Originally published on 5/19/14
I just returned home from the HOW Design Conference in Boston. It's exactly what it sounds like: a multi-day series of speeches and lectures, organized by HOW Magazine, on the state of graphic design as a profession and the lot of graphic designers as professionals. I had the chance to trade stories and ideas with peers from across the country, all of whom I found to be mature, well-educated, perfectly reasonable adults.
You'd never have known it from the speakers.
Don't get me wrong: we had some heavyweights, including Malcolm Gladwell, Seth Godin, Bob Gill, Stefan Sagmeister and others. And most of the keynotes, while not always packed with actionable information, were nevertheless entertaining and inspiring.
But the meat of a conference to me is in the breakout sessions, where speakers can really delve into specific issues within specific disciplines. I expected to walk away with at least a few slivers of insight that I could pass along to the design team at home.
Here's what my team got from me:
"Branding is strategic."
"Sell the problem, then the solution."
"Shake up your routine."
"Make the world a better place."
All of these statements have value, but for this I needed to fly a thousand miles and sit in a freezing convention center? My fellow attendees seemed to share my disappointment and communicated it with their feet. On Day 1, the designers sat politely and listened to the streams of feel-good buzztalk. But by the next day, the first utterance of "Be passionate about your design" sent people scurrying for the exits.
To be fair, most of our speakers were hawking their own books and, I presume, needed to go light on the specifics for fear of giving away the store. And many of them weren't designers.
It's the second point that roused the conspiracy theorist in me: were we being deliberately condescended to as a profession?
This isn't innocent paranoia, if there is such a thing. One of the common threads of discussion among the designers I met was the challenge some among us face in articulating our work to non-designers. This failure of language is easily interpreted as an absence of intelligence. It was a theme among many of the speakers, too: designers aren't invited to the table when big picture decisions about strategy are at stake because we're not expected to be able to contribute at that level.
Another speaker, Dan Pink, author of the recent business book To Sell Is Human, made a point about sales prowess among different personality types. Apparently, an extreme extrovert makes very nearly as poor a salesman as an extreme introvert. The best salespeople fall somewhere in between — bold enough to speak with confidence about their product but not so aggressive that they fail to listen to their customers.
I don't have any data on where designers fall on the personality spectrum. I can only go by experience (and for the purpose of creating a larger sample pool, let me expand the definition to include all visual artists). While many artists thrive in collaborative environments, the act of manufacturing art is a solitary pursuit. That's true of plenty of disciplines, creative or otherwise. But in my experience, going all the way back to art school, our particular discipline does seem to attract and produce individuals who express their inner lives best through the inventions of their hands, not their vocal cords. Solitude breeds silence.
Am I romanticizing our profession just as egregiously as the wets at the HOW Conference? Maybe so; I admit I don't have the figures to back up a word of this. But here's where the wets and I find common ground: designers do need to be passionate about our work, if only because passion moves people to speak up. And that's how we can elevate our reputations within our companies and within our respective industries: keep speaking up until we get good at it. Without demonstrating a clear and articulate voice, designers might just as well be stupid. Why would anyone assume otherwise?
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