But the magicians in this scenario -- the designers -- do not always get it right in the marketplace. As they'll tell you themselves, a product that wins awards doesn't necessarily mean a runaway success in stores. Bold design launches are tricky to pull off, and the market is littered with ambitious failures. "The industry is waking from a long hangover," says Chris Heatherly, chief strategist at Frog Design, based in Sunnyvale, Calif. "There has been more design than ever in the last few years, and much of it failed." For example, Polaroid's I-Zone combo digital-instant camera, which appeared briefly during late 2000, received accolades for its unusual look, but consumers were turned off by its complicated features, and sales tanked. Another high-profile disaster was 3Com's (COMS) spunky Internet appliance, dubbed Audrey, which lasted only five months on the market in 2001.

Pentagram partner Robert Brunner dates the era of design excess to shortly after the launch of the first iMac, when the word iMac became a verb. "So many companies said they wanted to 'iMac' a new laptop or telephone. They saw [it] as a metaphor for colorful, exciting, successful design. It drove us nuts," Brunner says. It has been four years since that product's debut, but many in the industry are still Apple-obsessed. "Back then, everything was covered with disgusting, translucent plastic. Now it's metallic silver paint."

Apple copycatting isn't the only reason some products fail. Bad planning and overinflated expectations can doom even the most awe-inspiring designs. And that's a shame. Many consumer-product launches turn into train wrecks because companies keep making a few of the same lethal mistakes.

Screwup 1: Design is an afterthought. Companies may mistakenly think that design ends at the product's surface -- that it is just a way to dress up products in pretty packaging. They involve designers too late in the development process, and then expect them to work miracles. "Companies often come to us when they've already decided on a concept," says Frog Design's Heatherly. "The product specs are bad, and then they ask us, 'Hey, can you spread some cool design over this?' Little can be done." No amount of fancy design work can save a product that has too many buttons, has a crummy interface, or is awkward to hold. Heatherly's pet example of surface design is Patriot Computer's Hotwheels PC, a computer aimed at kids who like race cars, which appeared on the market briefly during Christmas 2000. "It was just a desktop computer with some stickers on it," he scoffs. It flopped. To help avoid such costly flameouts, designers should be involved with projects from the outset, giving engineers input on product usability and interface issues.