The Roles Experience & Intuition Play in Design

This is a guest post by the tremendously intuitive and experienced designer, Naomi Niles. I think it’s also relevant for non-designers and I’m grateful to Naomi for sharing her ideas with us.

Let me tell you an insider secret about the world of design. Are you ready for it? This may shock you…

Good design is not magic.

Yep, you read that right. Most of us designers haven’t been randomly or genetically blessed by the enchanting creativity fairy. We’ve gotten good at our work by putting in the hours and making a lot of mistakes, pretty much in the same way that you get good at just about anything you really dedicate yourself to.

But don’t you have to have a natural talent for it to be a designer?

Not necessarily. It’s true that some people have natural inclinations that make it easier for them to grasp the fundamentals of design (being left-brained vs. right-brained, their learning style & personality type, etc), but being an extraordinary designer on the first try is a pretty rare event indeed.

Now, I’ll let you in on another secret. I struggled a lot with something the first few years I started designing. I felt badly about my work. I didn’t attend art school and I though I would never be good enough because of it. Heck, I only took 1 semester of art class in high school. I didn’t even think I really had any natural talent for it. You could say I started from zero.

Since I’m sharing my darkest secrets today, I’ll show you the very first “web design” I did back in 2002.

http://intuitivedesigns.net/grunge.jpg

You might be saying, “It could be better and it could be worse”. Well, at least I hope that’s what you’re saying and not, “Wow, that sucks monkeys, man!”.

When I look at it now, I see that I broke a lot of “rules”. Are there like 6 different incompatible free fonts in there? This would’ve been a nightmare to code into a working website. User Experience? That didn’t exist in 2002, right? I was pretty proud of this small achievement at the time though, let me tell you.

And even now, I still don’t consider myself a great designer. I do good work and I know I’m a decent designer. I’ve put in more than my obligatory 10,000 hours. I care. But, I don’t have illusions of being the next Milton Glaser. And you know what? That’s ok.

Am I naturally “intuitive” though? Well, yes and no.

It’s kind of funny because now that I know more about the fundamentals of design, I can objectively identify small quirky things that set the stage for me to become a designer.

For example, my annoying habit of arranging and rearranging all my knick-nacks until they look perfect. As it turns out, it’s not OCD, but carefully following the rule of thirds, symmetry, proximity, and dominance!

And that crazy habit I had of grouping my crayons into compatible colors as a kid was not really so crazy after all. I still think teal blue and violet make a very nice couple. They should get married and have lots of purple baby crayons.

And if we get into the marketing and psychology aspects of commercial design, I could tell you lots of stories about my previous jobs doing door-to-door sales and telemarketing. We won’t go there because I’m still too scarred to talk about that though. I said I was sharing my dark secrets today, but not THAT dark!

Still….that grungy design would have made for a pretty bad website and I would have been a pretty crappy designer if I just called it good enough at that point.

So, which is it that makes a good designer? Intuition or experience?

Well, I think it’s perhaps a little intuition or a knack for it and a lot of experience that make a great designer.

Have you read Blink by Malcolm Gladwell? It’s probably one of my favorite books from the last few years. When I read it, it made me think a lot about design and how people perceive it, especially during the first few critical seconds. The main premise of the book, if you haven’t read it, is that often what you call “intuition” is really a culmination of experience bringing you to make a well-founded snap decision or what he calls “thin-slicing”.

I’d say this is true most of the time. For example, when a client proposes an idea for a design that we’re working on together, I can usually determine right away if it’ll be workable or not.

If I discharge the idea right off the bat, it’s not because I’m drunk on my own power. It’s because I can “see” how it’ll look in my mind. I often move things around in my head while considering them or sometimes I come up with whole website designs almost all done in my mind before I even start up Photoshop.

Or perhaps, my quick judgement just tells me it won’t work. I just know.

I couldn’t do that when I started designing. It’s an ability that I have now because I’ve experimented a lot, made a lot of mistakes along the way, and have learned a thing or two about what works and what doesn’t. I’m sure a lot of other designers feel the same way.

What has your experience been?

I’d love to hear from you other designers out there. Did you take off running right from the start or did you go through the school of hard knocks like me?

And if you’re not a designer, what do you think? Do you see the parallels between this and your own line of work?

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Naomi Niles is the co-owner of Intuitive Designs, a custom website design and illustration studio she’s run alongside her husband since 2003. She also helps web designers with the business side of things at Guides for Designers. You can follow her on Twitter at @NaomiNiles

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