Design's not for you

This is a post from 2016, that I decided to revisit and tweak a little bit.

As illogical as it may sound, the truth is that the purpose of functional and efficient design is not to satisfy its own client, even less the designer itself; we need to focus all designs to the customer and her/his needs.

Designing is putting ego, personal tendencies and prejudice aside; and, in order to create engaging images and experiences to the customer, the designer and its client must work together to conceive them; because without this, the design is meaningless and the company's final goal won't be a reality.

The client, by living its own company, understands its own product and services, and has enough data to know the regular customer and its gross sales accomplishments so far; on the other hand, the designer is a professional that knows how to convert that same data into abstraction of images, ideas and concepts in simple forms, evoking emotions and provoking attraction.

In conclusion, each part of the equation is as important the other, but none of them is as important as the customer itself; because without the consumer, there’s no company, therefore, there’s no design.

I invite you to take part of the new design era of the design and marketing best practices, were synergy is the foundation of great companies.

— Myself, 2016

Thanks, myself from the past.

This is a piece that I wrote when I started my branding company in Mexico, and even though I decided to continue my career on another branch of design, I still stand by this rule, which is so simple, yet sometimes so hard to fulfill.

Ego is corrosive for companies, designers and for everyone who needs a customer to thrive. We as designers are guilty of that, as most of the time we come from an art background, since our childhood we decided to create for ourselves, just for the sake of creating. I am guilty of that and sometimes it costed my job for me to really understand that. Design is different…

Design is creating for the sake of others.

We are solving a solution that will make a user/customer happy, or at least, it will make a message and/or interface less painful to understand.

When we focus on that, there will be no barrier to our growth in our careers, there will be no challenge that can't be solved by having a little empathy for who we are creating for.