“In an interview with Adrian Shaunessey, the legendary graphic designer Peter Saville once mentioned something valuable he learned ten years into his career: that there is so much more to design than “just designing.”Just designing? Just designing? As a design student graduating nearly thirty years ago, I would have been stunned to hear this. Designing was everything to me. I had just spent five years in design school. I had entered college as someone who could do a nice pencil drawing of a bowl of fruit. I spent the next sixty months moving shapes around on grids, manipulating squares of colored paper, resolving compositions, drawing letterforms, learning the difference between Helvetica and Univers and between Herbert Bayer and Herbert Matter, redrawing a logo a hundred times until it was perfect, calculating the column lengths of Garamond set 12/13 on a 35 pica measure, and — for this was the point of it all — learning the difference between good design and bad design. When I graduated, my goal was to work with all my heart to create to former and avoid — nay, obliterate from the face of the earth — the latter. And now I learn that not everything’s about designing? What else is there?
"Gestalt Psychology"
But it’s true. I spent five years transforming myself into a designer. But what had I been before? That’s simple: I had been a regular person, like most other people in the world. And, as it turns out, it’s those people who actually make it possible — or difficult, or impossible, depending — for designers to do their work. And Saville was right: most of that work isn’t about designing […]"
