5 Things I Wish I Had Known at Design School

This year marks eight whole years since I graduated from university with my honours degree in Visual Communication. Looking back on myself in those undergraduate days, I see a lanky idealist carrying an Iomega Zip Drive and an A2 folio case wandering around campus, trying to figure out what on earth this whole design thing was about and where exactly I should be directing my ironic gaze. (Irony was very big amongst the youth of the early noughties. Example A: trucker caps, Example B: 2nd hand non-sequitur printed t-shirts. I wore both. At the same time). I literally had no idea.

At some point in the intervening years, however, I decided to shed some of that irony and really care about creating quality design. Part of which meant actually figuring out what quality design looked like. That transition involved learning a few things along the way, and for what it’s worth, I’d like to share a drop of that pearly wisdom with my younger self. And the internet, if anyone’s out there.

1. Design is commerce (+ art).

For most designers, there’s a certain ickiness about an eager, shameless pursuit of money. However, it’s exactly that pursuit of money that keeps our clients going. You might be extremely purpose-driven about delivering the best quality pizzas or financial services, but really, if you’re a business, who doesn’t want to sell more? You can’t have capitalism without the profit motive, and we the designers are inextricably bound up in that. It’s inescapable: we wouldn’t exist if we weren’t generating value (money) for our clients. That’s the point. Of course we’d like to think we’re something more than that, and we probably are. But we’re not something other than that.

I’m certainly not a Marxist now, and wasn’t back then — but somehow I used to find the whole concept of money a taint on what was to me the intrinsic pleasure of creation. Design should be, in its purest form, guided play. Once lecturer I respected told me he was moving to Hong Kong to do more motion graphics work because — he rubbed his fingers together — “They’ve got money there.” I furrowed my brow. Surely (aghast), you’re not doing it for the money?

My advice to myself: get over it. We do a job, we help our clients make money and in turn we get paid. This is the world and we are neck deep in it so let’s not try to convince ourselves otherwise. We are not exempt from the need to pursue money simply because we like indie music, cheap beer, shared-house living and making things. We all covet Apple products and they too (lo!) cost money. Yes, you can choose your limits. Yes, you can have a certain amount of creative independence and get paid too. But, by the strictest definition, you cannot not sell out. You are a designer and you’re paid to solve the problems of others in the most elegant fashion you can conceive — but you’re not an artist, so let’s not be precious about it.

2. There’s no prizes for being right.

I used to really think that there was a right answer. And that somehow I would be vindicated because I had found it. I used to think that we designers had a monopoly on what was aesthetically and functionally valuable and what was not. I would shake my head in dismay when confronted with badly kerned type. I would walk away from meetings with tutors or clients confused — not because I didn’t understand their criticisms, but because I couldn’t understand how they couldn’t see that my solution that was so obviously right. So correct. I mean, how could it not be?

And you know what — I’m sure that at least sometimes, many times perhaps, I was right! That typeface was more legible at smaller sizes. The colour scheme would be better with magenta than it would be with (*snort*) pink. But what I didn’t grasp was that during these conversations there were two humans who had different points of view, and that even though I might have had some level of training and expertise: if I couldn’t convince my client that I might be worth trusting, then all that knowledge and training was worth precisely butkis. Ego is a big part of creativity — at some level you have to believe you’re making a succession of ‘right’ choices otherwise you become paralysed and unable choose anything — but it’s equally important to understand that they’re not the only right choices. They’re just hunches. They seem right at the time, but there are always other choices, more or less equally right, depending on how you look at them.

Learning to see things — particularly design decisions — from another person’s point of view is an acquired skill. Sometimes the biases of a designer and the client will invariably clash (i.e.: ‘Have a balanced spacial arrangement and clear hierarchy of elements’ [me] vs ‘Make the logo bigger’ [client], *frown* [me]). But it’s through the resolution of these clashes that we get to some kind of consensus about how things should work best. Design is not engineering — to a certain degree we’re all just guessing — so let’s just acknowledge that and park the ego.

