I regularly come across young designers wishing to expand their horizons at Jack Yan & Associates, and Rohan was one who contacted me in February from his Calcutta base. He’s a talented chap, and a good thinker—so I was delighted to hear he had started blogging. His company, Rainscape, has its blog at this URL. Of course it plugs his work—but as you read his entries you might realize why I keep saying India is the next boom nation.
   It’s fairly well written, which leads me to my next point. Designers should be able to write, especially self-employed ones, because one often needs to market oneself. If I were starting out now, I would do what Rohan did and blog. Thus, when Peter Pimentel at SmashLab Vancouver forwarded me a link to Ideas on Ideas today, I thought it fitted right in to this theme.
   The blog’s latest post, ‘Designers Must Write’, says that designers need to be conscious of the changes to the industry, and need to exercise their creative muscles. Writing skills are among those that need to be exercised. The important paragraph is this:

Not using language efficiently is negligent and wasteful. It’s something a professional designer should never willingly do; nevertheless, I find that many of us shy away from these tasks, as we don’t feel that they are pure design. It’s sort of that attitude of, “that’s not in my job description”, that seems to keep us from strengthening this capability.

   How true. I have virtually based my design career on writing—but then, I have found it to be a strength of mine. Being able to express yourself with the written word has become more a necessity ever since international dealings became everyday with the fax. Only Skype might shift some of the focus back to the spoken word, though not for all. Designers, I would say, are predominantly visual by nature—otherwise we would not be designers.

Del.icio.us tags: writing | designers | graphic design | design | communication Posted by Jack Yan, 09:34  permalink

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