“The life of a designer is a life of fight: fight against the ugliness.” – Massimo Vignell
This quote is so true! We spend our entire careers fighting the bad and the ugly. As creative people, we notice bad design first. It’s the good design that we walk by with a smile on our face and think “that’s nice.”
Unfortunately bad design is all around us. Sometimes, as much as we hate to admit it, it is even created by us. What?! How could this be? Yes, it has happened, but we had our hands tied by ropes and chains and were forced to create something using, yes, somebody else’s vision.
Other times, bad design comes directly from a bad designer or somebody who calls himself a designer. Either way, we see ugly and fight ugly every day. We’re like the superheroes of design who take ugly and make it great.
As designers we work for the client. We make their vision come to life. Most of the time our clients are amazing, they know exactly what they want and do their absolute best to show us their vision, so we can create it. Once in a while that process goes wrong and after the 49th revision we give up and finally give the client exactly what they want. It’s still their vision come true, only we had no creative input whatsoever. And that’s when ugly is born.
I’m not going to talk about the “bad designer” because we all know what that`s about. We take one glimpse at something and want to redesign the whole thing because nothing makes sense.
It hurts just thinking about it!
We take ugly and make it great. Being a designer gives me so much satisfaction. It’s great when I see my work in a magazine and it looks great, or a huge outdoor sign that I drive by every day, or even a small business card that my client is proud to hand to somebody. No, as designers we don’t save lives, or make a huge change in the world, but we do lead a life of fight: fight against the ugliness.