What I Learned This Year 2011 #16: Scott Hill

1. THERE AREN'T RULES

I'm not trying to be edgy or fight "The Man." I'm only saying that we aren't as constrained as we think we are. Design school told you there were rules. Design blogs tell you there are rules. Design books and manuals tell you there are rules. Then you accidentally break one of those rules, people gasp, and realize that the train didn't come off the tracks. We only have one rule, and it is really more of a goal: Communicate with people. If you're breaking that one, well, you're really just wasting a lot of people's time. But mostly, your own. I am part of a 3-man company in 3 different states. Clearly, there are no rules anymore.

2. DESIGNING FOR MONEY IS THE LAST REASON YOU SHOULD BE DESIGNING

For a semester in college, I thought I wanted to be a preacher. Like my father and grandfather. While studying as a Bible major, I found myself longing to draw and design, though I no longer had any assignments that required me to. I went to my grandpa for guidance and he told me this: "If there is anything else in the world you can do besides preach, then do it. If there is nothing else, then be a preacher." It was profound and I switched back to a design major immediately. This year, I realized that the same applies for design. If there's anything else you can do, then you should. Don't do this for a paying job. Without the love and passion for this game, you will burn out, you will under-perform, you will quit and then wonder why you paid all that money for a degree. In my opinion, the foremost reason to be a designer is because you can't help but design when you wake up in the morning.

3. DON'T BE A JERK

I have a bad leftover habit from high school. I think it's funny to be mean sometimes. I hate that about myself, but it is even worse when it sneaks into my business life. I have bad-mouthed clients. I admit it. I have lost my cool, become frustrated, and unfortunately even tweeted about them. It has yet to come back on me that I know of, but I imagine it has and I don't even know it. In a calmer, clearer state of mind, it hit me like a ton of bricks that many of my Twitter followers are non-designers and potential clients. They've now seen what they could face if they ever stepped into the role of being my client. It's hard to admit when you're wrong, and it's even harder to correct those actions, but it's time for designers to stop thinking we're too cool or informed to be nice. Clients aren't idiots. They're uninformed. And helping them out in that respect should be just as important to us as what we're doing in Photoshop and Illustrator. I know I want to be treated as a partner when I'm hired by someone, not a subservient pair of hands they're paying to operate. I should treat them with the same respect that I ask for.

4. BEING A DESIGNER IS LAME

I love what I do. I'd never do anything else. I mean, I kind of want to open a restaurant. But I have a sneaking suspicion I just want to design and brand it, then I'd realize I didn't actually want to run a restaurant at all. Anyway, what I mean is despite what you see on Twitter, Dribbble, blogs, magazines like Print, CA and HOW, this life is not glamorous. There is no such thing as a design rockstar. And shame on the person who coined that phrase anyway. There are however people we mistake for design rockstars. They get a lot of exposure, they get articles written about them, and they get blogged about. Then what happens? They get flooded with new work inquiries. Cool, but then they spend more time sorting through emails than they do designing the things they're passionate about that got them where they are in the first place. They get ripped off. A lot. Then they reply to emails of people telling them how they've been ripped off. And commenting on blogs about being ripped off. And write articles about being ripped off. They get egos, and then the same people who blogged about them, turn on them and say they're not a purist anymore. And the worst part is you never get to turn it off. Designers know no such thing as "5 o'clock" as it is understood in the big-people-job-real-world. Your head will always be spinning at all times and you'll be thinking about your clients and your projects and your friends' projects and whether they're getting better work than you. You have to be very intentional and try your best (sometimes with no success) to shut it all off just to pay attention to things like family, church, and friends — or you'll go crazy. When you learn that balance, then you're doing something right. I'm still working on that one.

5. WE'RE SO LUCKY

Despite anything I've said before #5, I can't deny that we are the luckiest people in the world to have this profession. I got paid a couple months ago to draw a drunk bear. A drunk bear. I got paid. That still bear-ly (see what I did there?) makes sense to me when I think about it. None of us knew when we were little that we were going to be "graphic artists" as our parents call us, but we knew we were going to do something with art. We never had that awful year of college where we had to pick between 45 different majors. Someone said, "You can draw and make money!" And we said "Seriously? Graphic Design it is!" We started playing around with crayons and paint and colored pencils when we were little kids, and here we are 20 years later doing the same thing. Only now we're providing for our families. It's a trip. And I pray I never take it for granted. We are blessed as designers and if we ever stop trying to be design rockstars, we might just realize it.