The AIGA Chicago (American Institute of Graphic Arts) is asking: Can you be a designer and not know it?
That’s a tough call. I like to say that I’m not a designer. It gives me a fresh approach to my design work where I don’t get bogged down with being stuck in a box. It allows for a sense that there is so much more. Designing? yeah, i do that, but i’m not a designer.
But this question flips the situation around. Where someone is doing design and is totally unaware that they are a designer. What immediately comes to mind are people using desktop software like Word. Sure some people think they are designers. Snooty hootin-palootin designers will disagree that Word users are designers. But sure they are. Or the people who make signs to go up in their storefronts. (actually, don’t even get me started on storefront signage… that’ll be a post for the future)
So of course, people can be designers and not know it. But, it’s a more rare situation where you are a good designer and not know it. That would be a great case, because then you don’t have someone who has a big head about it. They are just merely doing it. Perhaps they are so much more focused on being something else, and design is just way of expressing what they do. But they can express themselves in beautiful ways where the message and design totally work together.
i like to say that i’m a designer, rather than a graphic designer or web designer or product designer or package designer or building designer or electrical designer or interior designer. just saying the one word “designer” is very open-ended, meaning you have a certain perspective on the world around you, and how you deal with that world and within it. are you referring to being a designer as a living and getting paid for it? because that’s a whole different idea. me, i constantly want to arrange elements of all sorts of different things around me, to “re-design” everything like candy displays, the folder system on my computer, the clothes in my closet, the food in my fridge, almost anything. this is definitely part of my personality, so i feel like being an official designer has always been in me somewhere, though for most of my life i did not realize it. now i’m in school, training to be an official paid designer, but that doesn’t mean i haven’t been “designing” all along. i think all artists design, in their art at least, and probably other things too. they just may not be conscious of it. i wouldn’t refer to myself as a “designer” to a person who gets officially paid to do that, though [at least, not claim to do the same thing they did or as well”>, as part of my profession. that WOULD be snooty. it sort of demeans their own profession. i’ve done some very basic designing as part of non-design jobs i’ve had, but i wouldn’t act like i knew the proper design principles. that’s why i’m in school, so i can learn those and be “official” someday.
Conversely, can you think you’re a designer and not actually be one?