I’ve been designing for five years now. Out of that, I’ve been a designer for three of them. I must establish the difference between the two before I continue, so that we’re on the same page. Designing, to me is a very vague term. It can involve creating layouts and templates, apart from actually making things look good. A designer, is someone who starts with a plain sheet of paper, a lot of text and puts them together in a visually attractive arrangement. A designer is involved in designing, but designing doesn’t make you a designer. I started designing by creating basic templates for my first weblogs. I was restricted by what Blogger allowed me to do, but I tried to push the limits beyond what people had been used to seeing till then. I admit that things weren’t amazing to look at, but people came around to see what could be done. Breaking away from the conventional was the big thing.⌘

I can call myself a designer today because I understand the language of colours and layouts. They truly are a language. The different pieces need to be brought together in a particular way so that they make sense, seem attractive to another person. But it is a strange language. The person who receives, doesn’t need to know it to appreciate it, and hence, it is probably a much bigger universal entity than any other with the largest appeal. Not everyone can communicate what they want to using design, but the one’s who can, are the real designers.⌘

Convention

Design patterns take a long time to see a real revolution. I’ve not been in the field long enough to see one, nor do I know how the last one came about. But a lot of the time, a design is associated to its medium in a unidirectional manner. When someone sees elements of a design taken from one medium, applied to another – they immediately begin associating the two and try to find similarities. If they can’t, the design is rejected. It’s hard to explain how hard headed people can be about this, but it’s one of those things that you have to go through to actually understand. I dare say more than half the genres in music we hear today wouldn’t have existed if cross breeding of existing genres was rejected by people the way they dismiss designs — and that’s how creativity grows, by mixing, matching and experimenting. I’ve seen a good deal of ideas get rejected because they didn’t look like the norm, and while it is frustrating, I’m still not in a place to turn things around.⌘

Being conventional, of course, has its rewards. One works with tried and tested formulae, feeding people what they’re familiar with. Familiarity is always more accepting than something very new. Change can be displacing for most people, and the corporate agenda today is to make the most amount of money as fast as possible. That means any service or product needs to be accepted in the shortest amount of time. This makes design stagnant and repetitive. It might get the job done, but it’s boring.⌘

I think it is safe to say that industrial establishments seek creativity in the most non-creative way possible. And design firms need to listen to them because that is where the money is. At the end of the day, everybody needs to put food on their tables.⌘

This will be legen … wait for it

Being a maverick designer is much harder than I initially thought. The freedom to do your own thing without feeling restricted by acceptance is an amazing thing, but that’s not going to happen until people open up their minds to new possibilities. They need to stop looking for familiar and formulaic solutions, asking for proof that a new element works before they allow it to go through. There are no guarantees in creativity. Creativity creates, and when something new is created, opinions can go both way. People need to be flexible enough to allow that to happen and learn from the outcome. I feel like the next revolution is just around the corner, but we can’t see it because of the fat non-accepting gorilla sitting in the middle of the room.⌘

A designer who doesn’t take chances is not a designer. He’s a drone. We have enough of them without more being added everyday. I see tons of designs everyday that win competitions and prizes, but look like the designers shouldn’t have left design school. There are very few design firms that actually deliver what I call design.⌘

As these things go, every profession has the elite and the upcoming. There are people who are new and who want to learn the right way to do things. Then there are the wannabe elite, who count themselves with the best of the lot even though they have nothing to deliver. The elite are the ones who have been in the field the longest, and have tons of experience, but it is the upcoming who look at everything with fresh eyes. They are the ones who cause revolutions. We need more up-comers, new perspectives and fresh energy. But more than all that, we need room for us to grow. I don’t know when the next big change will arrive, but I can feel the air sizzle with anticipation of an opening. And it will be awesome.⌘