Good vs Great Designer

Ahoy Ahoy! 👋

How many of you attended ADPList’s BeMore Festival? If you did, I hope you enjoyed it with a lot of takeaways. I’ve had the honour of being a part of a panel alongside Mario Van der Meulen, Megan Dell, and Wolfgang Bremer. All design leaders in their own right.

Design Leadership and more

We covered topics across things like day to day work, some opinions around advice that we give. Mario, being his usual self, dished out very thought provoking advice along the way. With him being over 30 years in this industry and myself only 17 years in the industry, his wisdom always astounds me. Mario used to be my ex-colleague in my current workplace. He left the organisation to work on this craft in a consultation role. In his time as my co-worker, I’ve had the opportunity to witness his brilliance first-hand.

Good vs. Great

One of the questions we’ve had was “What makes a GOOD vs. a GREAT designer?” In the short span of time that we’ve had, I tried to cover that in my perspective. I wanted to cover what Mario said, and also take a moment to link both perspectives together.

Mario’s take:

He doesn’t think that we shouldn’t focus on being good or great. The reason for that is the expectations of great might differ for him and the client. The bar for himself could be high, whereas the bar for his client could be lower. If he’s pushing the bar for his “great”, he could be ignoring what’s great for his client. His focus is whether it’s the right design, but it has to be good—covering the basic design criteria that he’ll need to deliver. And this “right design” it’s part of the growth path in the industry. Being in the industry long enough, we’d have come across these scenarios where the design is not that good, but it’s right. He thinks it can be successful, and he hope that we can accept the right design instead of great design.

Thought provoking, isn’t it?

Here’s my take:

At the core, I think what separates a good designer from a great one is that, is that they listen and take action.

LISTEN: Taking the time to truly listen to your team collectively and individually without being distracted is the highest form of respect you can give as a leader. It shows that you value their thoughts, feelings, and experiences and that you are fully present in the moment with them.

TAKE ACTION: Without taking action, bringing them through workshops and other things might not have been the best use of time at all. If you, as a designer don’t take action, what you would accumulate is the Cost of inaction (COI). And Cost of inaction is the hidden, often underestimated cost that accumulates over time as opportunities slip by and problems remain unsolved. In my opinion, that’s what I think is someone who’s a great designer—their ability to listen and take action accordingly.

In my previous post, I have spoken about someone who got high on advice but not taking action. This is quite similar to that. You could go through tonnes of workshop and if you do not act on their feedback, it doesn’t make a difference.

Now, someone in the comments actually took a step further and connected the dots herself. Stephanie’s sharp thinking allowed her to piece these 2 things together, as she rightfully put it in the comments—For us to create the right design for our clients, we have to listen and take action to create the right designs for them.

It’s how we listen and help them, which makes them a great designer. They’re not just pushing pixels, but instead helping them solve problems.

Again, as panelists, our opinions are bound to differ, but that’s the greatest part—it’s that you can form your own thinking around different perspectives that we’ve given. What Stephanie demonstrated here was just that. It might be just a comment to some, but bringing 2 varying perspectives together is no small feat.

The point of this newsletter is actually 2 things:

• Perspectives vary

• How to leverage varying perspectives to be a GREAT designer

  • Listen to these varying perspectives

  • Form your own solutions with these perspectives

  • Take action to design/build them

The people on that session were brilliant. Asked some really great questions, and gained some perspectives. This clip from the movie Huo Yuan Jia (Fearless) sums up my thoughts around this:

Like the clip above that talks about wushu, being a great designer DOES NOT mean that you’re a superior designer. It just means that through practice, you discover your strengths and weaknesses, that you can work on improving—to be better; to be the right fit for your client or organisation that you’re working for.

What do you think? What makes a great designer?

Reflect: Design is all about circumstances and perspectives, which is why we need to be inclusive in our thinking. While it might seem simple, not everyone and put two and two together. As demonstrated above, Stephanie’s ability to have a wider range of perspective helped her piece those 2 things together. Similarly, in our design work, if we do not consider other things like culture or communities, we would then fail to connect with them as our audience. Such things, while it may seem trivial to most, could be one of the biggest impacts that design can make.

Mentor’s Notes

I got no notes for y’all. Anyway, thank you guys for reading this all the way till the end. Hope this was helpful. See you in the next one!

P.S. Yes, as always, please share it with your friends if you think it’s useful.