Advice from professional designers

AIGA asked the following 10 design professionals from across the country to share their advice on remaining competitive in an economic downturn. These essays offer valuable insights that can be useful to designers during both good and bad times.

Follow your passion and be the best at your craft

Julie Beeler is a principal at Second Story Interactive Studios in Portland, Oregon.

The design field is ever changing and expanding, with the role of designers rapidly evolving, providing opportunities for a myriad of distinct disciplines to exist.

The designers of the future will play a significant role in communicating complex information because more and more organizations are looking to designers to communicate, visualize, educate and engage their audiences.

As you prepare to enter the field of design, take the time to explore all the various specialties within design and find the one that is a natural fit with your talents and passion. It is important to focus on a design discipline that you can excel at and master, such as typography, motion, user interface or information architecture.

Demonstrating true proficiency in your design craft will empower you to become a valuable member of a multi­disciplinary team. I have seen a lot of young designers who are generalists and want to be big thinkers without having ever mastered any individual design craft. The more successful designers are ones who have honed their design skills and evolved their strategic thinking and problem solving across disciplines.

Making things beautiful is important, and applying this to solving complex design challenges is a valuable skill. The designers of the future will be responsible for not just making beautiful things but also making smart things?solutions that communicate, clarify, distill and crystallize complex information.

Be determined to succeed

Ellen Bruss is owner and creative director of EBD Ellen Bruss Design, a design, marketing and brand consultancy in Denver.

When I started out, I worked for a designer who told me that there was a little regret in every job. At the time, I thought this was a negative outlook. But now I realize that if you don’t see that there are things that you could do differently or better, you won’t keep striving to improve. The designers who aren’t afraid to question themselves and their work are the ones who ultimately get better and succeed.

Technical ability brings the idea to life A creative director I visited in college told us, “Don’t lie to me, because I will find out what you can and can’t do within one week. And if you can’t do what you said you could, I will fire you.” That terrified me at the time, but he was right. An employer needs to know what you’re skilled in and what you still need to learn. If you misrepresent yourself, it puts everyone in a bad situation. While you can learn on the job (and will), most firms don’t have time to teach you the software you should have learned in school. Bad execution can kill a great idea. But learning how to execute well will make your work sing.

Stay ahead of the curve
You need to know how to design for print and digital media, period. An understanding of both allows you to express ideas in any application and helps you to be a better resource for your clients.

Communicate what you do best
Don’t, however, try to be everything to everyone. Know what your strengths are and develop them. If you’re a web designer, excel at that. And when you’re looking for a job, look at firms that you think fit well with your skills. Don’t try to say that you’re a great fit for the job if your skills aren’t a match for what they’re seeking. Neither of you will be happy.

Do design because you love design
It shouldn’t be work; it should truly be your passion. Abraham Lincoln said, “Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any one thing.”

See no boundaries

Liz Danzico is chair of the MFA in Interaction Design program at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

To create patterns is natural. In fact, not only as designers, but also as humans, we make sense of a wild environment by taking haphazard shapes and concepts and giving them form and meaning. We categorize them: poster, website, building, typography, interactive, stone, and so on. Creating categories, then, gives our experiences boundaries.

For designers in this era, however, seeing boundaries can be a disadvantage. At a time when websites are spilling off desktops onto sidewalks and computing in public spaces is dissolving into behavior, technology itself has shown boundary blindness. And humans are following suit. We carry our televisions in our pockets. We pay with our phones. And we read more than ever before on an unpredictable number of screens. It is possible to see beyond the small fences of the familiar, but first you must see no boundaries.

Yet even this is not enough. As you become comfortable in this open field—no matter the discipline—what is common is that you design for people. And an understanding of where design intersects with human behavior is critical to raising both the meaning and value of products and services. The studies of how people think (cognitive psychology), how people interact (interaction design), how people behave (behavioral economics), and the design of services for them (service design) can complement and enhance your understanding of your pursuit.

So, start by reimagining your design studio. It’s not just the place where you have a desk, a chair and some tools—it is also the place beyond those walls. It is there, in your design studio at large, that you’ll find those who will inspire and instruct you that seeing no boundaries is one of the greatest lessons for a young designer. Going beyond yourself, then, can become a natural extension of your every day.

Work smart and prepare for a changing practice

Meredith Davis is director of graduate programs in graphic design at NC State University in Raleigh, North Carolina.

