Courage as a Design Attribute

My favorite talk from the 2008 Event Design Summit was from Jeff Lake, Creative Director of Hamilton Exhibits on “Selling Design in a Tough Economy.” Jeff is one of those grizzled design veterans who has seen it all, and thus his advice comes with the added weight of experience.

While the talk had a lot of great nuggets (“The confused mind always says no.” “People with money problems will cause you money problems.” “The true brand essence is…whatever the CEO says it is.”), one particular thing that struck me was his list of attributes of What Makes a Great Designer Great? Here’s the list:

• Always give them more than they expected
• Commitment
• Courage

The example he gave for the last two was this:

Stefan Sagmeister‘s famous AIGA poster, made by having his assistant carve the words into his skin with an exacto knife. Strangely, on the way home from the conference, I was listening to Debbie Millman interview Sagmeister, and she asked about courage. I’m paraphrasing here, but he said, of course he wasn’t brave all the time, but that he had moments of bravery that drove his work.

I’ve never given courage much thought until recently when I took the leap to start Kicker. But thinking about it, the more I realize that Jeff Lake is certainly right, and probably not just about designers. To be great in any field requires taking risks, and risks require courage.

There is a lot of lip service in our industry about letting people fail and making prototypes you know will fail. But actually doing those things is really difficult. Sagmeister could have been called a fool for that poster, but instead is hailed as a genius. And to a lesser degree, every time designers put their work work for review, they are taking a risk. Sometimes small, sure, but sometimes large. It would be hard to be a designer without being somewhat courageous. You have to be able to stand next to your work, with all its flaws, in public and defend it. Or at least have your name associated with it. This requires a thick skin, one that can withstand a few slashes of an exacto blade.

This was written by Dan Saffer. Posted on Friday, November 7, 2008, at 9:59 am. Filed under Inspiration. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Post a comment or leave a trackback.