The Designer’s Tortured Soul

So you are a designer. Great. You have decided to follow along the path of countless others before you to walk the walk and talk the prestigious and pessimistic talk. You correct people when they say you are an artist and specify that you work with “Web” or you only do “Hand Drawn Type.” You deal with long hours and the seemingly endless rounds of revisions from clients who show you clip art as inspiration and give you the end of day to come up with the design that will boost their company to stardom. And you get paid shit for this wizardry you do.

Good news in all of this: you are not alone. As mentioned before, there are countless others embarking on the same journey every day. Some self-taught and some graduating from the highest ranked schools in the world. But the point being, you are not alone. So stop acting like it. You are not the only one who was up all night working on the project you put off weeks to do, and when you finally sit down to finish it, you make sure you tweet about how much you hate the client for assigning you this overflowing trash can of a design to “knock out real quick.” You let the world know how good of a designer you are on any given day, but when it comes to someone making a comment about the logo you put together with 1,000 circles and even more guides, you shut them down and immediately look for something to bash them about.

You are not special in this design world. Design is not easy. Design takes years and years of endless nights and piles of drafts and bumps in the road. Losing power to your machine and not saving your progress in the last four hours is something that happens to designers. Not something that you should be screaming to all your internet friends about, fishing for sympathy. Design is made up of the things that you do not want to deal with. It is spending all day working towards an end goal to realize that is not the correct end goal, and starting over. Design is realizing when to push forward on the same path or accepting defeat and finding a new one. You are not the best designer in the world, but you will never become that person if you keep on your close minded, pretentious ways.

So kudos to you, you are a designer. You have chosen to endlessly explain what you do for a living to people who still don’t really understand. You have chosen to work amongst those who are better, more creative, more interesting, and better than you, but that’s ok. That is what design is. So stop screaming out to the world when something goes wrong. Stop re-branding every re-brand that hits our screens. Stop giving designers a bad name. We all are looking too soft.