I‘m not a designer for money.
I run a design business for money, but that’s a different thing. The money has always come as an incidental, as an effect and not the cause. I design and often people want to give me money for it. That’s a healthy relationship and a good way to stay alive.
But I design because I love it. I design because when I don’t, odd things happen inside me and the world takes on a certain pallor.
I’m a designer because when I walk around in the city I can’t keep my eyes off storefront signs, sandwich boards, even newspapers in their stands. Everywhere I look is typography for me to study and I often wonder if I’d have made the same choices.
I’m a designer because I see bumper stickers with type so small it can’t be read unless you physically run into the other vehicle. I wonder about the thought process behind that choice and why the designer didn’t care more for his audience.
When I go to the movies, I often pay more attention to the opening credits than the rest of the movie because they’re fountains of inspiration to me. Pacing, typography, layering, composition, mood and how music and images go together…every movie is a semester of schooling for me.
While I hate watching the news on TV I love watching their opening sequences for the same reason. A lot of info has to go into very tight time and space constraints. They’ve got pictures of news anchors, the station logo, stock quotes superimposed over the Loch Ness monster, pictures of Seattle and random shiny bits in motion all over the place and somehow it works. It’s fascinating and I can’t tear my eyes from it. That’s another semester.
Then there’s the internet. I started designing websites because I wasn’t happy with what I saw. Many people were trying to make their businesses thrive on the internet, and I knew they were failing just by looking at their sites. Would you give your money to someone who actually thinks green with pink polka dots is a pleasing color scheme? Or that a flashing star background behind a horse running through a meadow somehow makes sense? Sites like these always left me with a haunting residue. Like what happens when you eat asparagus.
Then there are the great sites. The one-in-a-million site that has 96 awards listed in the footer, and which is so good I feel a pang of jealousy. I see those and wonder why I’m a designer at all, or if I’m even capable of such magic. Those are the times when I spend 48 straight hours reading books on design and doing tutorials, just to keep up with the talent around me if I’m to stand any chance at all.
I’m a designer because I’m probably not slick enough to be a politician, but I’m unwilling to let things slide as I see them. Design is how an artist changes the world, even if it’s just a page at a time.
That’s what it means to me to be a designer. You look around and you wonder.