When life is seen as a journey of discovery, then we learn to deal more gracefully with the setbacks, the mistakes, and the roadblocks in our life. We can start to grasp the spiritual insight that there are no mistakes, simply experiences that point us to a deeper truth about ourselves and the world.Frederic Laloux .
With our most basic needs taken care of, businesses increasingly try to create needs, feeding the illusion that more stuff we don’t really need—more possessions, the latest fashion, a more youthful body—with make us happy and whole. We come to see that much of this economy based on fabricated needs is unsustainable from a financial and ecological perspective. We have reached a stage where we often pursue growth for growth’s sake.Frederic Laloux .
Your life no longer needs to be divided into arbitrary phases of work and retirement. You can blend the two for fun and profit—design a better lifestyle that makes work enjoyable because it’s not the only thing on the menu.Carli Ressler and Jody Thompson .
When you hire a designer, you’re not hiring a pair of hands. You’re hiring a mind that’s been trained to solve problems in a way you can’t.
Design isn’t magic and it isn’t art. It’s a craft. Design solves a problem within a set of given constraints.
Much as a doctor needs patients to practice their craft, a designer needs clients to practice theirs. Like walking into a doctor’s office, describing what’s wrong, and then having your doctor diagnose the problem and prescribe a solution, working with a designer is the same. You tell us what’s wrong, and we research, come up with a plan, and design a solution. We don’t ask for blind trust, but we do ask that you respect that we’ve been trained in handling a scalpel. And maybe a little trust.
You know bad design when you encounter it. From every chair you’ve sat in that hurt your ass, to every coffee cup that burned your hand, to every time your finger triggered the wrong link on your phone, to every airline booking site that pissed you off. You know bad design. You hate it. And you should. Because anything designed poorly could’ve been designed better. The truth is that good design isn’t magic: it takes a clear goal, the expertise and resources to reach that goal, and, most of all, the intention to do it well.Mike Monteiro.
Objects have value not because of what they are but because of what they enable us to do.
And, as the people who make objects, we have a profound responsibility. A responsibility to not take for granted the limited time that each of us has in this world. A responsibility to make that time as beautiful, as comfortable, as painless, as empowering, and as delightful as possible though the experiences that we craft.
Because this is all there is.
And it’s up to us to make it better.
Aral Balkan.
I annotate aggressively. If I’m reading a piece of really long fiction, I often find that there are these fabulous things I want to remember. I want to take notes on it, so I highlight it, and if I have a thought about it, I’ll type it out quickly. Then I dump all these clippings into a format that I can look at later. In the case of War and Peace, I actually had 16,000 words worth of notes and clippings at the end of it. So I printed it out as a print-on-demand book. In short, I have a physical copy of all of my favorite parts of War and Peace that I can flip through, with my notes, but I don’t actually own a physical copy of War and Peace. Clive Thompson.
Most design disciplines think in the long term. Architects design buildings to last for generations; industrial designers create products that will withstand endless hours, if not years, of use.
Graphic designers, whether we admit it or not, are trained for the short term. Most of the things we design have to discharge their function immediately, whether it's a design for a book or a poster, a website or an infographic, a sign system, or a business card. In school critiques, architecture and industrial design students produce models. Graphic designers produce finished prototypes. As a result, the idea that we create things that are unfinished, that can only accrue value over time, is foreign to us. It's so easy for us to visualize the future, and so hard to admit that we really can’t. That's what we face every time we unveil a new logo.
And so every time a major identity is introduced today, it's subjected to immediate scrutiny. Why not? It's fun. It's risk free. Every client wants to have an audience «connect on an emotional level with their brand.» And then when they do, it's not always what they hoped for.
Whether we want to acknowledge it or not, anyone evaluating a brand new logo at first glance is — to paraphrase my partner Paula Scher — reviewing a three-act play based on what they see the moment the curtain goes up. Or, to put it differently, they think they're judging a diving competition when in fact they're judging a swimming competition. The question isn't what kind of splash you make. It's how long you can keep your head above water.
Michael Beirut.
An important part of working together is being humble with people who have a better or more interesting perspective than your own. Rob Giampietro.
I have two bits of advice for my younger self. First, I didn’t understand until later in my career how important it is as a designer to listen. That is the first thing I’d tell myself. At Project Projects, I had phone calls with new clients, and at one point I realized that my desire to please them and show them how much I knew wasn’t as important as allowing them to talk and become intrigued by the mystery of what it would be like for us to work together. Even if I had already started to formulate ideas, I needed to let the person bringing the project to me finish all of their thoughts before I spoke. Listening is so important, and I feel like a lot of new designers don’t understand that. It takes time.
The second bit of advice I’d offer to my younger self is to be patient with recognition. It’s important to ask for recognition when you need it and to have good support systems around you, but significant recognition takes a long time to earn and is worth the wait. It’s important to have realistic expectations and not let yourself become prematurely frustrated.
Rob Giampietro.