Lu’s work book 1: don’t follow what design school has taught you
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
-Ira Glass
I was inspired by Ira Glass’s words, doing lots of work to foster good taste. However, in the past 2 weeks I was challenged to not only having a good taste and execution in visuals, but also I need to improve my approach to solve problems and communicate solutions to stakeholders in a fraction of time.
Today I was doing a quick design review with CEO, who is my boss and mentor, he quickly pointed out the methodologies that I use are results of mass productions of good designers from design program back in school, where professors teach design students to follow steps without working with real-world constrains, however, he said I should find a designer that I truly admired and follow their fundamental principles
I don’t know which is a better approach, so I am going to try out both approaches.
