Design Is A Dream?
From the outside, I imagine that ‘design’ falls into a category that I’m going to call a ‘dream job,’ in that, it’s something that lots (and lots) of people want to do, whether it’s just a frustrated creative daydream, or one of the countless kids (and adults) that head off to college or university each year to study it. Hell, it just seems to be treated as sounding cool when it crops up in the usual ‘so what do you do?’ type conversations of adult life / Tinder.
But if it’s viewed as a ‘dream’ from the outside, what’s the view like from inside it?
That’s a tough one, and, I think, it varies very differently from what the reality is for a lot of the people who call themselves designers, and the image that the industry has, both in general and how it sometimes presents itself internally.
I try to go to a lot of industry events; talks, meet ups, awards, tenuous excuses for drinking on Tuesday nights, I’ve even started organising them myself! And something I’ve noticed is a bit of a trend to highlight a specific sort of creative; lone, hyper specialised, almost ‘artisan’ creators. I’ve heard talks where people boast of only working on ‘their’ exact sort of project, for their favoured sort of client, and if they don’t 110% love the idea of it, they just don’t work at all. Events where talking about design like it is a business, or working for corporate clients even, would be shunned.
Now, this is all well and good, and this isn’t, by any means, an attack on that sort of creative, hell, it seems like a cracking life if you can get it, but, to me, it seems like we are taking what is a rather niche element of the working population, then focusing on an even tinier niche within that niche when looking for things to inspire the rest of us.
It’s not reflective of the greater mass of designers, who are grinding away in agencies, clientside or working on freelance projects. Most of us don’t get the luxury to hyper specialise or to refuse to do work that doesn’t make us want to jump out of bed in the morning. It sometimes feels like this ‘reality’ is somewhat downplayed, even at events that are targeting ‘industry’ people only. Hell, there are one or two which give off the air that us more ‘corporatey,’ if you can call it that, designers, aren’t particularly welcome, or certainly not seen as a potential source of inspiration. Not in a hostile sense, more that we aren’t considered as creative as our even more niche colleagues.
We even had that earlier this month when we had the pleasure of Chris Do joining us for a talk. When he got to his views on charging and earning, you could hear the sharp intake of breath from some in the room. Like the idea we should be trying to make as much cash out of our skills as possible is some sort of taboo subject.
Personally, I think that’s complete and total bollocks.
Take what I’ve been up to this last year, sure, it can be forgiven for thinking that, on the surface, it sounds a bit dull; I’ve mostly been working on stuff for financial clients; things for managing your money and the like, and sure, if you hold this stuff up against some beautiful illustration work, maybe it’s a hard sell to get people excited, but, these things are used by a lot of people, and represent an opportunity to make a lot of lives better, even by just a little bit.
I recently saw a fascinating Q&A (thanks to the always awesome Gab, one of the best series of design talks going in Scotland) with the founders of ustwo, John Sinclair, in particular, referenced this, in relation to their work on a Barclays mobile app; maybe it sounds a little dry, but 5 million people use it. If you say you want to use design to make the world a better place, then you need to reach as many people as possible to do that. And they certainly did.
It can be very challenging working in ‘corporatey’ design, often companies don’t fully grasp the value design brings, it can be a fight, but the rewards are there, and the ability to genuinely reach millions of people are also there if you can manage it. It feels like sometimes, as an industry, we focus on and celebrate work that was largely made for us; beautiful illustrations, art installations, edgy interventions and the like that while great work, can feel like ‘preaching to the converted,’ in that, we all get the need for great design, we don’t need to be convinced.
That kind of thinking can end up seeing people disappear down the Dribbble rabbit hole. Churning out work for the approval of other designers in a back slapping, self congratulatory echo chamber.
In short, becoming art. And art is not design.
Design is a job (yeah, the title of this is a play on that). We shouldn’t be somehow ashamed of that. Designing for a bank is no less a creative exercise than branding a craft beer bar is. Making money from your skills doesn’t cheapen our skillset compared to working solely on pro bono projects for ethical startups.
Talks and the like are often students first encounters with the professional world, so I think it’s important that they get exposed to the full gamut of what the creative industries is like. That aforementioned ‘intake of breath’ at Chris Do’s talk is as much of a concern as when I hear students I work with saying they expect to work for free when they start their careers. It’s bad enough fighting battles to make other professionals value us, let’s not warp our own views of ourselves, particular those who haven’t even started out yet!
I suppose that’s the thing with any ‘dream,’ the reality is sometimes very different. But that doesn’t have to mean in a bad way.
