I no longer want to be a designer & developer

Posted 11 years, 5 months ago in General, Ideology

I no longer want to be a designer and developer. I've come to a conclusion that lead me to believe to produce better work I don't need to be a better designer & developer. Design & development refers to the technical skills idealized by the people that make up the industry. But where do those come from? They come from the limitation of the mediums such as print and web along with use and needs of the people consuming it.

At this point trying to become a better designer & developer means taking even more time and isolating myself to more contact with others in those industries. With that may come a stronger set of technical skills and knowledge but comes with one major limitation: I won’t necessarily produce better quality work.

It might be better produced and have higher production values but the one thing that attracted to me to this field is that the value of the work isn’t purely derived from the quality of the execution. Instead the quality of our work is determined by the effectiveness at communicating the founding ideal to it’s audience. Therefore a good design piece doesn’t need to be made by a good designer.

Instead, I need to be a better human. I need to live more, experience more to become more empathetic to other people. With that comes understanding. Understanding that can be used to create better works that touch who we are as people. For instance we don’t love characters in our favorite movies because they are technically well handled. We identify with them, we understand them in some way and they evoke a response from us that becomes a positive connection. For instance in the original Star Wars trilogy I can identify with Darth Vader being those rare moments where we are blinded by ambition and use our power to harm the goals & ambitions of others. Because we can identify with characters like that the technical theories are produced to try and create the same result.

So in order to become a better designer we need to not spend so much time trying to be a better designer, but a better person. The more positive connections we can create with the world around us, the more cultured we can become, the more valuable our work will be as we try to use that to better connect with people, the ever-important creatures that consume our work.

While it may appear I'm speaking as becoming a business man that is the actually my limitation in my ability to communicate this idea. People are keen when you're not legitimate. People can tell when they're being manipulated and they do not like it. So it's in my best interest to be genuine in my cultural and social development and become a better person to have a better life. The better quality of work should be a by-product of those efforts.