3. Good design is generally invisible.

I used to love David Carson. The Designers Republic. Neville Brody. The designer iconoclasts who loomed over the visual landscape in my formative years of the 1990s. They made the kind of work that made kids (me, at the time) sit up and think, “Graphic Design is cool! I want to do that!” The designers I mention were pushing the craft to its limits, just as graphic design was transitioning into the digital form. What I didn’t realise was that there was just as much consideration put into, say, wayfinding signage. To me, that kind of design was boring — I wanted shake things up, challenge people — I wanted to yank my supposed audience into the bold future zeitgeist of graphic design. I wanted to be cutting edge. Whatever that meant. However, what I didn’t appreciate at the time was that the ‘boring’ design was itself waging a war — that it’s small victories were fighting a rear-guard battle against a thoughtless, careless, chaotic world. I learnt that good design is not always about shouting the loudest but is really about solving problems for people before they become problems. Good design is about getting out of people’s way.

I see now the dignity in the unsexy, the unnoticed, the deliberately unobtrusive. Someone once told me about the horror of being an industrial designer, spending weeks designing a light switch to have the perfect sounding click. We groaned. Lame. But actually, as I’ve come to appreciate, it’s the countless menial design decisions like these that colour our world, infinitesimally improving it — click by satisfying little click.

4. Technical skill is underrated.

I was lucky when I was at university. I already had a job typesetting the pages of my local music magazine. And I was reasonably entrepenuerial so was doing freelance gig posters and the like for friends. So by the time I hit university I was fairly proficient with the Adobe Suite.

Thank fuck for that. I completely understand the value of design thinking. But design thinking without adequate design execution is incapable of meaningfully conveying your intentions. You will find new solutions by thinking and looking at things from new angles, but you’ll make those new solutions much, much better by pushing software/hardware/meatware to its limits. Stylistic innovation is still innovation and all too often it is left to too few to define what a better solution looks like. Sure, the idea has to be good but as the ultimate technical perfectionist Stanley Kubrick once said: “Don’t sweat the technique.”

5. Graphic Design is just the tip of the iceberg.

Whilst studying what was effectively graphic design, I also used to work at a publishing company. And as at most publishing companies there were editors and there was the art department. There’s a deliberate tension at play: the editors want to publish 3,000 word essays that ‘really get to the heart of the matter’ and the art department want to cut the word count, make the photos bigger and squeeze in more pull quotes. That tension works, but it’s based more on traditional practices of dividing labour and skillsets due to time and technical constraints than actually creating effective communication.

The thing is — graphic design and writing — they’re two sides of the same coin. They are symbiotic creatures; they entwine to communicate ideas. My current job title (Communications Designer) is ludicrously broad. But really, it’s about pushing things from one mind into another. By any means necessary. And to do that you need to know how to think visually (learn Graphic Design), audibly (learn how to write), convergently (learn how to edit) and divergently (learn how get inspired and to brainstorm), and you need to decide which medium will be the best vessel for which idea (learn the basics of filmmaking, animation, web design, powerpoint, whatever).

Most technology is comparatively easy to use these days (if anyone remembers using PhotoShop 1.0 — without an undo feature — you will surely agree). The barrier to expressing oneself through new mediums is already low, and it’s dropping fast. This means that writers can make pretty websites, graphic designers can make films and the piece of slowly decomposing carrot cake at the back of my fridge can maintain a twitter following in the hundreds. So where once we had our little fiefdoms of expertise that is no longer the case. We’re all converging, and the lines between traditional disciplines is blurring. Learn everything you can because, one day, you’ll need it.

So that’s it, young me. Absorb ye wisdome and go forth. Actually if I really were talking to the young me, that would be horrible advice. Because the 6th thing that I wished I’d known back then was that every mistake is worth making. There is no other route from A to Z except by going through the alphabet. There are no shortcuts and mistakes are the most useful things you can make. So, young me, don’t listen to any of this.

Go out and fuck things up a bit and figure it out yourself.