Michael Bierut: P7 It doesn’t matter if you didn’t have enough time or if the client was an idiot. The only thing that counts is what you’ve designed, and whether it’s good or bad.
P14 It’s funny; I am a fairly messy designer. It doesn’t who in my work, but my process is messy.
Garin Goldberg: p22 As a graphic designer, I like collaboration. I don’t want to be in a cold garret somewhere smoking unfiltered Camels all by myself wth paint all over my body-because I like sheets too much.
P28 There’s a part of me that wants to speak a common language, and there is a part of me that wants to scramble the language.
I love NY designer: Milton Glaser: P31 I think that, to some degree, this is part of my character as a designer: to keep moving and not get stuck in my own past. This is what I try very hard to do.
Paula Scher: P44 I consider the fact that I have been able to continue to grow a very important part of how I perceive success. To me, success is not about money, it’s about what I design. If I get up every day with the optimism that I have the capacity for growth, then that’s success for me.
P47 Generally, there’s a paradigm of what things look like in any arena. What you want to be forward, to break its own mold.
Stefan Sagmeister: P57 I like the fact that design is audience-related. I like the fact that it’s not “art” and that you’re typically collaborating with other people.
P60 Sometimes we do something totally new, but sometimes it’s okay to use hand-writing again.
Neville Brody: P73 No one’s prepared to engage with difficult ideas anymore. It is very rare that graphic design is a difficult, engaging space these days.
P74 There is nothing really different. There’s nothing really dangerous, there’s nothing really difficult out there right now. And I think we need some things to start galvanizing people. I think we need things that allow people to think in non-commercial ways.
Peter Saville: P78 There is a great misconception in this era of graphic design that it is a medium of self-expression.
P92 You’ve got to like what you’re doing, and then you do it well. You’ve got to like what you’re doing, and you have to put meaning into it for others.
Emily Oberman& Bonnie Siegler/Number 17
p96 When we toss things back and forth, there is no compromise at all. That is when it’s magic.
James Victore p111 it’s about whittling. It’s about taking something and whittling and whittling and getting it sharp and perfect. Then you’ve got something.
John Maeda: p119 I’ve never been happy with the work i’ve done. I wish I were. I’ve seen people who were happy. I think I’m always wondering what else the end result could have been.
P122 That’s why I keep changing what I am doing-to avoid criticism.
Paul Sahre: P127 Design is supposed to be about something else, and not about you; but I think the only way it’s actually any good-and to get people to care about it-is if it’s also about you at the same time.
p130 But there are many times when I get my greatest joy from being totally invisible in terms of the viewer. They don’t know some one designed what they are looking at! Nevertheless, it’s still something that I needed to express a certain way.
Chip Kidd: p139 I’m often asked for advice on how to become a better graphic designer, and this is my res
Millman, Debble. How to think like a great graphic designer. New York, NYC: An imprint of allworth communication, Inc, 2007. Print.
P54 Designers are convinced that ‘design’ is a special way of thinking, and they spend a lot of time trying to convince the rest of the world of this. They are using this argument to battle against a lack of recognition.
* It doesn’t seem like they first have to learn an alien, fundamentally different thought process. Apparently there is a certain level of design that can be approached by common sense.
P55 As the architect Richard MacCormac observed: ’ I don’t think you can design anything just by absorbing information and then hoping to synthesize it into a solution. What you need to know about the problem only becomes apparent as you’re trying to solve it.
The internet, on the other hand, is an information gathering disaster..But knowledge that is selected without a proper understanding of context is just unsorted, uninterpreted and unreliable data. It does more harm than good.
P56The consensus among good designer is that the best practice is to slowly work your way from the very general level of an assignment to concrete level of the end design.
P57 Designers and design theorists agree that it is important to always develop several design options in parallel. Which, at first sight, seems like a waste of time and effort. Wouldn’t it be more efficient to take one good design idea, and develop that as quickly as possible?
P59 The solution to this is called ‘concentric development’, which recommends that you develop all aspects of the design to the same level of detail before you decide to go on to the next phase. It is as if you keep circling around your design, looking at it from all sides. In doing so, you make sure your design stays balanced-not necessarily at every moment in time, but at least at the moment you make important decisions.
