It’s almost impossible to design anything by yourself. It’s also stupid. You improve everything when you talk to people with different viewpoints, experiences, and skill sets. The myth of the solitary genius is just that: a myth. Mike Monteiro.

Every good designer is a bit of a method actor. We try to design through the eyes of the people we anticipate using the product. Does this mean we disregard your business needs? Au contraire! We make sure that your business needs match the needs of the people you’re trying to win over. Ultimately, that’s the best thing we can do for your business. Mike Monteiro.

Your success depends on how well your product or service meets the needs of the people who use it, and how many people you get to use it. Good designers understand this. They find out who your customers are, how they behave, and how they think. Some designers even create personas to better represent these people so it’s easier to plan and design with them in mind. Mike Monteiro.

Design starts with understanding the problem and helping to set the strategy. Not having your designer participate in the problem solving is like a restaurant investor handing the daily menu to the chef and saying, «Make this.» Neither of us would want to eat at that restaurant. Mike Monteiro.

To get design’s full value, you need to hire a professional. You need a designer. Would you trust any other valuable part of your business to someone who wasn’t qualified to do it? Would you let your cousin’s best friend do your accounting because they had a calculator? Or let your neighbor reprogram your fuel injection system because they have three cars on blocks on their lawn? Probably not.

We hire professionals because we can hold them accountable. If you get audited, you better believe you’re taking your accountant with you to the hearing. If the credit card processing system on your site goes down, you want to know that your engineering team is on it. You also want to be able to call them into your office and ask what happened. When your users can’t figure out your site’s interface, you want to know you’ve got people trained in designing effective interfaces on the job. When you ask people to take on tasks that are neither part of their job nor something they’re trained at, you have no right to complain if they screw it up. Gift horses and whatnot.

Can I guarantee that hiring a professional designer will result in good design? No more than a college can guarantee that studying there will make you smarter. But it certainly improves your odds. Especially if you find the right fit.

Mike Monteiro .

Imagine two chair shops across the street from each other. One shop takes the chair’s design into consideration from the start. They hire the best chair designer they can. The chair designer researches other chairs on the market to figure out where they’re lacking. They ask people what they like and dislike about their current chairs, research materials, consider the chair company’s budget and profit margin, and source materials and manufacturing to make sure the chair is built right. They test different designs. They make adjustments. They test again. They come up with a solid design that meets both the company’s goals and people’s desires. The chair goes into production. It sells well. Everyone is now rich.

The people at the chair shop across the street also make a chair. They select adequate materials and make a seat, some legs, a back. This is definitely a chair! Then they hire a designer and say, «Make this a comfortable chair!» The designer adds a sad little foam rubber seat cushion. The chair bombs. Everyone dies of dysentery.

The value of good design is the increased possibility of success. We understand its importance in everyday objects like chairs, clothes, watches, coffee makers, and a good mattress. When it comes to websites, we tend to think of design as a surface layer applied at the end. In truth, that website’s design started long ago. It can be intentional or happenstance. For design to be truly great, you need to build it into your projects from conception. Because if you’re not doing it, you can bet your competitors are.

Mike Monteiro.

… when we build websites or apps, we often wait until the last minute to bring in designers to «apply» design, or look and feel. This is akin to baking a cake and then hiring a baker to make it taste good. Mike Monteiro.

… It’s the same with graphic design. Before the computer, we had specialized workers. Graphic designers functioned more as orchestra leaders. After the computer, people were doing all of their photo-manipulations, typesetting, and prepress work themselves. It was a business model that was set up upon hope: a designer designs something and hopes it has success. They keep overhead low by doing as much work themselves, in order to retain as much profit as they can. So designers had to learn all of these skills, but I think that we are at the point again where people are realizing that they can’t do it all, despite being told they had to. It’s incredibly difficult to do everything. Ben Kiel.

… I think there has been a shift, but actually that shift is reversing. There is a time and a place in the typeface design industry where you can still do that—you can design a typeface sitting in your room and not talk to anyone. Once software became affordable, the means of production and distribution became accessible to all. But at least in the type industry, I think the trend is different now. It’s one thing to do a poster font that requires only a particular set of characters by yourself. However, if you are doing a superfamily, or a large type family, there are all sorts of things to cover. We’ve essentially bridged the technical point where the needs of type design outstretch the ability for one person to do everything themself.

I’m thinking of an example like Tal Leming, and his recent Balto typeface. He drew the entire thing. He kerned everything. But he didn’t do the hinting. And I think that’s going to be the case more often. There’s always going to be some collaborative help as type projects become more demanding. Large character sets aren’t just English, web fonts need hinting, and super families are huge tasks. At a certain point, type designers will have to choose where they are going to spend their time. Someone like me can do the technical stuff, although it’s something that I’m trying to transition out of.

There are people who spend their time just working on the design. For example, Kris Sowersby from Klim Type Foundry, does most of the drawing and kerning, but I do his typeface production. I master his fonts because he doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want to do the very slow, nit-picky, technical work. But I do. So yeah, it’s possible to sit alone in a room and do everything. But I also think designers have to really think about what it is they want to do, as the amount of work keeps increasing.

Ben Kiel.

Looking at the history of metal type, persons credited with creating typefaces were rarely the only ones who contributed to their manufacture. Usually the designer would conceive of the aesthetic blueprint, while a punchcutter carved the steel punches used to make molds from which the type was cast. It was uncommon for the designer to be personally involved in the cutting and casting; others were responsible for physically producing the actual type. It’s a rather new phenomenon for the process of typeface design to be a solo effort. Even today, I prefer working with others because the collaborative process allows greater potential to find better solutions. Ken Barber.