tiny gigantic

I’ve got various friends who run various successful graphic design studios. They all went to design school, seriously know their shit, and have been practicing graphic design for years. When we met years ago, I was doing copywriting, naming, and brand strategy stuff. So when a recent article referred to Language in Common as a “design studio,” I received no end of razzing: “Since when are you a designer? Since when do you run a design studio?”

To be fair, these friends have devoted large chunks of their lives to the practice of Design, and have no doubt earned their status as masters of the craft. And I believe I’d never have come to design if I hadn’t met some of them early in my creative career.

Still, I’ve never identified as a Designer, so my friends’ playful poking doesn’t bother me that much. But what does bother me is the misunderstanding inherent in their fun-making: that design is limited only to graphic communications. I know, I know: here you’ll remind me that designers are pure problem solvers, and that design is a process rather than a product—absolutely, and we’ve heard it yawped form the rooftops of the graphic Design community for a quite a few years now. Problem is, many of those who are yawping it—while deep and effective creative thinkers—are mistaking mastery of the tools of graphic design for the process of designing. And while they continue to use that mastery to solve problems, and continue to be top notch graphic designers, many refuse to allow that design can be used to solve problems other than graphic—that the practice of design itself is an entity separate from the creation of a visual product, and that the measure of design success is very rarely only aesthetic. If design is really to be an inclusive community, we’d better start inviting all the creative people in.

So, at the risk of being redundant, and late to the game, I’d like to offer a broader definition of design. One that lets problem solvers be problem solvers no matter the medium they work in.

Design is not the making of posters and logos and brochures and websites. It’s not title sequences and motion graphics. It’s a way of doing which can be defined as making things that solve problems.

Here’s how it goes:

-You figure out what the problem is
-You figure out other ways to frame the problem
-You come up with a shitload of ideas
-You test a few of them out
-You decide what solves the problem and what doesn’t
-You refine it and make something dope

And with this process any problem can be engaged as a design problem, and any tool or resource can be used in the process. Sure, the tools and eventual outcome are different, but whether an essay or story, a painting or poster, a space or a structure, the process is exactly the same: Sometimes you begin knowing what you want to say, other times you figure that out by doing. Then you think about rhythm and composition, light and shadow, hierarchies, shapes and sizes. And you hope that the thing you’re making has multiple useful ways of being understood.

Often that thing isn’t graphic, or even pretty, and sometimes it has nothing to do with communication. But it’s still design.

11/08/07 by josh kamler

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 8th, 2007 at 11:02 am and is filed under Thinking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.