You Are Not an Artist: A Candid Guide to the Business of Being a Designer

By Jon Robinson

It's becoming increasingly easier for anyone to be a "designer," or at least call themselves any combination of designerly-titles: Graphic designer, art director, commercial artist, visual communicator, content creator... The list goes on.

But there's one big thing about design that most people get wrong: It's not about making things look good. A designer's job is to focus on meaning, how it can be created and communicated. To understand how products are sold and marketed. To evaluate business problems and solve them with creative ideas and processes. Like the list of titles, this too goes on and on.

Sadly, the majority of design education has poorly positioned the role of the designer. Too few practitioners develop the necessary understanding that design is a business, not an art. Good news: All the things designers aren't being taught in the classroom can be found in this book. Things like: What makes design successful, rather than good. How to amass a body of knowledge, rather than a body of work. And why the design community should strive to be an army of thinkers, rather than makers.

Whether you're a student, you're five years into an agency job and still floundering to find confidence, ten years in and considering career reinvention, or feeling stale and burnt out from decades of poor collaboration and deadline fatigue, this can act as a companion throughout your journey. Plus, it's also for the design curious and the design adjacent, because the little details that make designers successful is knowledge that everyone can benefit from, as design touches all aspects of our everyday life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781667865744

Jon Robinson

Jon Robinson writes 'The Gamer' column for ESPN The Magazine and ESPN.com, for which he has interviewed everyone from Kobe Bryant to Tiger Woods. He is the coauthor of The Madden Phenomenon and has a BA in creative writing from San Fransisco State University.

Book preview

You are not an artist

A candid guide to the business of being a designer

By Jon Robinson

––––––––––––––––––––––––

"Designers talk about creating a body of work, but they seldom talk about acquiring a body of knowledge. They take pride in being makers, but seldom identify themselves as thinkers."

–William Drenttel, from the talk Culture is Not Always Popular

Introduction

Why I wrote this book

Marshall McLuhan wrote, We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future. That’s a fancy philosopher’s way of saying, we reflect.

After reflecting on two decades in design, I realized how poorly positioned the majority of design education and advice truly is. So I saw a need to get all these years of what I think, or know—or think I know—out of my head and onto paper. Mainly because I tend to have these same conversations about design with different people year after year.

I find myself repeating the same advice consistently. So what better way to avoid constant repetition than to say, instead, have you read my book?

Eh, that’s a self-fulfilling answer. Let me start over.

The real reason I wrote this book was the COVID-19 pandemic. Before it hit, I taught design for nearly a decade—as an adjunct professor at several universities. And continued to for a short time after. Like so many other educators, the COVID era had a significant impact on the way I taught, and where and when.

But it also changed my outlook on the state of design education and how I want to contribute to it in the future.

The necessity to keep people apart—that forced so many institutions to move to virtual learning formats—uncovered the most significant limitation of the virtual classroom: The ability to have valuable conversations in a shared environment.

When solely engaging with people through screens, it became harder to challenge perspectives, to collaborate, and to connect. Sometimes even, to feel human.

It seemed like the right time for evolution; to find a way to share insight and reignite valuable conversations about design and the reality of being a designer.

An opportunity to teach humans about this big, wonderful design world regardless of cultural, economic, or geographic boundaries.

Years of experience speaking, writing, and having conversations with people proved that I don’t necessarily need a classroom to have a forum.

So, I resigned from my teaching job. And here we are.

Who it’s for

I’ve conducted lots of portfolio reviews with design students and emerging designers. I love meeting new people and talking about design. I can not say the same when it comes to discussing their work.

Why? Because too many of those portfolios are full of beautiful art and character illustrations, identity packages and campaigns for fictional companies, photography and lettering exercises, but very little actual design work.

It’s not always the designer’s fault. They just don’t know the difference, because no one has taken the time to explain it to them.

So this book is dedicated to the designer who not only wants to be good at design, but wants to understand what that really means. Whether you’re a student, five years into an agency job and still floundering to find confidence, ten years in and considering career reinvention, or feeling stale and burnt out from decades of poor collaboration and deadline fatigue, this can act as a companion throughout your journey.

Especially if you’re navigating your design education alone.

But it’s also for the design curious and the design adjacent. If you run a business or organization and want to deepen how you use design or design thinking to create results, improve the way you work with designers, or even approach leadership, this book is for you. If your loved one is a designer and you feel far removed from what they do, this resource will help you better understand their world. If you want to get better at working with clients, there’s a lot of great advice here on building better relationships.

While this book may be written and marketed specifically to a design audience, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t written for a baker, or a financial advisor, or an entrepreneur. At its core, design is creative problem-solving, and there’s an endless need for badass problem solvers well outside the confines of design.

So if you’re a curious, analytical, strategic person who likes to break things down to understand them better; an individual who thrives on collaborating and solving problems with other people; or just someone who wants to feed themself with lots of different knowledge, then you’ll find a lot of value here.

The information you’ll find isn’t just about what makes design good. It’s about what makes design successful. That’s knowledge that everyone can benefit from, as design touches all aspects of our everyday life. At the end of the day, we’re always learning and trying to be better at whatever it is we do.

Designers never really leave design school.

I hope this will be valuable to everyone. If nothing else, I hope you can hand this book to a friend or family member and say, this is why design matters.

How to use it

This book is a culmination of most of the mistakes I made in my career and the things I learned from those mistakes along the way. All the conversations I’ve had, be it with a student, a colleague, or a client partner. All the books I’ve read. All the talks I’ve given (or listened to). It’s 20 years of teaching, and doing, and failing, and getting a little better at this design thing every step of the way.