P61 The designer, in preparing the ground for these decisions, has the opportunity to influence them considerably. you know which concept you want to be chosen, and it is tempting to subtly ‘rig the vote’ by presenting it in a better light than the others, perhaps by elaborating on it more during the presentation, or by putting a little bit extra quality in the drawings.
P62 The natural way to tackly any problem, including a design problem, has been described in a little model called the problem solving cycle. The model states that you should first analyses a problem, the create a solution (this is called synthesis). The next step is to simulate the behavior of the solution to see the evaluation, you can decide to go through the process again if you are not completely satisfied, or start a new cycle to tackle a different problem.
P63 Is it difficult to plan a design project. You never know how hard it will be gather the necessary information, or how much time it will take for good ideas to surface, and you never know how often you will have to ‘iterate’: to go back to an earlier stage of the design project and plan design. Notwithstanding all these uncertainties, you still need a plan, otherwise the whole design process spins out of control.
* A design plan must be dynamic. As the uncertainties about the course of the project gradually diminish, you constantly need to adjust the planing accordingly.
P72 Good designers know how to tackle design problems in very successful ways. The bad news is that they are not usually able to explain to others what they do, why they do it, and how. The complicated and creative nature of design means that most design knowledge is implicit-and is notoriously hard to bring out into the open.
P73 If you would stick closely to the reality of design practice, and manage to describe design in all its complexity, you would end up being swamped in detail. You would be unable to get any kind of overview at all, let alone develop helpful advice for designers.
P79 Design can be captivating. If all goes well, the design problem is interesting, your ideas flow nicely, and you are in another world. Nothing exists except your own thoughts, decisions, sketches, doubts.
* Design is such a diverse profession that it becomes very much like life. You use everything you have to solve a design problem: all your knowledge and personal experiences, your creativity, and your powers of thought. It engulfs you completely.
* From the outside, design is a strange profession-the creation of novel things by means of an incredibly messy process that is hard to control and difficult to rely on.
P80 Intuition plays a role in all human behavior. Much of what we think just pops up in our head. Of course, we also reason logically from problem to solution and there are stretches of reasoning where the mind works like a machine, moving through a problem methodically, step by step. But those times seem to be the exception, not the rule. Often we intuitively reach a solution and construct an explanation (rationalization) afterward.
In design, you need both intuition and reasoning: these two fundamentally dissimilar of thinking are combined within every design project.
P81 Design is often seen as a combination of two ways of thinking, a mixture of problem solving and creativity. We have to creatively develop a design, but this creativity is not completely unrestricted.
P88 Designers from practice are typically very eager to solve the problem a student lays before them, and to help the student get a wonderful design by the end of the project. But of course, student’s designs are not as important as their learning process. This means that in the role tutor, you should not say everything that comes into your ‘designer’s mind’. You must often let the students make the mistakes they are heading for, confront them with those mistakes and then help them reach a different solution. You do not help them learn by solving their problems for them, although that may make both the student and tutor feel good.
P90 To students, those methods are just complicated solutions to problems they have never encountered. And if you force students to work according to a method, the absurdity of the heavy-handed model will pitch them against design theory forever. However, if you take the alternative route and introduce design methods at the end of their studies when they start to really need them , the students will have developed all kinds of unfortunate design habits that they then have to unlearn.
P91 When you start on the long road towards becoming a designer, you already have developed opinions about what good design is and what kind of designs you want to create. These opinions are superficial ad are often based on a gut reaction to the shape of a design you like, without having any idea of the thoughts and considerations that led to it:’ I want to make something like that!’
P92 That is where their core quality lies: single ideas are seldom groundbreaking original, it is through the combination and integration of ideas that one develops inimitable design of great complexity and enduring quality. Those designs might be deceptively simple, but this simplicity hides a mountain of ideas and decisions that make the design rich and sophisticated in its appeal.
P93 The ability to integrate is based on a very complex kind of implicit know-how that can only be picked up by doing projects and being tutored. Only a tutor that is involved int he project can explain whether the way you are approaching a particular problem is promising, or propose that you try a different route.
P99The bigger talents often have an element of danger in them, something absolute, an all-or-nothing monomaniacal streak. They are so focused on what they strongly want and what they really can do very well, that any call of flexibility is lost upon them. Great talents tend to not do so well in school. They are self-propelled and easily collide with any system, be it their school or outside world.