My advice to young designers is to build a deep understanding of the systems that define contemporary experience. The goal of today’s audiences is to interact cognitively, socially and physically with complex cultural, technological and economic contexts. Under these conditions, our role as designers often shifts from the design of discrete, freestanding artifacts to the design of tools and systems through which audiences and users construct their own experiences. In meeting those challenges, great form and strategy mediate the interactions between people and their environment; design must be useful, usable, desirable, viable and sustainable in accomplishing the goals people have for such interactions.

Designers, therefore, need to know about more than software and visual invention. We need to understand how people perceive and process information; how they behave in social ways; what they value culturally; how they use technology and what they think it means as a way of doing something. We need to understand how what people want to do with information fits into the rest of their lives and how such goals change over time. We need to work collaboratively with experts in other fields, value research and identify new places where design can have positive influence.

Young designers have greater opportunities to make a difference than previous generations—the field is less hierarchical and more diverse in its applications. Great opportunity, however, carries with it great responsibility. We need to work smart and to prepare for a changing practice.

To be a great designer, understand business

Alan Dye is creative director at Apple in Cupertino, California.

I was lucky enough to spend some time recently with a friend who plays in a band, a pretty brilliant and successful one. Like all the greats, they make amazing work look easy. After the show, we started to talk about process: song making and making design.

We both shared stories about how hard it is to make good work, and how nearly impossible it is to make great work. And how terrifying it can be to share that work with the world. It gave me comfort to hear that I wasn’t the only one who really needed to get a lot of bad work out of my system before getting to anything good. My friend talked about the 20 songs that need to be written to get to the one that makes the album. I talked about the hundreds of sketches and work sessions that lead to the final piece.

It reminded me that in all worthwhile endeavors—creative ones, especially—you need to grind it out. And you need to be scared to death that the work won’t be good enough, isn’t better than anything you’ve done before. I find that it helps to set the bar high. And yes, at times that leads to some anxiety, but it’s all worth it when you create something that makes you proud.

Sadly though, in the world that we find ourselves in today, hard work isn’t enough. As a matter of fact, beautiful, award-winning design skills aren’t even enough—they are the cost of entry.

For a young designer to succeed years from now, you had better have some serious design chops’so start working hard. But in addition to this, you’d better understand how to deploy those design skills in a way that helps solve business problems for your clients. So you’ve got to understand business, as well as how to tell that client’s story across a wide variety of media. Print may not be dead, but the tools that we have to tell stories these days are dramatically different from those of even just a few years ago. In other words, there are plenty of designers out in the world who know how to make a nice poster, but the select few who are going to thrive in the months and years to come are going to be the ones who can tell a complex story across a range of media in a simple, clear and elegant way. So learn from the great storytellers—watch tons of films and read lots of books. And while you’re at it, read the business section every day and start to pay attention to the analytical studies that your strategic planners keep talking about. It will pay off.

And of course—keep working your ass off at the job of making great work.

Be a designer, plus

Stanley Hainsworth is founder and chief creative officer of Tether in Seattle.

A designer has no boundaries. I write this while on an airplane. Which is an apt metaphor for where design has gone (and is going). Design is now a world without defined disciplines, boundaries or restrictions. It is a world with endless points, all interconnecting and leading to a greater destination. Each one of these connection points is a chance to build pieces of a greater story. You are the architect of your own flight path: Create your personal journey by taking advantage of every opportunity that arises.

A designer is everything, plus. Think like an anthropologist, a lawyer, a marketer and a business owner. The design part is what you’re taught in school. It is a trade you will learn and grow along the way. But the way you think is what will set you apart as an employee and as a partner to a client. Think strategically and be a student of life. Look at each design problem you’re presented with as an opportunity to solve a problem with every tool, experience and bit of stored know­ledge you have in that amazing brain of yours.

A designer is a student of the world. Look at the world around you as a personal palette that you can draw from at any time. Design books, annuals and catalogs are all great, but the most valuable resource you have is your own experience and how you uniquely view and resource your surroundings. The personal insights and experiences you bring to your work will set you apart. They will lend a passion to your projects that will result in creating the emotional connections we strive for as designers.

Experience the world beyond your computer

Jessica Helfand is a partner at Winterhouse in Falls Village, Connecticut, and a founding editor of Design Observer.

It has never been easier to think that the world is your oyster simply because you sit, day after day, staring at a computer screen. And there’s never been a more misguided way to think about design in the 21st century.

Like music, design is an international language, and it’s evident in everything from text to textiles, shelter to shopping. How we communicate in foreign places stems from the ways in which we engage material culture?not popular culture, but the real, tangible, material worlds inhabited by millions of people you’ve never met.

