Siolon

Being A Good Designer Isn’t Just About Being A Good Designer

We live in a time that is far removed from the late 90’s bat­tle with 640x480 res­o­lu­tions with IE 4 (oh how I shud­der at those days). Today, the web is an elab­o­rate medium for artis­tic expres­sion, and we have no short­age of tal­ented design­ers strut­ting their stuff and receiv­ing their due recog­ni­tion. But I must admit that I, and most of the web design­ers out there, aren’t a “good designer” in the tra­di­tional sense of being com­pletely orig­i­nal. In fact, I ven­ture to esti­mate that the truly rev­o­lu­tion­ary ideas come out in web design is com­ing from a group smaller than 5% (sim­i­lar to this is how much of a country’s wealth comes from the upper 1%). So, what about the rest of us?

The Argu­ment

For a long time I was dis­cour­aged that I would never be a Cameron Moll, Eric Meyer, or work for Happy Cog. I thought since I couldn’t com­pete at that level it was bet­ter that I hang up the design­ing shoes. Well, I have since learned that being a good designer isn’t just about being a good designer, and I want to elab­o­rate on what that means and its impli­ca­tions for the major­ity of “design­ers” out there.

I have learned that just because I’m not com­pletely orig­i­nal designer with my lay­outs, method­ol­ogy, etc that doesn’t mean I can’t be a “good designer.” While I might not be the most orig­i­nal I can work on how I dis­cern good from bad and func­tional against un-functional in doing design work. In short, the aver­age designer can be a good designer by hon­ing their abil­ity to be dis­cern­ing on design choices and there­fore be able to give edu­cated opin­ions to clients and co-workers about best prac­tices in the design world.

The Proof

To prove this we need to look no far­ther than this site! It is chocked full of resources, best prac­tices, and gal­leries of excep­tional designers/programmers doing excep­tional things in order that we may learn from them. The fact that there are no short­ages of design gal­leries on the Inter­net speaks to the mar­ket of inspir­ing other design­ers. That doesn’t mean we can bla­tantly copy them, but we can see how some­one else approached a sim­i­lar design prob­lem and then mix and match to solve our indi­vid­ual design requirements.

The Con­clu­sion

Just because most of us (includ­ing myself) might not be in the upper ech­e­lon of design­ers doesn’t mean that we can’t be tal­ented in how we approach our design work. It’s true that being truly orig­i­nal is great, but for the rest of us we can stand on the shoul­ders of giants while paving our own way!