#1
Design is, among other things, a social skill.

The one most fascinating and annoying challenge of design is the need to educate clients about the process of design, the responsibilities of a team, and the procedures and requirements for the production and manufacture of information. Articulating the idea of design as a problem-solving endeavor to people other than those who understand design-speak is an important skill, learned through a combination of practice, trial and error, luck, and thin-slicing (thinking without thinking), a term coined by Malcolm Gladwell in the book Blink.

But the promotion of design is not the only situation for which designers need to hone their talking points. The procedures and steps for turning words into distributable information are quite different in a virtual “desktop” environment than they are in the commercial sphere. Teaching this lesson requires crafting a convincing argument that essentially outlines how much time it takes to conceive, design, review, produce, and manufacture a readable object and how much it is going to cost. After that hurdle is out of the way comes the delicate negotiations needed to get the word count down to where it will fit into the format—this is where it gets interesting and therapeutic.

Those who purchase design these days are not a savvy bunch who come to the table knowing what the designer knows. Instead, they buy into the sales-pitch discourse that permeates the air: IT’S SO EASY WE ALL CAN DO IT! Because of this, it’s no wonder that when a designer rails against the pervasive assertions that design is a commodity that it is met with disbelief, mistrust, and opposition.

These fast-paced, ever changing 27 years I have spent practicing graphic design have frequently felt as insurmountable as Mt. Everest. The process of creating readable objects has experienced seismic shifts, and its future is not certain. I can’t think of a comparable industry that has gone through or is going through the remarkable changes that publishing has. I’ve learned so much about so many things—some now obsolete and some on their way to becoming essential, before they quickly turn passe.

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