'A great designer has to know everything while an artist doesn't have to know anything.' -Richard Tuttle
Don't get the above statement wrong. This is not an Artist versus Designer debate. There are more appropriate forum for that. Besides, I have no authority in a matter of this magnitude. What this [blog] is, among a lot of things, is a record of my thoughts and learnings as I pursue knowledge in Graphic design and the business of selling this design service. But some questions comes to mind. How much can one person learn? Do we really need to learn so much?
In his book, Design, Form and Chaos, Paul Rand said:
"Design is one of the most perplexing pursuits in which to excel. Besides the need for a God-given talent, the designer must contend with encyclopedic amounts of information, a seemingly endless stream of opinions, and the day-to-day problem of finding "new" ideas (popularly called creativity)."
This was in 1993. Nowadays, with information easily available on the net. It has become virtually impossible for any one designer to know all there is to know about his craft. I mean, there is probably a thousand ways to do a book cover from the same design brief and another thousand ways to interpret Market Researches and probably more than a few thousand different opinions on the same draft. A fledgling designer would be intimidated about the how much field he should cover. I know I am, even after some years of actual industry experience. Scared as I am with the vastness of the (unexplored) knowledge base that is the Internet (or "the cloud" as I referred to in this blog a couple of times) I am always excited to learn new ways of making things work together from the designer circles I move around in. Even though sometimes these guys make me look at my work and want to hide them where they can't be seen. But I digress... Being a designer means creating solutions... and if we want to grow, we will always search out new design problems to solve, messages to deliver creatively and figure out design trends. Whether these trends are for good design or otherwise doesn't matter. But that is for another rant altogether... So for you budding design superstar... soak up everything you can... Be the sponge!
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