The role of the designer is that of a very good, thoughtful host—whose energy goes into trying to anticipate the needs of his guests. Charles Eames.
Design is like language—a larger vocabulary of concepts gives you more and better ways to be understood. Liam Campbell.
Design ideas, much like dreams, need to be realised quickly and in sufficient detail to be communicated effectively, otherwise they disappear before your eyes. The faster a designer can get an idea to a sufficient fidelity, the sooner it allows them to bring less non-designers into the mix (and it improves the designer-to-designer conversations too). It’s essential that we do this because the greatest design ideas can come from the most unexpected people in the most unexpected places. You just don’t know.
It’s incumbent on every leader and every senior designer to create an environment where more dopey ideas get shared. The key to this is being able to share ideas that other people can understand correctly. If you, or your business is employing design as a competitive strategy, you’ll only be as successful as your ability to share, nurture and evolve your dopey ideas.
Darryl Gray.
Risking ideas by sharing them too early is a well-founded concern. But, ironically, not sharing ideas early carries just as much risk. A lack of other essential points of view can mean that the idea never quite gathers enough momentum to take flight. It doesn’t develop the texture and detail that comes from bouncing around different minds. It risks becoming a missed opportunity.
Sharing ideas that cannot be properly understood is risky. Designers need better ways of sharing their ideas with designers and non-designers alike. This is a communication and tooling problem that the next generation of design tools must help solve.
Darryl Gray.
Great designers know that shared ideas stand the greatest chance of taking flight. Great designers realise they don’t need to know all the answers; their role is to shepherd the idea to the right people at the right time, and to help protect it. This is what makes great designers great.Darryl Gray.
When the point of contact between the product and the people becomes a point of friction, then the industrial designer has failed.
On the other hand, if people are made safer, more comfortable, more eager to purchase, more efficient—or just plain happier—by contact with the product, then the designer has succeeded.
Henry Dreyfuss.
Design is basic to all human activities—the placing and patterning of any act towards a desired goal constitutes a design process. Victor Papanek.
People think that design is styling. Design is not style. It’s not about giving shape to the shell and not giving a damn about the guts. Good design is a renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need and beauty to produce something that the world didn’t know was missing. Paola Antonelli.
Helvetica is popular because of a variety of moments in history. It was right for the way in which visual culture was changing. It could be adapted for logos and publications. Helvetica was an evolution of a much older typeface style, but it was right for the moment. It could be very heavily promoted and advertised because there weren’t hundreds of foundries releasing and promoting typefaces. Where it sat in terms of technology shifts was also important. Yes, it was licensed for everyday things like Letraset and sign-making shops, but when software manufacturers needed some typefaces for their computers, they just asked for the most popular typefaces that everyone knew. Then, all of a sudden, Helvetica and Times New Roman became ubiquitous and maybe Helvetica was a bit more contemporary. Dan Rhatigan.
Every time someone says: ‹We need the next Helvetica›, I respond: ‹What’s the next Helvetica? What is going to capture people’s spirit?› You’re making typefaces that other people have to work with so, unless it’s a custom job where you know exactly what the context is going to be and what demands are going to be placed on the typeface, you have to make an educated guess as to what the typeface needs to do and how it’s going to do it.
You have to prepare a typeface so that people who are not great typographers get a good result out of pouring it into a layout, dropping it in a headline. So you have to work out what is the best internal rhythm, what are the right proportions, what’s in tune with the shape of the letters and the overall family.
It’s intuition, not sales figures, that will probably tell you what’s going to be successful. Often, by the time someone tells you to go out and see what kinds of typefaces people are using, it’s too late for you to do a typeface like that. You have to take a longer view.
Dan Rhatigan.