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An Important Industry

"The Irish design industry employs around 5,100 staff and has a turnover in the region of €465m. While this may seem small, it plays an important part of the wider marketing, advertising and media industries and if Ireland is serious about developing a knowledge-based economy, we had better take it a lot more serious", writes Nicholas Cloake.

Since the evolution of the GDBA to Design Business Ireland in November 2008 Ireland's economy has experienced a serious reversal. Although many design firms had anticipated a downturn in business, few could have foreseen the abrupt change in confidence and engagement with our sector. We are facing challenging times. Many of our members have had to take the unfortunate and painful step of reducing staff numbers and this combined with a reduction in the number of new projects has created difficulties not experienced for over a decade.

The state sector, particularly in the Republic of Ireland, has slashed its budgets for communications. This is quite significant as this sector generates over 35% of business carried out by Design Business Ireland firms. Indeed some firms rely to a very large degree on Government work and there is an increasing loss of state projects to design companies from mainland Europe. Add to this the loss of the huge amount of business commissioned by the construction sector and the result is a definite contraction in projects and project values.

In reality, the design sector has suffered from the downturn in a more pronounced way than many other professional services sectors. The intense competition to win assignments has created a danger of commoditising our industry. This presents a serious danger of removing ‘think-time' from projects as the need to quickly win, complete and invoice becomes more essential.

However, every cloud has a silver lining, and in our case we can certainly recognise that, as businesses, we have become more efficient. We are learning to approach projects with smaller budgets and reduced human resources and are still able to deliver world-class design work, as illustrated in the pages of this publication. Our client community is also benefitting from our current circumstances, allowing clients to enjoy incredible value.

Our clients may not realise it but it is more vital now than ever before to invest in design and good communications. I passionately believe that our sector can and will play a pivotal role in re-energising our economy and it is incumbent on us to deliver this message wherever and whenever we can. Needless to say Design Business Ireland will not take a passive approach to this and we will play our part in lobbying Government and promoting the benefits of our expertise to the private sector.

Ireland's return to prosperity will require the support of a strong design sector. The ambition of creating a ‘knowledge-based' economy will not succeed without our industry. Furthermore I believe that our design firms should actively pursue the objective of exporting our services, if a Danish design company can compete and win in Ireland there is no reason that we can't do likewise internationally.

Employment and Turnover (ROI and NI)