I’ve always been enamored with design. My dad would always say, “design is art, art is design”. That means that our thinking is always about how we’re going to express our ideas, our visions, and our goals. But what about the job itself? It can be a job, a task, a chore, a task of self-discipline, or a chore of self-discipline.
Even though I’m a visual designer who specializes in interface design, I still find myself thinking of myself as a designer. In a way its true, I still feel the same way about it. I always wanted to be an artist, and while I get that its kind of a dirty word. But I also feel the same way about being a designer. I think it’s our job to help people look and feel and move and live their lives the best way they can.
I think it has more to do with the fact that design is a lot about making things accessible and usable. I think it’s a lot easier to be an artist when you’re working in a lab than it is when you’re working in a design studio. So I feel that the true artist has a lot more agency and control over their designs than the designer.
I often feel the same way about writing. I think that a writer can be as good a writer as they want to be, but if they work in a design studio they have to be a design editor, and they need to make sure their writer is getting the right words to the right readers.
I love the idea of the designer being able to have so much control over their own design and that of their writer but I do think that the real designers are often the ones who need the most help. I have a few design students I think are really good, but they have to be in a design studio full time.
I think the designers who make a great design are the ones who work in design studios for more than a year and have really good habits. I often hear that one of the hardest things for a new designer to learn is how to be a good designer. It’s not because you have to learn to not use weird fonts on the internet or to get a million different styles of writing and formatting right.
I don’t know of any designer who says they only work in design studios, but the ones I know who say this usually work in design studios for an extended period of time. If anything, I think the designers I know who have really good habits are the ones who don’t have to put in hours commuting between their studio and the studio where they work. They don’t have to make phone calls or take long lunch breaks. They can just work all day.
I think that’s the case for a lot of designers. Not everyone can handle doing their own branding and marketing, and not everyone wants to do it for a long period of time. It’s also part of a personality style, but I think it goes deeper than that. I think designers sometimes have a tendency to stick with a certain style of work for years, and then decide to change to a new one. I think this is partially because of the time crunch they are in.
This is why I think it’s so important to hire designers who can change their style as necessary. I’m not saying you should just hire someone who is like you, but make sure you have experience and thought process that are like yours. I think this is why I’ve had a hard time with design firms I’ve hired where I thought I knew what I wanted, or even what I “needed”. They all have very different personalities, styles, and philosophies.
At its core, design firms are the business of making things. They are the creators of something that people can use. What I mean by that is that a designer is a very powerful person with a very large team of people to work with. When you hire a firm, you are hiring a designer to create a new thing, and then you need to make a decision about how and when this thing is going to be made.
