Design:Technology=Chicken:Egg
Show a designer a beautiful piece of work and 9 times out of 10, their first question will likely be, “How was it made?”. In other words, what software and what techniques were used to create the final product? The tendency to inquire as to the means of production is only natural and all too common. Perhaps there’s no problem with this production-centric mindset. It’s certainly easier to describe a project as “created with Photoshop and Illustrator,” than to explain one’s reasoning behind color choices, layout, typography, and all the design decisions and iterations that lead to the final product. Then again, perhaps the tendency to focus on tools & technology first has a detrimental effect on how we think about design and on the quality of what we create.
Perusing some of the day’s popular design portfolio networks provides ample evidence of our obsession with tools & tech. Dribbblers often comment to each other with questions about which software they used. Behance even has a built-in “Tools Used” tagging system that puts the production method front and center with the project description. In my own experience, in both the classroom and the studio, designers and design students are constantly asking one another how they created this, that, and the other visual effect.
All this talk about the tools available might be causing us some problems. Instead of getting to the task at hand, that of creating, we might stop and ask ourselves questions like, “Should I learn Photoshop or Sketch? Or both?” We start to think that great design work can’t be created without the best tools. We become anxious and stressed about our tech stacks and toolkits, and instead of focusing on creating, we switch things up, derail work-in-progress, start over, and throw out hours’ worth of iterations. Rather than focusing on what’s in front of us, our minds wander to distant and unfamiliar alternatives, the promises of which blind us to our own experience. It’s 2015 and, seriously, just about anyone can create an exciting new design software… that turns out to be rather useless and flushes hours of time and gigabytes of data down the toilet. Even big dogs like Adobe are failing to deliver actual improvements with their newest tech.
What if we looked at design and technology from a different vantage point? How might a design-centric perspective benefit us?
Good design makes people’s lives better. Good design doesn’t care whether it’s made of pixels or dots, or what its file extension is. Good design uses technology to proliferate itself, and this has always been the case.
The printing press didn’t pre-date the letterform. People created written language to communicate more easily, and the technology for printing evolved to suit that need. The camera was invented long before Photoshop, and Photoshop only came along to make good photography easier to produce. Digital printers are faster and more accurate that silkscreens, but neither can be trusted to make poorly designed print work look good.
Keyboard shortcuts are a lot easier to learn than design principles. I’ve been at this design thing for long enough to say with confidence that it’s far easier to learn how to use a tool than it is to learn how to design something well. With that, I would urge any designer to focus not on the tools and technology that proliferate the work, but rather to focus on making the thing, and making it damn good.
I am currently a student in BDW’s 50 week program. See my work at tinyeahno.com
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