MARGARET OSCAR: Designers are meant to be loved, not to be understood.

This Quote is very suitable from a designer on a Valentines Day.

Off course every designer would love to be loved, but the most important for us, I think, is to be trusted and respected as experts in our field.

Some people literally ORDERS work from their designer in way that makes me want to ask:

“Would that be with fries and ketchup, mam?”.

I suppose you would not sit down in a dental chair and start telling a dentist what to do? The dentist is an expert in her field and you trust and respect her to execute the treatment she determines to be proper for whatever issue she encounters inside your mouth. You have no way of deciding on dental issues, because you’re not a dentist.

For graphic design issues things are not so simple. The professional title of “Graphic Designer” is not protected. That means at least 2 things:

  1. Anyone who wants to buy a MAC and start subscribing to Adobes Creative Cloud Software Packages, can call themselves graphic designers and start practising dangerous “design”.
  1. People in general think themselves entitled to opinions on graphic design, to the same extent as a professional. THESE opinions are based on their subjective likings, not on the knowledge of readability, perception, marketing and technical requirements for production that a professional graphic designer has. Everybody can do design! YAY!! Especially if you are a woman with some sense of home-decoration, fashion or DIY-crafts.

Both these circumstances are very unfortunate for businesses. Time, money and other resources are spent in vain because of them. Besides the respect and trust in graphic design as an expert field is diluted.

I have a very good friend who used to be a leadership coach. She used to say: “My clients do not always get what they want, but they get what they need.”

You don’t need to love us.

Just trust us.

Quote Posts are thoughts and reflections that come to me when making quote images for social media. There is always a reason why a quote resonates with me, and I decided I wanted to share my observations with you. Many quotes are about design, but some are not, even if applicable to design and designers as well. Would love to hear what you think.