Re: Design Philosophy

Enjoy Nebraska!

You've given us quite a prompt. I'm going to try to come up with a creative and meaningful response, but I might actually just dance around your question without actually answering anything.

At this point, I feel like my design philosophy is a patchwork of other philosophies I have picked up from more developed designers. Last week, I attended a presentation by Brenda Foster of Greatest Creative Factor (GCF). They are a non-profit design firm specializing in work for educational institutions and their work is fantastic. Brenda herself was extremely intimidating, but also very insightful. My main takeaway from the evening was that as a designer, you should never strive to give clients what they want because anyone can do that. You want to really think about what they are asking for and go beyond that, giving them something that they didn't even know they needed (which can be a gamble sometimes). I guess this is more of a business philosophy than a design philosophy, but I found it incredibly useful.

In thinking about why I do what I do, I believe there are 3 main pieces that lock together - telling a story is very important to me, as is finding creative ways to convey information, but those are both part of a larger idea of differentiating your client from competitors (GCF focuses a lot on this concept). I mean, we are working on the exact same thing with our directors. We may be telling a story and we are probably looking for new ways of displaying information about the films, but our main goal is to find out how they are different as directors, and market that to the movie-going public.

Maybe I am oversimplifying it. I definitely haven't figured it out completely, and I am sure that my answer will vary as I continue to grow as a designer, but this is what is sticking with me right now. Can't wait to hear what others think!