Creating a story out of your idea.
Creating a story out of your idea.
At the heart of good design is the ability to understand another: the person who will view, consume, use, or appreciate the work. Without the ability to empathize with a person one may never meet, the designer cannot create work that resonates and moves people to act and think, and the designer cannot create work that improves the world.
Designers are the champions of people who they may never meet; and a designer often has to make decisions that walk the line of right and wrong. The designer speaks the truth and never hides or misinforms: to do so would betray the trust people put into design.
A designer often hands work off into the hands of others: engineers, customers, and clients. This work needs their feedback and criticism to become stronger and better. Then, it is back to the beginning to iterate and develop. The work can be demanding and the pay-off only occurs much later in the future. Patience helps a designer focus and pull through, while giving space for creativity to flourish unhindered.
Perception requires the mind to make a leap of faith without knowing where the leap will land. Designers are first to begin work and operate in an environment where information is at its weakest and where ideas are as firm as clouds. They must call upon their past experiences to decide how a specification, idea, or plan will take concrete form and leap into a solution that is powerful and thoughtful.
In a world of best-practices, whitepapers, data-driven design, usability research, and mass-opinion, designers are the few people that can use taste convincingly to create the new, the exciting, and the different. Taste is what provides differentiation from competitors, puts life into the bland, crusades for emotion into the silent, and writes storytelling into the everyday. Without taste, design lacks beauty.