Ignore them at your peril, because they’re going to be your next audience. As a student, your job is to learn how to learn; this means training your eye, your hands, your mind. Yet as you hone your craft, you must keep your eye on a much more distant goal, but a much more relevant one—and that is need.

What do people actually need? How can a designer meet that need? How can you actually observe what people need?and where and when and how they need it? Finally, how might you begin to think about design as a combination of the known (read: your education) and the unknown (read: the real world) and approach it as a kind of robust international language?

You can begin by contemplating a departure from your comfort zone and going out into the world to see for yourself. Apply for every travel grant you can. Get out there and look. Be strong and listen. Be brave and ask tough questions. Be humble and participate in that which seems so other. Be bold and immerse yourself in a culture that is not your own. This is what it will mean to be a designer in the next 50 years. Start now.

Be a super-designer-renaissance person

Michael Konetzka is principal at Dennis | Konetzka | Design Group, with offices in Washington, D.C., and Chicago.

AIGA’s 2009 national conference was entitled “Make/Think.” Important skills or abilities, to be sure, and to those two words I would add: “Explain.”

Assuming commitment, creativity, deep and broad visual literacy, and an understanding of design processes (oh, is that all!), you will need to be able to articulate your (design) thinking in a way that will be meaningful to analytical and political thinkers, not just intuitive thinkers. You will need to be able to do this both verbally and in writing. Additionally, you will need to be able to collaborate with others, including those who live and work well outside design-related fields, and process the information and experience they provide. You will also need expertise in a particular design area—preferably an area that you love—that will allow you to give form to ideas.

As this was being written, Steve Jobs debuted the iPad. Game changer or overgrown iPod Touch? We?ll certainly know in three years. Regardless of its success, it is clear that having the skills to be a media-independent designer is essential. That suggests, for example, that the necessary area of expertise may be in coding languages and how they can enable interface design. Three years from now, expectations for flexibility and custom­ization on the part of a user—no matter the interaction—will be even greater than they are today.

Design will continue to be about broad thinking, about the what and the how, about making connections between seemingly disparate activities or experiences. How else to make the unfamiliar familiar? To be successful at that, you will need to be able to think, make and explain.

Keep learning, keep giving

Tim Larsen is president and founder of Larsen, a design, branding, marketing and interactive agency in Minneapolis and San Francisco.

Be broad-minded
Study an array of subjects in addition to design and be involved in current affairs. Throughout your career, you?ll work with multiple audiences: A broad understanding of business, the arts, the sciences and technology will be essential for wise leadership.

In the future, design courses should ideally be treated like pre-med, pre-law, or pre-MBA classes—as preparation for an advanced degree. Think about it: If leaders in medicine, law and business had been trained first as designers, their views today might be richer, broader, more innovative. Steve Jobs is an inspirational example of bringing a designer’s perspective to the technology of computers. In his case, it changed the face of business. How and what can you learn now that will prepare you to learn about design later?

Be detail-oriented
Big ideas are made up of details. Your intelligence is demonstrated in those details. Put design elements together in a deliberate way. Be aware of how your notes and files are organized, how your thoughts are layered, how you present yourself and how you take care of others. All of those details are part of craftsmanship and will help you succeed.

Be a student for life
College is only the beginning. Use your college years to learn broadly and build a portfolio that opens minds and doors. Ask your professors to challenge your work; go beyond what’s required. Attend design conferences. Study industrial, product, architecture, fashion, theater, film/video and interactive design. After college, stay involved; keep learning, questioning, growing. Knowing how much there is to know will keep you humble, and creativity and humility make a good pair.

Be generous
Volunteer for your professional design association. Mentor, write articles, teach. Use design to change minds about critical or controversial topics. By giving, you will get much back.

Five steps to living a remarkable life

Debbie Millman is a managing partner and president of the design division at Sterling Brands in New York. She is currently serving as president of AIGA.

  • First itemWork harder than anybody else you know.
  • Second itemDon’t rest on your laurels. Don’’t rest on any laurels.
  • Third itemConstantly try to find out and learn about the things that you don’t know. It’s really easy to learn about things that you know. And it’s pretty easy to learn about things that you know that you don’t know. I would suggest that people learn about all the things that they don’t realize that they don’t know.
  • Fourth itemMany people start out by thinking about all the things that they can’t do; once you take that path, it’s very hard to get off of it. Try not to take that path. The only person who can make your dreams come true is you. If you start out with limited dreams, you’ll achieve only limited dreams. This is not a good way to start.
  • Fifth itemDo not compromise! Consider what you would do if you knew you would never fail, and pursue that as if your life depended on it–because it does! Only you can create a remarkable life for yourself. Only you. Start right now!