The Uneducated Rip-Off

I have been reading a lot of books lately. Not on design, but in other areas of interest like marketing and photography. When I was in high school and college I was a complete bookworm. With the web being so new to me I would read every book I could at the library. Whether it be on design or programming I was soaking it all in. I didn’t apply everything I read so most of it just was retained as knowledge, but I felt that through all of these readings I was able to pick up new insights.
Being a great designer, photographer, artist, architect or whatever requires that you have a deep knowledge of your craft. Does it mean you need to follow along the same path of others? No. Does it mean that you need to read everything in sight? Not even close. However, it is very helpful to gain as much insight from what others have learned before you so that you can decide if something is worth it or not. There is no reason you should repeat the mistakes others have made or go against a principle that thousands of people have put to the test before you.

The Easy Profession

Web design is an easy profession to get into. You learn how to use an online editor and you make some small changes and presto, you have designed a website (sidenote: check out this discussion on the word design being diluted). A lot of web designers have read books on web design, but how many have read books on the principles of design? How many are merely experimenting with techniques that are proven not to work for their clients, but continue to do so because they are unaware that others have proven they don’t work? How much effort could be saved by some designers if they had taken the time to read and educate themselves on different aspects of design?

People have come before us, failed, learned, written it down. Scientists have figured out what works, and proven it. Economists have gained significant understanding about the long-term impacts of short-term decisions. And historians have seen it all before.
How dare we, then, decide to just wing it? To skip class. To make up history. To imagine that science is a matter of opinion, something optional, a diversion for the leisure classes… How can we work in the marketing tech field, for example, without knowing about David Ogilvy and Lester Wunderman and Claude Hopkins? Or Kaushik and Shirky?
If you’re doing important work (and I’m hoping you are), then you owe it to your audience or your customers or your co-workers to learn everything you can. Feel free to ignore what you learn, but at least learn it.

Seth Godin
We aren’t the first designers of the world. Many have come before us and struggled with design principles that hadn’t been written yet. They discovered them and wrote them out for us so that they would learn from them. Who are we to ignore them and pretend that we can improve upon such techniques?

The Wunderkind

There are Wunderkinds of the world who pick up on some things without ever learning about them. Don’t take this the wrong way, but there is a good chance you aren’t one of them so you will have to do it the hard way and that is by reading and studying. Learn what the lessons that the greats of your profession have to teach you.
How can you effectively use grid systems without reading the work of Josef Muller-Brockmann? How can you reach the greatest solution of an information dense design without understanding the principles laid out by Edward Tufte? There are so many more greats, but you should be out searching for them on your own. You should have the hunger to improve your abilities and understanding of your craft by reading the words of your forefathers. If you don’t have that hunger then realize you probably aren’t providing the best value possible to your clients.

The Rip-Off Artist

Most people in a creative industry are rip-offs. Would you like to go to a surgeon that hasn’t at least read to the deepest of his knowledge the practices of others that have performed the surgery that you are about to receive? So many creatives pass off their skills as the knowledge of the industry they are in and yet they are merely winging it. Great designers might not be able to come up with the perfect design on the first draft, but all of their drafts usually look damn good because they understand what works and what doesn’t. How many designs do you go through that look like total crap before you finally start reaching a point that each new iteration is decent looking?
You are charging people for your work and to their knowledge you know everything that will work and what should be done. Can you really say you know these things without knowing what the people before you have done? Brian Clark is one of the most well-respected online marketers around today. What if he told you that he never read a single thing by Ogilvy? He wouldn’t tell you that because he has read Ogilvy, but that would seem utterly ridiculous to me if he hadn’t. In fact, his whole site is based around the principles laid out by the marketing geniuses before him. He is simply building on top of their work and creating a new level of his own.
Why aren’t you doing the same?
The web is still a very young medium so a lot of stuff that you will do might not have any history at all. Sites like Smashing Magazine provide great insight as to best practices for today and when you combine those practices with that of past designers you can start to etch out a fairly decent internal knowledge base. You don’t like getting ripped off by the mechanic or dentist or painter, so it shouldn’t be okay for you to do the same to your clients. Soak up every piece of design knowledge you can and then you can decide if it is worth applying.
Article source: http://journal.drawar.com/d/the-uneducated-rip-off/