Ego is the enemy of any design project.

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Music and links from this episode

Why I Can't Sleep With The Door Ajar by We Is Shore Dedicated

Nothing (Bonus Track) by Kai Engel

Mutations by Small Colin

Line-by-line notes

If we consider the task of making a website

There’s several stages a project goes through

Most of those stages are black and white, especially actually building a website

But when design gets involved

The ego starts to get in the way

This is AADA, and I’m Craig Burgess

MUSIC

When you build something

Like a wall for example

There’s no black and white to that

A wall either works

It stays stood up for years and functions as a wall

Or it doesn’t

The wall falls down

It’s very clean when the wall isn’t working, or doing its job

There’s no emotional intricacies to deal with here

Design is the exact polar opposite of this

When you’re talking to somebody and telling them their logo will be green

This can elicit a whole range of responses you can’t begin to even comprehend

Ranging from things that make sense like

My customer base won’t like the colour green

To strange things like

Green reminds me of grass and the countryside, and I don’t like that

No matter how hard we try to stop it from being so

Design is an emotional thing

It isn’t as simple as a wall that either stands up or doesn’t

Or a website that either works or not

Design isn’t black and white, and it works on a thousand levels

Most of all, design is subjective

And that causes problems for everybody

With subjectivity comes a much more insidious thing: ego

The graveyard of failed design projects is full of gravestones that declare Ego was the problem

And ego comes from everywhere

It comes from the client thinking they know better than the professional designer they hired

It comes from the marketing company thinking they know better than everybody else

And worst of all, it comes from the designer thinking that they know better than everybody else in the world

A designer with an ego is a useless designer

That’s a fact

A designer who sees their work as precious pieces of art that have been perfectly crafted isn’t a real designer

Design is not art

Design can be pretty, it can affect people’s emotions and decisions, but it’s not art

Art is designed to affect an emotion

Design is to communicate a message

Art serves the artist

Design serves the client or the purpose intended

Design doesn’t serve the designer 

And when a designer thinks it does, things go wrong really quickly

Don’t get me wrong

Designers should be passionate about doing a good job

OF COURSE they should

But that’s a fundamental difference

Passion is not ego

Passion is doing things with conviction

And an ego usually negatively impacts anything it gets involved with

I’m going to finish off with a depressing thing about design

It’s not depressing if you already know it

But it might be depressing if you’ve never considered it

Good design

Really good design

Gets out of its own way

Good design doesn’t get noticed

Because its done it’s job

The only people who notice good design is designers

And design isn’t for designers

MUSIC

This was AADA and I’m Craig Burgess

Music featured in this episode was

Why I Can't Sleep With The Door Ajar by We Is Shore Dedicated

Nothing (Bonus Track) by Kai Engel

Mutations by Small Colin

For a line by line rundown of this episode go over to askadesigneranythingdotcom/ep128

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