124 - Developing The Style

What this episode covers

Is a style for a designer a good thing to cultivate, or a bad thing? Subscribe: ITUNES | ANDROID | STITCHER | RSS FEED Music and links from this episode Trampled by P C III Waitng by Ars Sonor In curtains by J Hacha de Zola Line-by-line notes I’ve always been heavily conflicted as a designer I’ve never really thought I fit in with what lots of other designers think of themselves I love designing things, and I love coding things I love technical stuff as much as design stuff But I call myself a designer That puts me in a weird no mans land with lots of designers And the other thing I’ve never had Is an outright style as a designer Let’s talking about designer’s styles for a bit This is AADA, and I’m Craig Burgess MUSIC Style Having a style works for lots of things This podcast, has a style A model may have a particularl style And a singer usually sings in a certain way or style It’s still a weird thing to me to associate with design though In design, you should be producing the work that’s most appropriate for the situation Regardless of personal preference, and style Maybe I’m being a little idealistic After all, we all have styles, whether they’re carefully cultivated or not We all have go to typefaces, or colour combinations that we like We all have styles of photos that we like and layouts that we think work best All this stuff builds up a style And at first, this style is an unconscious thing for most people Eventually though, a designer twigs on and starts to make more work like their other work And this is where things get weird for me Because I genuinely don’t understand this bit Why, as a designer, would you ever want to suddenly start making the same work using the same methods, over and over? I understand the idea of niches, and how you can make a lot of money if you stick to a niche I get all the commercial reasons I just don’t get the personal reasons To me, once you’ve settled on a style, that’s it You’re developing a designer as far and wide as you could be any more You’ve decided you’re going to sit in a very particular box And you’ll continue to do your work from inside that box For me, I love making all sorts of things in all different styles I relish the challenge of producing a brand for something I’ve never done before Or designing something in a style I’ve never even considered They’re all interesting challenges to me And as I take on things like that I become a better designer But if you suddenly develop your style, you don’t really get any of that opportunity anymore To some extent, the people commissioning the work are to blame They’ll go hunting on behance and pinterest and look for things that fit their new ad campaign Then they’ll find something, go to the original designer, and ask them to do the same thing again but for their campaign “In their style" This usually happens when somebody becomes known for a particular piece of work And they’ll find themselves—if they’re not careful—recreating the same piece of work over and over again In different scenarios for different people Some designers embrace that challenge And I guess on some level, restricting yourself to one style presents a different kind of design challenge to being able to do what you want But at its very core The idea of designers have a particular style  And developing that style And then reproducing that style over and over for different clients I don’t understand on a human level We all have an innate design to keep improving, to keep getting better at things And working as a designer producing work of a particular style makes it harder to improve all the time It’s a bit like being a football goalkeeper with a hand tied behind your back It’s possible, but it’ll be twice as hard to get good at it I don’t intend this to be an episode of me bashing designers who have a style Some of my favourite designers have styles People like James White of Signalnoise and