Who’s going to push boundaries if not for us?

There’s no getting around it. Design has devolved into a sea of sameness. Same templates, same sources of inspiration, same blind allegiance to the trend du jour. Don’t believe me? Just scroll through Behance or BrandNew and look at where things have been headed over the past several years.

It seems to me that a few things are at play here: 1) Designers have gotten themselves so worried about following rules of engagement (I’m looking at you, web design) that anything even slightly veering off course is viewed as a radical departure. 2) Designers aren’t designers anymore. They’re hobbyists. Canva fanatics. Wannabe influencers following in the paths of their digital heroes. 3) The world moves too fast and budgets have gotten too chopped for any of us to have the luxury of thinking. And that’s really at the core of successful design: thought. Problem solving. Turning ideas into something tangible. But without the time needed to flesh out a given idea, what are we left with? Cranking out stuff that looks… nice.

I’ve certainly been guilty of this myself on occasion. Clients short on time or money or both force me to move at a pace that doesn’t always result in the strongest work. But having done this for nearly 30 years, even my “crank it out” is at least rooted in some deep knowledge of what works and what doesn’t. But I for one want more out of my profession that just executing what I know the client will approve then moving on to the next thing.

Design should be collaborative. It should be thoughtful, ripe with opinions and intellect. It should make users stop in their tracks (or in their scroll, as it were) and actually think. Anything else is doing a disservice to our clients, and subsequently to their customers.

All this to say… designers, take the time to do things right. Work through the problems. Insist that your clients let you. And clients, do your best to understand that you’re hiring us for our brains not just our hands. Because someone needs to push the boundaries, and it’s not going to be a Canva template.