Day in and day out, commercial designers work with people who don't have a direct connection to or background in design, including strategists, writers, account people and, most of all, clients. That can make it challenging to convey the value of good work and to sell in new ideas. But if you understand how those people learn about design, you can come up with ways to make them into better business partners, advocates, and even creative collaborators.
I know from whence i speak, having come from the copy side myself. Eventually, I've creative teams on the client and agency sides; teams that have included designers at all different levels. It took a lot of time, and it wasn't always easy. So I thought that it might be helpful for you to learn about my journey because of how it could help you teach others, which might make your lives easier...
As a word guy, I think about communication first, which reminds me of a site redesign project. The client wanted a clean, uncluttered interface, with lots of white space and beautiful product hero shots. She was looking for a strong grid pattern, with information broken up and presented in manageable chunks; high-contrast elements, including color, size and font weight; and lots of dynamic and interactive content. All of which would have been incredibly helpful, if it were actually articulates. Instead, what we got in terms of direction was ‘Make it like Apple.’
Point is, non-designers learn about design through words & pictures. Not everyone can draw or knows how to use the Creative Suite. But we all talk and write. And we all intuitively get big, dumb animal pictures. We just need a little help to develop a vocabulary that allows us express what we’re thinking in design terms. But that requires exposure and experience. We need to see what the words you're using mean so that we can use them ourselves in the right ways and in the right contexts.
You can help by showing us. Teaching us. Being instructive about design in ways that help us grasp what you mean when you use highfalutin terms like ‘composition,’ ‘saturation,’ and ’slab serif.’ Give us the tools to not say opaque when we mean transparent, or graduated when we mean gradient, or forced perspective when we mean linear. When you do, you’ll also be helping us distinguish between good and great. We want great, too!
Another way to understand about how non-designers learn design is evident where a lot of other life lessons can be found: in the movie The Devil Wears Prada.
Anne Hathaway’s fashion-assistant character, Andy Sachs, rolls her eyes at an earnest decision-making process that involves many highly paid executives debating which of two similar-looking belts to include in a magazine shoot. Seeing the assistant's disdain, her editor, Miranda Priestly, played by Meryl Streep, rips into Andy, schooling her by explaining that the cheesy blue sweater she's wearing didn't simply materialize in a mall one day, but was in fact the result of a meeting exactly like the one they’re in, and that the sweater’s “not just blue, it’s not turquoise, it’s not lapis, it’s actually cerulean.”
It’s a great example of the fact that, learning about design requires people like to me to totally immerse ourselves in it. To surround ourselves with it and appreciate it in new, more nuanced ways.
Of course, we can do some of this on our own, but there’s only so far a StitchFix account and a subscription to Architectural Digest will take us. So here, again, we need your help. Pull us into projects, even (especially!) those where you don’t immediately see a need for us. Same with brainstorms and whiteboard sessions. Share those Sketch layouts that you usually just pass around between yourselves. Simply: show us how the design sausage is made.
And don’t stop there: Drag us to shows, exhibits…your photographer friend’s gallery opening.Give us recycled issues of CommArts for Christmas and Rothko-inspired eggs for Easter. If necessary, schedule a ritual burning of our 'blue sweater' and help us acquire some fashion sense.
For one more way people like me come to better understand what people like you do, I’ve got to recount a story…
When my wife and I bought a house, we didn’t have much money left to furnish it. Mind you, these were the days before some robot could order a sofa for you online and a drone would deliver it that afternoon. So we did what other cheap and enterprising north easterners did, and roadtripped to Hickory, NC. There, we spent a couple of days shuttling from one showroom to another, eventually buying the whole kit ’n caboodle—enough to furnish pretty much the whole house.
A couple of months later, back home in New England, a truck backs into the driveway, and two guys unload its contents, placing pieces precisely where we envisioned them. Everything was perfect; for about a week, after which time I realized we had made some abjectly awful choices and would spend the next decade or so trying to change it all. (We went through no fewer than a half dozen iterations and have currently stopped somewhere between what might be called halfway between 'transitional' and 'early Connecticut whitbread.'
That's an admittedly long way of saying non-designers learn about design the hard way: by trial and error. Mostly error.
We make dumb suggestions. We come up with ideas and fumble horribly for ways to visualize them. We toss out absurd concepts that are impossible to execute. We’re the equivalent of the people in your design schools who sat in back of the class and picked their noses.
So be patient with us. Set up some meetings where you share a few different design treatments with us, and let us pick the most successful one. We’ll probably get it wrong, but you can use that as a teachable moment, explaining what works and why.
All of which is another way of saying that helping enlighten non-designers isn't terribly difficult and it's ultimately in your best interests. Because once they're educated; once they understand and appreciate your craft; once they can identify and articulate what effective design is, they can be hugely effective in helping create and sell in great work.