After reading about half of a book about Bruce Lee, it’s left me pondering a lot of things about skills, and how we acquire them. A common topic in the book is about how during martial arts the mind and the body become one, so the fighter isn’t even thinking about fighting when they are doing it. The activity of martial arts becomes instinctual, and I see that as the same as designing in some ways.
While a lot of people tend to disagree (especially academics), I’m a strong believer of the ability to design being largely a case of natural talent. I’m not talking about designing any old website, because anybody with a bit of training can do that. I mean design. The ability to see past the looks of something, and to see the value of its communication. And to some degree, to bring aesthetics and communication to a complete whole so that they’re inseparable.
From my experience of design so far, a lot of people tend to find the “communication” side of things difficult, as do clients. Many young designers and clients see design being about making things look pretty, and that’s the be all and end all. Many young designers know how to create something that looks good, but when it comes to applying it to a commercial situation – or having the ability to see past the design and understand how to communicate – many fall down.
This is around about where I’m going to come back to my original point of martial arts in some way being like design. After a while, you can just sense when something doesn’t look right, or when a something is slightly off centred. The vast majority of people would never notice such a discrepancy, but that obsessive attention to detail becomes so ingrained that it almost becomes an instinct. In many ways, the craft of design is very obsessive.
The best way I could describe obsessing over little things like this is it’s like being let into a secret that only a select few know. Most people know when something looks good or appeals to them, but they can’t tell you why it does. Things appealing to people is never an accident, it’s some poor designer sat at his desk with 10 sheets of A4 around him with 500 words on them brainstorming ideas that makes that product or whatever it is look pretty.
It’s like becoming a member of a secret Make Pretty Things Club. Sort of like a group of people making a daisy chain, only on a much larger scale.
