Why designers still cant think

Even when a valuable site like Brand New attempts to host an intelligent dialogue about a well-executed identity project, the comments devolve into snipes over superficial qualities at the expense of critical thinking about the work in a broader cultural context.

The conversation tends to end in naive arguments over good taste. Whether my client makes forklifts, forks, or foghorns, I can quickly get up to speed in the ten-minute cab ride to the meeting. Rather than accept defeat, I send my students articles related to their projects and interests. They tend to be pack rats of idiosyncratic topics, from thermodynamics to the art of Ukrainian Easter-egg decoration.

Educators should encourage curiosity and direct students away from the navel of design, toward broader topics. Design Observer, Kottke. Educators deserve a noogie and a raise. They turn their inspirations into reality.

Secondly, they are good at practical resolution. Thirdly, good designers are good at iterative prototyping , refining the concept through repeated cycles and getting feedback from the right people as they go. James Dyson famously made two thousand prototypes of his bagless vacuum cleaner before he got it right.

The rest, as they say, is history. Simon Rucker is an associate director at global design and innovation company Seymourpowell , based in London. You are creative in problem solving, but maybe not in visual communication. You can learn to express your ideas visually, just like you learned to express them in code.

None of it seems to help you make a design, or demonstrate what your very first step should be. Learning to code, you install libraries and a text editor, then start typing. The tutorial teaches you what each line of code means, and introduces concepts one at a time. And often, even if a resource claims to be written for developers, it still covers advanced topics too soon. Would you try to teach someone learning to code about OOP or TDD before they understood what a variable or a function is?

Of course not! It would be impossible. When you try to learn design, if you find yourself getting lost, take a step back and try to find a source for more basic topics. My book could be a starting point for you.

Look back at a sample of your code from just a year ago. An award-winning team of journalists, designers, and videographers who tell brand stories through Fast Company's distinctive lens.

The future of innovation and technology in government for the greater good. Leaders who are shaping the future of business in creative ways. New workplaces, new food sources, new medicine--even an entirely new economic system. Graphic designers are lucky. In a single day, a designer can talk about real estate with one client, cancer cures with another, and forklift trucks with a third.

Imagine how tedious it must be for a dentist who has nothing to do all day but worry about teeth. Yet somehow these people managed to prosper without four years of Typography, Visual Problem Solving, and Advanced Aesthetics. What they lacked in formal training they made up for with insatiable curiosity not only about art and design, but culture, science, politics, and history.

Today, most professionals will admit to alarm about the huge and ever-growing number of programs in graphic design. This swelling tide of year-old, would-be designers is swallowed up thirstily by more and more programs in graphic design at art schools, community colleges, and universities.

A few years later, out they come, ready to take their places as professional designers, working for what everybody cheerfully hopes will be an infinitely expanding pool of clients. There are many ways to teach graphic design, and almost any curriculum will defy neat cubbyholing. Nevertheless, American programs seem to fall into two broad categories: process schools and portfolio schools.

Process schools favor a form-driven problem-solving approach.