It’s broken into two parts. The first part is for everyone who said, I wish I learned that in design school. It covers all the basic need-to-haves that are often missing from design education, formal or informal. All the stuff you shouldn’t have to learn on-the-job, but don’t necessarily need a traditional design school education to pick up.

And, yes, it’s very heavily focused on shedding your identity as an artist and building the foundation for a nimble, strategic, problem-solving designer.

Part two is the icing-on-the-cake stuff that will take you to the next level, as they say. It covers my career path through the agency world and how I transitioned to user experience design.

I talk about navigating freelancing and building client relationships. And there’s a lot of advice on working with people; to build a greater level of appreciation and understanding of your teammates, clients, and other partners.

But knowing all that, I’d like you to think of this book as a collection of conversations—focused on truths, advice, learnings, and mistakes—that cover the most common discussions I have with young designers. All the things I especially wish someone had shared with me when I was starting out.

I hope you can open to any page, spend a few minutes reading, and pick up something that will help you along your creative journey.

This experience should feel less like a typical design book and more like a series of 1-on-1 interactions. Consider each conversation your opportunity to think deeper, respond, and add your own thoughts.

One more thing. I’ve worked with everyone from small startups to Fortune 50 organizations throughout my career. You’ll not see me name any of them in this book. My goal isn’t to wow you with stories of how I solved problems for Nike or cooked up an incredible ad campaign for Target, but to give you relatable advice that can help you tackle problems with your own clients, no matter how big or small they are.

So let’s jump in and figure this stuff out, together.

Part 1

All the things they don’t teach you in design school

––––––––––––

Today’s technology makes it easier for anyone to be a designer, or at least call themselves one of any combination of titles: Graphic designer, art director, commercial artist, visual communicator. The list goes on. But design isn’t just about making things look good. That’s only a tiny part of it. A designer’s job is to focus on meaning, and how it can be created and communicated. To understand how products are sold and marketed. To evaluate business problems and solve them with creative ideas and processes. Like the list of titles, this too goes on and on.

That’s one of the great things about our profession: It’s impossible to put us in boxes. As soon as we get a handle on all of the interconnected branches that make up the family tree of design careers, new ones start growing in all directions.

Thinking back, part one covers just about everything I wish I had known before I graduated from design school. If your professors aren’t talking about these things in the classroom, you should ask about them and find a way to contribute to the evolution and articulation of these ideas with your peers.

But first, let’s get a critical clarification out of the way.

You are not an artist

Design can’t live on creative expression alone

I studied design in college, but I originally had my heart set on a career in broadcasting.

Growing up near St. Louis, people like Jack Buck and Bob Costas were just as much heroes, to me, as the athletes they covered. I wanted to do what they did, until I had an eye-opening conversation with my high school guidance counselor. In the I-know-the-real-world-better-than-you advice guidance counselors give, he said, you’re pretty good at art. Have you thought about art school?

I likely responded, yeah, you’re probably right, and that was pretty much that. Off to art school, I went.

When I got there, I was drawn to graphic design because I liked the sound of computer art. It seemed new and different at the time. But during my four years of undergraduate design courses, no one took the opportunity to point out something pretty critical: What I was learning and practicing every day wasn’t art.

I had to figure that out on my own.

This is a pretty common problem. The boundaries between art and design are confusing—especially for students—because people often talk about them in the same context. But as a relationship, art and design tend to have as much in common as other famous pairs like Marty and Doc Brown, Han and Chewy, Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewart. Hell, even Pabst Blue Ribbon and a Marlboro cigarette. The chemistry is there, but one is not so much like the other.

Understanding the differences between art and design is an essential first step for anyone in the early stages of their design education. But—so be it—many designers still like to consider themselves artists. If you’re one of them, it’s time for a harsh reality check:

You are not an artist.

Allow me to clarify: Designers are not artists. And viewing yourself as one—especially when approaching your journey as a student of design—is already a step in the wrong direction. In fact, design schools share a tremendous amount of blame for this misconception. I literally can’t place enough emphasis on the responsibility your educators share in addressing this problem.

Yes, design and art are very closely tied together. Many art forms—printmaking, for example—are undoubtedly the roots of our profession. And, of course, many designers are artists in their spare time.

So when you pick up that paintbrush, call yourself an artist or creative genius all you like. As long as you can separate that mentality when it’s time to roll up your sleeves and tackle a design problem.

When I teach first-year students at the university level, this distinction between art and design is one of the first things I want to communicate to them. Like myself before, many of them are art students or have been progressing through a foundational education in the fine arts: Painting, drawing, art history, and often (for some reason) graphic design (the weird cousin of most fine arts programs).

While they do share many overlapping qualities, design and art are two fundamentally different disciplines. Each is informed by different data, is created through different processes, and wholly exists to fulfill different functions.

Most people who understand this believe there’s a fine line between art and design when—in fact—there’s a colossal gap between the two.

The differences between art and design

So, one of the first exercises I do with incoming design students is to explain these differences and break down the distinctions. For example: Art is about the artist, and design is about the audience (or the user). Art is subjective, while design is objective. Art expresses creativity while design leverages creativity. And so on.

A few years ago, after the first night of one of these introductory classes had wrapped, a student approached me and cautiously said: So you’re telling me that this class is not focused on art? And I responded, yeah, let’s explore this idea a little further." To do that, I drew a two-column comparison matrix on