In 2005, Coors launched a Belgian-style wheat beer called Blue Moon. It went nowhere—until Coors persuaded bartenders to change one thing: Serve Blue Moon in a glass with a slice of orange. Sales took off.

In 2008, Interstate Bakeries filed for bankruptcy protection. In 2009, it announced a revenue increase of 7 percent, which analysts attributed to just two changes: the introduction of whole-grain Wonder bread and, after twenty-five years without change, new packages for its iconic Twinkies, Ho Hos, and Ding Dongs.

In 2008, United States Beverage looked at the numbers for its Seagrams wine coolers and blanched. What was the problem? They sell their wine coolers in bars, but the coolers didn’t look like they belonged there; they looked like wine coolers, a bit prissy. Seagrams repackaged them as Cooler Escapes in new beerlike bottles. That simple change boosted sales over 10 percent and helped Seagrams capture 36 percent of the wine cooler market.

In February 2009, Tropicana redesigned its orange juice cartons, eliminating its familiar symbol of a straw stuck into an orange. By April, sales had dropped 20 percent, forcing Tropicana to bring back the original packaging.

What happened in each of these cases?

Welcome to the Age of the Eye. In our new life of little time, hundreds of choices, and exceptional quality—this new life lived in a flash—there is one compelling force: the brightest flash.

What makes that flash? By definition, it’s an image. It’s design.

The indisputable importance of designers in this new century is the inevitable result of the last one. In those one hundred years, we learned to build things. Then we learned to build them faster, then smaller, then more efficiently. And then, with the influence of the quality movement and pressure from imports, we learned to build them at near–Six Sigma quality.

What was left for marketers to do? If they were computer manufacturers, they could try to dazzle us with lengthy descriptions of features we did not understand. As it became harder to create truly differentiated products, Apple and others realized a new possibility: the visually differentiated product.

We live in the age of the apparent. Design dominates this age because design works, and because our love of beauty is deep in our bones. It’s deep inside us.