Being a designer…
My previous post touched upon the importance of visual identities, how they are often neglected and how it is often thought that a logo is all that is needed. The well-known line from Gestalt theory: ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts’ (or ‘the whole is other than the sum of the parts’), can be applied to a logo (part) and a visual identity (whole). I have recently updated my design section to include a few logos and visual identities that I have worked on. More to come, but for now head over and take a look.
I have often been asked what I do for a living, by friends and family, and I thought that a recent article by Hunter Wimmer, Imprint, would be a good read for them: What being a graphic designer means. As my training began in the realm of typography, the sentiments I appreciate the most from the article are: ‘we know the difference between a hyphen, an en-dash and an em-dash and use each correctly’ and ‘we’re often more interested in the spaces between things than the things themselves’. And as a designer who has spent a lot of my career in the corporate environment I understand that ‘it’s not about doing good work – all good designers can do good work – it’s about getting good work approved and produced’. (I used en-dashes in replicating the quote, rather than the American convention of using em-dashes that Wimmer used!)
Not only is it a good read if you are a designer yourself, but as a client it provides some expectation of what skills a designer should be providing when you place a job with them. In creating a visual identity a designer will call upon all the facets of being a designer that Wimmer mentions: communicator, aesthete, conceptual-thinker and craftsman.
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