My, myself, and I

In a design course I teach, the students are tasked with designing a 32-page booklet that showcases the work of a term's graduating class. In a class of 8 to 14 students, they start by creating a design for the cover only. There can be only one chosen, cover design. Whatever that design has in terms of style, typeface, color palette, etc., is what we go forward with in the design of the rest of the book. All the students must build, expand, and relate to that chosen design. A new competition begins for the design of the subsequent pages. Everything must flow and go together.

I had a student who ignored the style, color, typeface choice, and just about everything else about the winning cover design. In a critique of the interior page designs, I pointed out that his work had virtually nothing to do with the cover design. His designs used different, unrelated colors. He said liked his new "royal purple" better. He also admitted to the class that he really liked gradients, so his new designs had gradient backgrounds behind everything. It was ugly, both his designs, and the atmosphere in the room.

"Design isn't fine art," is something I've said to students repeatedly in my teaching career. Designers don't just do anything they want. A fine artist has the luxury to just go with whatever they want to do. Designers create for a purpose. Designers solve problems.

We don't work in a vacuum. Sometimes we work on projects that have components that have already been created. Sometimes we are given a "style guide" or a corporate standards manual to follow. My problem student later set about revising his designs. He took the criticism to heart and when I came around to see what he was working on, I saw him going in a new direction. He had taken the design concepts and feeling of the cover design and applied them to his new work. It was actually some of his better work. I asked him what happened and he said that he had been stubborn. He said he had to give up on the personal directions in which he originally wanted to go. It took him a while but a light went off in his head. He suddenly realized what he was really supposed to do.

Sometimes design isn't always about the next great creative concept. Sometimes is it simply solving a problem by providing something that is needed. It's not always "me, me, me". Objectivity is a very valuable mindset to turn on when needed.