A cruel reminder for all designers

The other day I had a conversation with a friend and it made me think about this scene from MadMen (as I was roughly paraphrasing it myself in a conversation).

It's a cruel reminder for most designers because it is the simple reality we often don't like to hear.

As a designer, you serve the brief, nothing more. You're hired as a tool to solve a business problem, at least in most cases.

But some designers are able to transcend this. They solve problems while also expressing an original worldview with their solution. It's when your work carries utility, necessity and meaning simultaneously.

It's when the product, interface or brand becomes inseparable from the designer's philosophy.

This is the only time design crosses into art and it also happens to be the holy grail for many, including myself.

But how do you get there?

It's not easy and certainly not for everyone. Venturing away from the brief and being "just a tool" can be dangerous for your job stability and reputation.

Also, if you do it too soon in your career, you'll likely fail because you're not ready yet. If you want to leave a mark, you need to be prepared to deal with the consequences which is usually something that you get better at with experience.

A couple things I'd say are necessary for this transition:

1. You have to choose depth over range at some point. Range is great when you're young and starting out, all you care about is adaptability for new tools, styles, trends, offerings etc.

You're essentially building technical competency when you're young (very necessary) but depth is likely not on your radar just yet. If you want to transition into the "holy grail" era (as described above) you'll need to replace some range with depth at some point.

2. You need to understand capitalism/commerce like a cold marketer. Understand why people buy, how markets behave and all the constraints that come with it. You first have to learn the rules in order to break them.

Learn about supply, demand, pricing elasticity, timing, framing, consumer biases... all the marketers' "magic" tricks that are deeply rooted in psychological consumerism and have been around almost unchanged for decades now.

3. Develop a personal philosophy, not just aesthetics. Who are you? What do you stand for? What's your view on the world? How do you think the world should look, feel or behave?

This goes back to choosing depth over range. It doesn't have to happen all in one day, this might take years and that's okay. Once those things feel more defined for you, you'll naturally use the learnings from Nr.2 and apply them to this new philosophy.

4. Detach from approval loops and stop designing for applause only (this is a hard one). Cold metrics are what made you a good designer so far, but real detachment allows you to replace your technical service with your own voice. This is tricky because if you've been trained on designing for someone else's metrics, it will be hard to feel "success" when you start switching to your own voice and philosophy.

But the best part: If you do it well enough, people will love you for it. They will hire you precisely for it. This is when design becomes art. Your art.

5. And the last part: Study the work of artists, not just designers. Artists are usually those who question everything. Designers are those with answers, often based on the already known. If you look at other designers, you'll often find the same answers to different problems.

Most of our work as designers converges, especially nowadays because we're all bound to the same frameworks, platforms and group thinking. You need to break out of this. It's the same with architects. Most are building the same boring buildings, but some of them seem to be able to break out of it and build something entirely different, still functional, but with a soul. We all know those buildings when we see them, no explanation needed.

You want to broaden your palette so to speak.

Think like an artist, design like a designer.

Let's keep trying,
Tobias