When you become a designer
Not an artist
Chapter 1. The beginning
My story is very simple. I’ve been a designer for 6 years now and maybe a bit more I knew I was a designer but didn’t work as a designer. I’ve always hated this word ‘designer’. What are we designing? Is it clothes, is it objects? Are we artists? Well, I’ve been trying to find those answers pretty much since I started. To me, design was something about pure beauty, something clean, some sort of art in a way. But is a design an art?
I think the way I treated design was dictated by the Ukrainian attitude to the design, web-sites, mobile, etc. Every time you show something to your friends or even to the clients, in Ukraine, you get something like: ‘oh it’s pretty’, or ‘maybe we should consider different colours’, or ‘I simply don’t like this button’… But is it about colour? Is it about something being pretty?’ To answer this question I had to move to the UK.
Chapter 2. The UK 🇬🇧
When I got an offer from a very good company with massive clients, which name I will not mantion, right @TheAppBusiness 😋, I was definitely intrigued. Can’t say it was a dream come true, cos moving to another country is tough, very tough. But straight after the very first meeting with the client, presenting some sketches and then the design, I instantly noticed something different — different mentality. They weren’t concerned about the layout or colours, they didn’t really care about the composition or white space. The only question I got, was: what does this button do? That simple…I was shocked. No stupid questions about the different colours, nothing. Just tell me what this button does and how it interacts with the rest of the elements… I’ve never believed in UX, I thought it was something more for developers, but at exactly that moment, I realised that all this time I’d been caring about the wrong things, putting emphasis on things that didn’t matter quite as much as I thought. Steve Jobs was truly a genius — he said ‘Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works’. It was spot on. Exactly that moment I realised that all this visual gloss and shine, made no sense! What you really have to care is how to solve problems. How to make people’s life easier. How to get an email from somebody saying: ‘thanks for doing this, it’s just helped!’. That’s exactly what you’re looking for. How many times have you thought of helping people by solving some problems today? Do you really care about amount of likes on Dribbble?
So I asked myself one simple question: Are you a good designer? And at long last I realised I wasn’t.
All this time I’ve been doing work for myself, satisfying my visual appetite. Now it was the time to start feeding people. And I’ve found quite a good recipe:
(talent + hard work) * people’s needs — your ego = good design
Design is not about clothes, not about art, not about beauty, not about satisfying your ego. Design is about solving problems in the most efficient and elegant way possible. It’s not about you, it’s about others. It’s about what does that button does rather then how it looks. It’s about how everything works.
But when something works nicely it doesn’t mean it can’t look great 👍🏻
The sooner, you Guys, realise this, the sooner you become better designers. Quite excited what I learn next in this wonderful country with lots of talented people.
TBC…