P108 Nigel Cross (design researcher and educator) has been focusing on these questions, and has made a list of eight core design abilities that all designers must have. According to him, designers must have the ability to :1) produce novel, unexpected solutions by 2)applying imagination and constructive forethought to practical problems, 3)using drawings and other modelling media as means of problem solving. In doing this, they need to be able to 4)deal with uncertainty and decision making on the basis of limited information, 5)resolve ill-defined, ‘wicked’ problems by 6)adopting solution-focusing strategies, 7) employing productive creative thinking and 8)using graphic or spatial modelling media.
P109 They discern six forms of intelligence: linguistic, logical/mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily/kin-aesthetic and personal…This would mean that design is a broad, all encompassing activity that doesn’t require extreme intelligence. This is a bit different from many other professions, which clearly use only one intelligence, or perhaps, a combination of two.
P110 You have to present and defend your own opinions about design. It is not the kind of study where you can safely hide behind books and are only judged bu exam results. There is nothing anonymous about becoming a designer. A lack of enthusiasm will sooner or later come to the surface and make it that much harder.
P111 The outstanding structural engineering design Ted Happold said: ’ I really have, perhaps, one real talent-that is that I don’t mid at all living in a area of total uncertainty.
* This makes you realize that design is a very risky profession. As a designer, you work on a complete design problem, possibly for months on end, without really knowing for sure that you will succeed in creating a satisfying solution.
* The design students who have what psychologists call a ‘low tolerance for uncertainty’, tend to concentrate on their first solution and improve on it, instead of going through the uncertainty associated with a complete phase of idea generation.
P112 This has been aptly put by the architect Denys Lasdun: ‘Our job is to give the client, on time and on cost, not what he wants, but what he never DREAMED he wanted-and when he gets it he recognizes it as something he wanted all the time.’
* You have to go beyond the client’s or employer’s preconceived image of the new design, and employ your specialist knowledge and skills to design something that is better than they could imagine.
P113 When it comes to it , these designer apparently love their freedom just a little bit more than they love humbly serving their fellow human beings. The more you think about it, the stranger this becomes: we all know that designing always involves creating things for others-yet many designers tend to be motivated by the fun of designing itself, or by the love for their own creations, and do not seem to want to know too much about the others they are designing for. Is design a schizophrenic profession? Perhaps.
* Ideally, designers should acquire the split personality necessary to work in both worlds, and alternate between ‘free’ project and those that have great commercial value.
P116 There is often also some paradox involved int he problem or situation that forces the creative person to search for a new way toward a solution. Their new way is then constructed by combining different ways of thinking. This can lead to a whole new field of discovery to be explore energetically.
p118 In a brainstorming session it is important to create an open atmosphere where people feel free to just throw in their ideas and associations. Anything goes, because it might spark some interesting connections..The one restrictive rule in a brainstorming session is that people are not allowed to criticize each others ideas. A fresh and mad idea is a brittle thing, that can be dismissed quite easily as being unrealistic or strange.
P119 Ideas are not always as original as they seem. It is worth checking where they cam e from.
p14 This strategy can be recognized in all design processions- in many design problems, the generation of possible solutions and their gradual improvement is the only way forward. That’s design.
p15 Th idea that design is problem solving had led to the development of phase models of the design process, in which you first define the problem, analyze it to formulate requirements and then generate solutions.
p16 Design can indeed be seen as learning: as a designer, you gradually gather knowledge about the nature of the design problem and the best routes to take towards a design solution. You do this by trying out different ways of looking at the problem, and experimenting with various solution directions. You propose, experiment, and learn from the results, until you arrive at a satisfactory result.
p17 Creative design is more a matter of developing and evolving both the formulation of a problem and ideas for a solution, while constantly shuttling between them.
