When Designers Behave Badly...

I am not a graphic designer, but I have been doing graphic design for more than ten years. When I was a child, my father paid for an Adobe Illustrator course, when it was still in its early versions, and I discovered that the right tools made many things possible. In adolescence I made my first web pages and occasional design work. Although I have no formal design education, I can normally do most of what practice requires without a designer’s help.

As time has passed and I have learned more about design theory and its tools, I have gained more respect for genuinely good professional graphic designers. At the same time, I have realized that sadly most people who call themselves graphic designers are terrible at their work.

To be clear, I consider that

• someone who can draw is not a graphic designer,
• someone who is creative is not a graphic designer,
• someone who thinks they are an artist is not a graphic designer,
• someone who can use design software is not a graphic designer

To me, a graphic designer analyses a problem and develops a solution by graphically abstracting a concept. They communicate ideas, put function before form, seek the best solution rather than satisfying their taste, and leave usable work that can outlive their participation in a project.

How many graphic designers do you know who meet these qualities? I think there are few; those few take themselves seriously and seek important projects. The rest fall into one of the descriptions above.

The reason for this exposition is the recurring difficulty of working with some designers. Several things stand out when designers behave badly:

Disorder and lack of care

Many designers do not take care with their work: they do not seek precision when aligning elements or give supposedly equal elements the same numeric properties, such as colour, shadow, or gradient. A square must have all sides equal; even a one-pixel difference means it is not a square.

Ignorance of standards

It is embarrassing that some designers use the worst tools, CorelDraw, and do not know standard formats that can be opened across computers and programs. They deliver vectors as CDR, assuming everyone has their version of CorelDraw on Windows, rather than PDF, EPS, or SVG. They also confuse colour models, delivering web graphics in CMYK instead of RGB or, better, hexadecimal values.

Ignorance of tools

There is a wide variety of tools for innumerable applications, yet many designers know only one and use it for everything: Adobe Photoshop to alter an image, make a logo, design a web interface, or lay out a magazine page.

Ignorance of the digital world

Today design is made on computers, the tools designers use most, yet some designers cannot use them. Some must scan drawings and convert them to vectors because they cannot draw vectors on a computer. I do not demand basic CSS knowledge, though they should have it, but they should at least know it is stupid to email a 40MB Photoshop file. Recently, a designer gave me website measurements in centimetres.

No knowledge of typography and lettering

At a dinner I met a “graphic designer” who did not know Helvetica; her favourite typeface was Arial. Attractive designs are often ruined by illegible or badly used typography. Theory is another matter entirely.

Given all this, it is unsurprising that graphic design in Mexico is at rock bottom. I endure the visual pollution of tiny letters on billboards and Comic Sans on every leaflet. A graphic designer once told me that “graphic design is the prostitution of art”; I think it is rather the “prostitution of bad taste and lack of professionalism.”

But there is still hope. I know talented, professional designers are out there waiting for their opportunity to shine; we only need to find them.