We put a release out to the Journal earlier this week which sought to highlight waste in public spending. In so doing, we offended some of our members and others in the design industry who took from the release that we thought design wasn’t valuable. We messed up and did some of our members a disservice. We want to learn from this and seek to make things right.

Design is enormously valuable as a profession and a discipline. Irish industry and industry worldwide relies on brilliant Irish designers educated in our colleges, and we’re proud to have them as members. Additionally, USI is a frequent client for design agencies and freelancers throughout the year, have been for many years and we will again.

We know from our own experience that Irish designers offer great value and their work brings enormous benefits to our work – grabbing people’s attention, making our campaigns more effective and helping us work for students of all disciplines.

We’re really sorry we created the impression we don’t value design or designers – we do. In the coming days we’ll meet with representatives of design students and work with them to find out how we can regain the trust of, and better represent the needs of design students in Ireland.