Design thus involves a period of exploration in which problem and solution are evolving and are very unstable, until they are (temporarily) fixed by an emergent idea which identifies a problem-solution pairing.
p19 You challenge yourself by aiming high, by being as ambitious as possible. Because you have inserted your own goals, you become personally attached to the project, desperately wanting to wanting to make your ideas work.
p22 To complicate things further, there are always aspects of the problem that will only emerge during the solution process. So a problem cannot even be comprehensively stated before you set out to solve it.
p23 Design can be seen as a reasoning process, running from problem to solution. But there is no unique road that connects the design problem with the design solution-design problems can be solved in many ways. this doesn’t made design irrational, though: there is logic in design, but design problems are so ambiguous that logic can be applied in many different ways. Therefore, design problems are often called ‘undetermined.’
p24If it turns out that your interpretation of the design problem just generates a lot of dead ends, you have to go back and change your view of the problem.
p25 In design, your goals are partly determined by others, the stakeholders, because the things you create must fulfill some practical purpose in the wider world. In art, this is not the case. An artist determines his or her own goals, They have this freedom because with their creation, artists do not aim for any practical application, but strive to influence the feeling or thinking of an audience.
p30 chances are that if you change one thing, you must readjust a lot of others as well. Keeping track of the story (in notes, annotated sketches, etc) can keep you tangled in your own design.
p31Showing the design alternatives that you considered and explaining the reason for their demise will strengthen the argument in favor of the chosen design considerably.
p32 Designers make plans, They plan the behavior of the design and its users and they plan the production of the design.
p40 Since then we have learned that this is one of those problems that don’t have one solution: both integration and task division have their pros and cons. The unsuccessful search for the one best choice has resulted in the constant reorganization of design functions within companies, from divided to integrated and back again.
p41 In the management science, success is traditionally associated with speed (time-to-market), efficiency and return on investment (shareholder value).
Some projects are deemed successful because they provide a great learning experience for the organization. These are potentially really messy projects, full of friction between the parties involved (creative abrasion, as it is called in lovely management speak), false starts, trial and error, and considerable overruns in time and cost.
p44 Many design problem cannot be solved within the context in which they have arisen. And if they actually cannot be solved at all, they have to be resolved. They way designers deal with the paradoxes and conflicts in a design situation is considered to be rather special, and a core quality of good design.
p45 The first difference is that the design situation includes the definition of the pivotal word or a possible expansion of the meaning of that concept (what is “a party”? What do the different people involve mean by “a party”?). There is no dominant design for what a party should be, so imagination needed to be applied at this very fundamental level. A second difference is that the design situation requires the design and use of (thought) experiments in order to get a solution (shall we go to a clud?), Thirdly, in design you have to develop tools to reach a solution, such as ways to discuss issues or arrive a t decisions (let’s vote on this guys…).
* Selecting can be hard enough, but it does not require a creative leap and inventiveness that it takes to mould the design situation.
p46 He said if I kept making compromises, I would have to defend every one of them (impossible, of course). But if I made some clear basic decisions that he could understand, he would accept almost any clear choice I made. After this traumatic event I had to start my project all over again and, of course, the later ideas also contained some compromises, but I could point out where they were, and why they were absolutely necessary.
p47 A design is made up of many of these chains of decisions, which are interconnected. Together these chains make up a very complicated network of interconnected decisions ( or, not to put too fine a point on it- a giant knot).
P48 Each of these stakeholders come with viewpoints, knowledge and values from their own world. In designing, you are making decisions in which all these different worlds must be combined. The process of combining different worlds is called integration.
* However, there is much to be gained by striving for integration: a well integrated design is simple, elegant and gives the feeling that “everything has been taken into consideration, and is as it should be”.
P50 Nevertheless, In nine out of ten cases a new design is a creative combination of concepts that has existed before. It is already difficult to create anything novel in this sense, let alone making something that is completely new to the world.
* To avoid frustion, it is important not to burden yourself with the target of achieving Novelty in every project. But you should strive to always do things that are new to you, irrespective of the novelty-value they might have for the rest of the world.
P51 Ans as a designer you do not have the luxury of choosing one side of the paradox over the other-you have to create a solution in such a way that paradox is resolved.
P52 A design problem is a situation of tension, of unattained aims and unresolved conflict. This tension is the force that initiates and drives design. At the end of problem is resolved, it disappears from the mind of the designer. This is very much like any form of problem solving. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein has stated that: ’ we are aiming at…complete clarity. But this simply means that the philosophical problems should completely disappear. The real discovery is the one that make me capable of stopping philosophy when I want to.
P53 After the design project, the document task becomes very difficult-designs are tangled webs of decisions which are so closely dependent on on another that is impossible to find logical point to begin the explanation of the how and why. And the resolution of a design problem makes it hard to imagine that certain things were problematic at one time.
Dorst, Kees. Understanding Design. Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, Inc, 2006. Print.
