Design Sojourn | Strategic Industrial Design Blog

This post continues our week long series, where by I will publish one of the seven habits on each day of the week. Here is the link to Monday’s post if you missed it.

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2) Proactive, passionate, motivated and truly loves what he/she does
I can’t emphasize enough of the value of a proactive designer in any team or organization. More so than in any other profession, design deals with a lot of unknown, and a proactive designer, always passionate and eager, is a boon any project as you can be sure that he/she will have ensured that the best design solution has been sorted out and worked through to the end.

Furthermore, believe you me, that the majority of design work is not the glitz and glamour of the so-called genius concept or sketch, awards and the sexy rendered coffee book images. A lot of it is managing piles of issues, tiring nights, and sometimes just down right dirty work. The pro-active and motivated design is a positive influence in the team, chewing through the work like a paper shredder.

There will be times where there are jobs nobody wants to do, but it has to be done. For example, after the team pulls an all nighter, someone needs to reposition a logo. Or everybody wants to jump on that sexy mobile phone project for a high profile client, instead of that latch design for a back room server. The pro-active designer takes on the job, and treats it as a learning experience, and that through these hard knocks he/she will become a better designer.

edit: After reading Jon’s post here, I think there is one more attribute that I forgot to put into the mix, that should be in there, as it sums it all up. An effective designer has to truly love what he/she does. When there is love, the proactive information searching and motivation comes naturally. The problem with many designers, especially with the senior designers, is that they are all jaded after too many late nights and design constraints and forget what they loved about design in the first place. If this is the case, then its time to stop, take stock of your work and life, and perhaps decide to move to a different design environment.

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I do hope you enjoyed Tuesday’s entry; do check out Wednesday’s post after you are done with this?