their organizational operation. They reconceive a metaphor for their business. In fact, they operate in a land that's often pretty intangible. Venture capitalists and incubator companies are constantly trying to foresee what doesn't exist. They look for openings where there are opportunities..

Now how does a good designer work? A designer often starts with things that are very tangible. How do people work, talk to each other? How far do they move from their desks? How do they get information off the printed page? How much time do they spend making decisions at a newsstand? What typeface sends the right message? These are tangible propositions that they work from to create the organized principles that will solve those tangible problems.

Design is critical for product acceptance. So why is there so much clumsy design?

Unfortunately situations come to pass where designers and technologists play to each other's worst instincts. They believe that if something is possible, it must be necessary. Designers and technologists collaborate to produce more facets or functionalities than anybody could possibly want or need. The result is not the simplification and user-friendliness that are ultimately measures of great design. It's the radical overextension of capability for capability's sake. That is bad design.

How would you define a great designer?

A great designer is someone who understands human beings and what they really want, need and will use. My wife, a trained architect, taught me everything I know about design which is that design isn't about buildings that look like wedding cakes. It's about creating the experience for the person who works inside the building as well as for the person walking by outside. What do people experience when they walk in the front door? What do they experience after an eight-hour day? Are their eyes fried? Have they had good fresh air because the ventilation system works? In the same vein, someone working at a technology company should not be thinking about what color to make the case, but about the design of the experience that the user has.

Is there a revolution occurring in workplace design?

Yes. It is a blast seeing the many ways you can organize and design office space. But there is a sense that people have gotten carried away. They've said, "We know how to make a cool office. We find exposed brick, put in a coffee bar and give everyone an Aeron chair. Now we're cool." Sorry, that's not design; that's rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. But suddenly there is great energy behind designing where people work and how the work gets done. It's fundamental, but it's great.

What about redesigning the relationship with customers?

That's fundamental but it's old news. I once had the privilege to hear Stanley Marcus speak. After listening to people say that the great thing about the Web is that customers are in charge, Stanley got up, at the age of 90, and said, "I don't want to sound like a fuddy-duddy, but when I went to work at Neiman Marcus, my daddy's store, we always thought customers were in charge. What's the news here exactly?" It's a classic truth, but the connection now is more intense and urgent. There's more choice. What's next in the New Economy is refocusing on the things we've briefly forgotten about what really matters.

There's a lot of talk about building new kinds of communities. Can design help?

It's a hot topic now. The Web is a big part of it because you can use the technology that blew up pyramidal organizations to create all kinds of community connections and relationships that previously were limited by geography or by the capacity of sharing and spreading information. One thing that is on the pulse of the moment is the need for people in the New Economy to have a sense of community, to reinforce it with well-designed communication tools, to design and develop their own rituals, their own practices that make the community more than just a cheap fad of the moment. That's what design does. It provides the recognizers and the habits and the signposts that people depend on so that you have more than just the trappings of community; you have the real underpinnings and muscle of community.

Any thoughts on the market downturn and what IPOs need to do differently to survive?

Make money. I can't tell whether there is a downturn. When Paul Saffo, one of the world's most quotable pundits, was asked if we had a bubble economy, he responded, "No, it's a froth economy." It's more like the top of a cappuccino where there is not one big bubble but lots of little ones. Sure, a number of start-ups may not survive, but, at the same time, data in newspapers suggest that the IPO market had a better month last month than the month before it was declared defunct. We don't know how to measure these phenomena exactly. It's less a matter of saying, "it's over" than saying, "what are the design specs for what's going to work?" We can see some design specs, some of which are not all that new..

A lot of what I honor as great design, whether it's an architecture or magazine or office space or website, is classic design. It's elegant design. It's good, smart design that could have been done 100 years ago and is refreshed, reinvented and made contemporary for what we're doing right now. That's true in many lessons about how to succeed in the New Economy. You have got to build organizations where you attract talent and where people want to work. The big myth that's been exploded is that people will only respond to the promise of instant wealth, IPOs that turn them into overnight millionaires. For some people that's true. But a lot of other folks respond to the idea that their work is something they care about. They want to go in every day and do stuff that matters to them. That's not new, we just needed to be reminded.