A friend in advertising discovered an app on his iPad and started making drawings. They lack technical finesse but the titles are witty and he’s developing a certain style with these ‘basic’ line drawings that he equates to editorial cartoons. Now he calls himself an illustrator. Fair enough, I commend him for taking up a new skill to express himself.
Then this new confidence made him assume that if he could manage an Illustration app, the Adobe softwares and technical knowledge would be a breeze. He started inviting and boasting about business stationery and illustration assignments he was getting. But he soon stopped talking to me about them because I guess he may have realized neither softwares nor design skills come easy.
I thought maybe he’d learned his lesson. But the other day he was having a conversation with me and kept addressing himself as a ‘design person’, ‘we design people’, ‘design is what’s common between us’ and I nearly lost it.
I’ve studied design for 4 years and practiced it for 7 and I still can’t call myself a great designer. And here’s this person who has suddenly gained this weird right of passage because they have an iPad with a couple of apps on it? I would never call myself an advertising professional. Then why would an advertising creative call themself a designer?
I wondered how to address this concern with him but could already foresee his response, “but people love my illustrations... and even in my agency I design briefs by understanding my users, doing research, competitors analysis and everything. I too follow a process. How am I not a designer or design thinker.”
Have you ever been in such a position? How would you respond to such a situation?
Great design resource
100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People (Voices That Matter)
Submitted January 07, 2019 at 06:48PM by potato-stick http://bit.ly/2AxpfD6
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