Designers are Boring
But you don’t have to be.
Q: What are the best ways to participate in the digital design community online? I want to find inspiration in the work my peers are doing.
Here’s a thing that I do when I feel stuck at work: I open a new tab and go to Designer News, or my Medium feed, or whatever else, and I settle on a likely-looking link to click. Then I skim it, and mentally file it in one of several categories:
- A technical treatise urging me to replace some part of what I do with more Javascript
- A breathless recommendation for a prototyping tool, of which there are roughly six dozen apparently equivalent competitors
- An article that tells me I don’t understand design unless I’ve seen all the right documentaries
- A case study of somebody’s app, resplendent with artfully skewed and zoomed screenshots — or better yet, animated GIFs — of lovely, thoughtful UI elements
- An in-joke
And then I decide I’m not that stuck, so I close the tab and go back to work.
Confessional Sidebar
I’ve tried to write this article several times, and I always end up dropping it halfway through, lunging for the nearest beer with this awful saggy expression on my face. I’m worried about what my sour outlook on the state of design discourse means about me. I don’t want to publish a thought unless I’m adding to the conversation, not just being an asshole.
And it’s hard for me not to feel like an asshole when I take the following two facts into consideration:
- I find the majority of the design community’s writing and discussion unforgivably tedious.
- I am expressing this sentiment in the context of creating more writing and discussion in the design community.
You see my conundrum. But I don’t think I’m wrong, even though I feel like a bummer just for writing this. I think there are better ways for us to learn and grow as designers, and this is the best way I have to communicate them. Let’s move on.
The problem with the tiresome categories I listed above is a matter of approach. They’re technical and process-oriented. They care for means, but rarely for ends. They demonstrate “how” thinking at the expense of “why”. Quoth Frank Chimero, way back in 2009:
How is coulda, why is shoulda. How is specifics. Why is motivation. In a world with limited resources (natural resources, time, attention, money), our questions should not be about whether something is possible or how to do it, but whether it’s worth doing it at all.
I’ve also heard this problem framed “hands” vs. “head”. Your hands are your techniques, your processes, your ability to produce high-fidelity work. But without your head, there’s no thought behind the things you do. They aren’t for anything.
Virtually everything I see discussed in digital design circles is hands-work. Which tools to use, how performant things can get, how arrestingly beautiful an interface can be. Even the case studies are primarily showing you hands-work — they want you to envy and emulate their well-wrought animations more than they want you to appreciate the empathic basis of the problem they went about solving.
And what a damn shame, because the problem is the most important part! The process of design is so much less interesting than the things we can do with it.
Design is a lens through which we view the world.
When we talk about solutions in isolation of their problems, we’re staring at the lens, rather than through it. The more we focus on design’s hands-work in exclusion, the more our solutions start to look and work the same.
Let’s talk about inspiration now, because I don’t think it means what most people think it means.
There is such a thing as surface-level “how”/”hands” inspiration, certainly. That’s the kind you can look for. You see something beautiful, clever, or interesting, and you mentally bookmark it to use in your work later. This — and pretty much only this — you can get from Dribbble. It’s not useless, but it’s definitely not the whole story.
We forget that inspiration originally meant “to breathe”. It’s not always a conscious process, nor is it selective. Your brain is constantly collecting and cross-referencing all the information poured into it. Eventually it can be exhaled again into your work as a metaphor. All the seemingly unrelated stimulus your brain chews on during the day is grist for a creative mill. The more you’ve seen, the more ability your brain has to pattern match and look at problems in new ways.
One of my favorite examples of this phenomenon is in a video of Neven Mrgan designing a hiking trail app as an exercise. Neven’s an avid chef, so of course he comes up with the idea of using recipes as a metaphor for communicating trail directions. It’s a great approach that informs the design of the solution before the hands-work ever begins.
I’ve seen this kind of associative-metaphor design process in so many ways from so many great designers. I worked with a motion designer who constantly referenced old sci-fi movies and retro arcade games in the way things looked and moved. He would pull up YouTube to show me what he was talking about, and in the course of a six second clip I would suddenly understand with perfect clarity the details of his design. Other people I’ve worked with have used metaphors from aviation, comic books, and architecture.
Design is like language — a larger vocabulary of concepts gives you more and better ways to be understood.
I’m not saying that craft isn’t important. A solution is only useful once it’s been executed upon, and sometimes understanding how somebody else put their design together can be enlightening. But a craft can’t be taught by proxy. Your hands only learn when they do work for themselves.
It took me a while to realize that. I used to spend a long time learning about new web technology, reading design blogs to see what was hot in UI, and drooling over typography. I was always excited to apply the latest thinking to my latest project. I was trying to come up with a solution before the problem had even materialized, which of course, never works.
The wider design community doesn’t know what you need to learn. Everybody posting case studies and comparing Dribbble shots is telling you what they’ve learned, but that’s irrespective of your work.
There are things to be learned from other designers, definitely — everyone we work with leaves an indelible mark on us, in some way or another. But the things they have to teach can only be learned in working with them. Not in watching their work from afar. A community is more effective when designers commune with each other. The thing you see online is really just a popularity contest.
There are also, maybe more importantly, things to be learned that won’t come from your field at all. Everything made by humans is designed. There are diverse lessons to be learned in case studies that haven’t been written — more profound ideas than “let’s not use so many gradients” or “I made the icon different”.
Digital design is a relatively narrow focus. Look to the wider world for context, and you’ll find it to be a much more interesting teacher. 🔎
Liam Campbell works at Mule Design, where he makes websites. His spirit animal is a pelican eating an entire burrito. You can follow him on Twitter, if you like.
