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Novices Design the Surface; Experts Dive Deep
The easiest way to tell a wannabe designer from a valuable pro.
The thing about design is that it can be as simple or complex as you want it to be. You control this complexity because the ecosystem expands the more you look and interrogate it. If you never look past the surface, you may not even be aware there’s more to discover. To properly define a problem and converge on a good solution you must understand a complex environment of crisscrossing variables. A great designer wants to dig as deep as possible into these details before coming up to manipulate the surface. A novice designer is content with studying the shallow ripples.
In my experience, the value of a designer is directly correlated with their ability to ask probing questions, think critically, and understand complex systems. A successful design process involves a series of expansions and contractions. Seeing the big picture while simultaneously considering the details. This gives us the agency to grasp complexity in a holistic way.
For a great designer, design is never done, because there’s a nearly infinite universe of complexities that can be discovered the longer they look. A project ends when time or budget runs out, not because a perfect solution has been achieved. It’s impossible to create perfection when variables expand to near infinity.
Expert designers spend 80% or more of their time diving deep to understand the problem, before using the final moments to craft a solution. Novices jump straight into a solution because they only care to see the top 20% of the problem.
Good designers have T-shaped breadth and depth of experience because they know that design must reach its tentacles into strategy, branding, content, and engineering — or it’s incomplete.
The best designers consider all the variables and fringes that might impact a design. They consider the ecosystem the problem lives within before looking directly at the problem. Poor designers think only about the design itself, failing to see the external forces at play.
