Perhaps the most important threshold for choosing a profession as a designer is the presence of an art education. Many people confuse the concepts of a designer and an artist, defining them as some kind of creators. I used to think that designers must have an art education and even went to an art studio.

I thought that I was missing the basic concepts of color rendering, working with shadows, composition, and so on. I have passed one stage of the academic drawing. Now I understand for sure that I wasted my time.

A good artist can be a very bad designer, and a cool designer may have absolutely no drawing skills and no knowledge of the basics.

Designer – composer

Designers are, rather, composers who collect a new idea from different elements, like musicians collect different melodies from just seven notes. The feeling of perception of the beautiful and correct does not come immediately, it needs to be brought up in yourself. Even if you know how to work in programs, how to make up layouts, etc., this will not mean that you are a designer.

Here’s a very cool quote from Steve Jobs on creativity that captures the essence of what I’m talking about. “Creativity is just making connections between things. When creative people are asked how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t actually do anything, they just noticed. This becomes clear to them over time. They were able to connect different pieces of their experience and synthesize something new. This is because they have experienced and seen more than others, or because they think more about it. “

In the first year of my work in the agency LYRA Design & Event, I was supervised by the creative leader Ivan, who was just incredibly cool coming up with ideas for our projects. I just admired and thought when I could do the same. In the second year of work (at that time, our creator left to implement his project, and I became the head of the department), my level has grown noticeably (but, of course, I’m still far from Ivan), ideas reached a new level and helped us win tenders for cool brands. The fact is that for a year of active work in this area, I got saturated with meanings, revised a lot of events and creativity, which then unconsciously surfaced in my mind and helped to find ideas for the projects we needed.

Author: Igor Kosovsky