A Dear Design Student Round Table
When did you know you wanted to be a designer?
As far back as I can remember, I have wanted to help people do things better, more easily, or in a way that is more fun. And I have always wanted to be taken seriously. Even as a kid, I worked hard to make sure that what I was saying or doing was important and clear to others. Over time I honed my ability to communicate clearly, and I got better at recognizing which things in life are important (from which perspectives) — these are lifelong pursuits. But it took me until college to realize I had always been what people call a designer, and that I could get paid for being me. — Tim Brown, designer
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I knew I wanted to be a designer only after I realized that I didn’t want to be an artist. Let me tell you a quick story.
I made work about identity in undergrad. It used indirect language and vague signifiers to talk about being a trans woman because I wasn’t ready to effectively communicate what was going on. But eventually that wasn’t enough. By the time I was three years deep into an art major in undergrad, I wanted to stop asking and start telling. That’s when I realized I was in the wrong room. Once I shifted my thinking to design I was able to do more than just solve my own problem — I got to work for others. — Robyn Kanner, designer
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When I was a kid my dad had a little side business. (All immigrants have a side business.) He painted signs for Portuguese merchants. Any new restaurant, grocery store, travel agency, or body shop that opened up in the neighborhood came to my dad for a sign. And because of the amazing amount of job creation and entrepreneurial spirit in the immigrant community, this meant my dad was pretty business. It wasn’t long before he needed a helper.
I started by helping to trace his tissues onto the sign using homemade carbon paper made of turpentine and graphite. He eventually let me do some of the actual painting, which I was terrible at. (My dad was a trained ceramics painter, and he could hold a fine hairline forever.) My big break came when he was trying to set type on an arc and not having much luck. Frustrated, he decided to go have a drink, and while he was gone I set the type on the entire sign.
From that day on I did the typesetting and he did the painting. And my cut went from $20 to $100. — Mike Monteiro, immigrant job creator
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When I was growing up, my dad worked for a small ISP. He was a professional nerd. The advent of the web a few years earlier excited him, and I, his youngest and least-athletic child, was in the right place (indoors, largely) at the right time to receive the brunt of his enthusiasm. He showed me how to use Yahoo to find things to read about Pokémon, which was all I really wanted to hear about at the time. I fell in love with the web. It was both an endless font of information and a way to connect with people who loved the things I loved; people who were a rare and precious oddity in my meatspace.
For a kid who had trouble communicating with my peers, there was an allure to learning how to communicate with the whole world. I chose the web so that I could reach as many people as possible. I became a designer so I could be understood. — Liam Campbell, web designer
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I’ve always been a systems designer. When I was 8 or 9, I was intrigued by libraries and how they were designed. I loved the process of cataloguing and checking out books. One weekend, I got out a manual typewriter and made library cards for every book in my parents’ house. I labeled each book and glued the cards in the back of the book. It took me weeks to do for every book in the house, but when I was done, I’d created a library. (Of course, at that age, I had no notion of taxonomies, so the numbering was completely made up and arbitrary.
When I was older, I fell in love with computers. I wanted to build software and hardware that people could use without being engineers, which, in the ’60s and ’70s was the only way you could use them. I fell in love with what we now call user experience design, but that the time we called funny things like “human factors” and “man-machine interfaces.” I learned everything there was to learn (which wasn’t much back then, because we didn’t know much). Then I started making stuff.
But it was that early fascination of systems — how collections of things work together in harmony — that drove my desire to create stuff that people could use. When I worked on many of the very first PC systems ever made (like the first PC email clients), I was driven by making messages float through networks in a seamless, easy way. Looking back, it was the library I built out of my parents’ books that predicted where my journeys would take me. — Jared Spool, UX researcher and designer
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The first computer showed up in my home when I was 4. A brand-new Apple IIc, with all the bells and whistles. I was immediately hooked. There was a computer in the home from that day forward. At the age of 9, I started learning how to program with BASIC, and dBase III. I made a simple Jeopardy style game with the help of a friend of my father. Normally this is where you’d hear about how someone kept going and lit the world on fire. However, that is not my story.
The combination of getting a guitar for Christmas and the fear of being a “nerd” lead me to ditch programming and focus on other things. Mainly girls and music. While I always maintained an interest in computers, and if asked honestly would say that I wanted to do something with them for my job, I was afraid of being singled out by my peers as one of those geeks. I also (incorrectly) assumed that if I did something “computery” as a job, I’d no longer enjoy it. I was wrong on both accounts.
Through a series of events that could not be duplicated, I began programming again when I was 25. By the time I was 27, I had left my career in finance, begun freelancing full time, and started laying the groundwork for what would become my own agency. And I couldn’t be happier. — Andrew Norcross, developer
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I still don’t know if I want to be a designer. I prefer to conjugate designer as a verb, not a noun. I’m an illustrator who designs. I’m a writer who designs. I’m an editor who is dangerous with a mouse. I’ve been designing over for ten years and I still I don’t care about fonts. My sense of typography is at a Print Shop Deluxe level at best. I’ve never owned a pantone book. My website is a Squarespace template. I have never finished reading a Great Discontent interview. I like Cooper black and Hobo. Dumb quotes interest me in the same way my dog finds a chicken bone on the street. I don’t care about your logo redesign. I wear light up shoes and sweatshirts.
I still don’t know if I am a designer. Perhaps I’m a self-hating one and lack the retrospection and self-awareness required to answer this question. I’m comforted that designers think I’m an illustrator. Unfortunately, illustrators think I’m a designer. — Jennifer Daniel, not a designer
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