Please Take This Personally

In my thinking, there are a couple of different ways to approach design work. One method is to establish your aesthetic as a designer (similar to a brand) and then attempt to draw clients and/or customers to your aesthetic (ala Joanna Gaines). There are a lot of design firms that give you a pretty good idea up front what you will get from them in terms of your design. If you like it, you’re more likely to contact them of course. But what if the client loved a featured design but you as the prospective client don’t love it? Does that mean the designer does a poor job or can’t meet your needs? Possibly – I won’t lie about that. But there are many instances where that would be a gross misperception.

As an alternative to the scenario above, designers can attempt to draw clients in by introducing them to the design process that will help clients articulate their own aesthetic and achieve their own goals. That is a much tougher sell when prospective clients are largely unaware of the design process. After all, if someone really understood their own aesthetic and design process they are much more likely to think they can come up with their own designs successfully. We’re emotional beings and our biases constantly override our better judgment, no matter how logically we approach a process that is deeply personal in nature. It can be difficult to get out of our own way in taking calculated risks with our own designs and executing an efficient process of realizing a design. The resulting frustrations can sour many on the process entirely. A commitment to a dynamic process of design can overcome some of the barriers associated with being locked in before you even start the design process.

Because it is deeply personal in nature, a dynamic process of design between designer and client involves a lot of trust. It’s easier to build trust with someone you know or you think shares a similar design aesthetic. For many designers, that’s how they pursue jobs at particular firms and also how they get their first clients. With that, there remains a risk the design process is reduced to a self-perpetuating cycle of creating designs that merely conform to conditions established by a shared aesthetic between designer and client. Both designer and client are likely to be biased in a similar manner. That’s not altogether terrible, but unless you’re working with Frank Lloyd Wright the result is unlikely to be either transformative or transcendent from what came before it. And as it was with Frank Lloyd Wright (who was famously inflexible with his own designs), your designer may take offense if you are not prepared to accept whatever you are given!

In thinking about all of this, I try to be thoughtful in how I present myself as a designer – including how I reach out to prospective clients and how much of my design work gets shared online. I am very proud of what I have done but I don’t want to lock myself in, nor do I want prospective clients to lock into a set of images to determine what I can do for them. I got into this line of work interested in how identity is (or can be) reflected in design. Not my identity, and not the identity of people just like me. I am interested in our diversity, in our extraordinary individual and collective history on this planet, and the intersection of our daily realities within our built environments. As an artist I want to draw from my intuition and perceptions that are shaped by purposeful engagement and not necessarily from what I see in front of me.