Developing an opinion
Required to grow in design
How would you describe your taste? What do you bring to the table? What is your perspective and why is it different from those around you?
These are difficult questions especially if you’re early in your career but digging into them is a rite of passage.
Design is often about considering who you’re designing for. Yes, it’s important to know your users, business constraints, and “what’s feasible”, but design that moves, design that’s considered innovative, even “art”, does something different.
“Design has to work, Art does not.”
— Donald Judd
As a designer, you may want to create something that not just satisfies function and reliability, but moves people and impacts society. Oftentimes, design is described as “good” if it goes unnoticed, completing its duty to the user. However, design that moves, innovates, creates big change, has no choice but to be noticed.
When a doorknob works, it goes unnoticed. Turn, push, and you’re in another room.
When it doesn’t, it gets noticed. It doesn’t turn, can’t push the door open, and you’re stuck where you are.
When a doorknob works but also tells you how long the room is available (let’s imagine a conference room), then that is noticed, but in a good way. In a way that makes one think about how they will use the room.
The point is, sometimes it’s good to be noticed. When creating something that says something, that’s against the “status quo”, there is no choice but to stand under the limelight.
Become comfortable with the limelight.
Try to use it to your advantage.
Even organize to get more lights so others can stand underneath them and say what they believe game-changing design is.
Virgil Abloh calls this, developing your own “personal design language”. If you were to bullet point what makes your design You, what would it say?
Developing an opinion or a style requires exploration. Rabbithole in who you love. Find out what inspires them. Abloh says find your mentors, dead or alive, older or younger. An analogy is food tastings. To know what wine you like, you try many wines. The ones you feel taste good, try to learn why they taste good.
Following your inspiration is step one. The next step is defining your “personal design language” through projects. More on that later.
A lecture designer Virgil Abloh gave on personal design language:
