Is a style for a designer a good thing to cultivate, or a bad thing?

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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