How do you become a great designer?
Have you looked around lately? Does it feel like everything you’ve encountered feels the same? It might be a remix of ideas slapped together to become something different but if you looked a little closer, you’d find that “sameness“.
Now, you look inwards and you find that you too have fallen into that trap, that safety of familiarity, that “sameness”.
The truth is, too often as designers we leave the less trodden path of awe and adventure to embrace the familiar, the boring and bland, the obviously practical whilst robbing ourselves (and our clients/audience) of the opportunities to explore and wonder.
What is a design voice?
Just like your human voice is your unique identifier, your design voice is how you interpret an idea and render those interpretations into an experience. Your voice could be loud, calming, laidback, assertive, seductive, rich, bland — but it’s your voice nonetheless. The same goes with your design and how you interpret ideas. It is your personality, your style, unique to only you and it falls on you to discover it and wield it.
That’s all well and good, but how do you get one?
Basketball players, musicians, writers, architects, and anyone else who is talented did not become great by completing three tasks per year. Every day, they worked hard in their studios, courts, and fields, honing their skills and honing their distinct expertise.
As a designer, there's no reason you can't spend at least an hour a day designing something. When you practice design, you are designing — let that sink in!
And as you design more, you begin to develop something I like to call “Design sensibilities“, a way by which you conceptualize, perceive, interpret and translate design that is unique to you and you alone.
Now that doesn’t mean that your design voice is fixed and static. Just like you have varying tones for pleasure, joy, pain, anguish, stoicism, indifference and so on, your design voice can be modulated to fit any scenario you find yourself in or narrative you’re trying to tell.
And the kicker?
You can always evolve your design voice. Anytime you want to. Perhaps I should clarify here — you can evolve your design voice without losing your core. This is fundamental to
But why aren’t you using your voice?
Fear.
Fear of being wrong, more specifically.
Being a great designer and cooking out great designs requires the courage to attempt all of your ideas rather than simply thinking they won't work and the willingness to accept that in most cases you could be wrong.
We operate in a space that incentivizes getting it right the first few tries (typically where few tries < 3) and when we don’t, the “punishment” is often black-walling, silencing your voice so that it isn’t heard in a participatory context. That’s a fancy way of saying you will be shut down and forced to create work with the very sameness you’ve been actively trying to avoid.
In the end, you’ve got only one voice and it falls on you to use it
The first step to finding your voice is to make sure you cover the fundamentals. Cover them knowing exactly who you are and what you want to do & be.
The pathway to becoming the designer you want to be will open up to you.
That is how you find your voice.
That is how you become a great designer.
Sidelines
It’s been an interesting one and a half months. I did manage to get some rest and do a lot of thinking, some productive….the rest not so much. But most importantly, I was able to focus on my family and the people that I care about.
One change I wanted to inform you about was that I have decided to cut my writing schedule from once a week to twice a month. I have also moved my posting days around, so you’ll be hearing from me on Mondays now. . This will give me more time to write more qualitatively while freeing me up to advance Ovalay Academy (there’s a new website design coming up….this should be like its 7th redesign and I kinda like that I’m redesigning in public)
How are you tho? Reply to me if you can, please. I want to hear from you.
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Beautiful