Three Designers Who Keep Reminding Me About Good Design

One of the strange things about being a designer now is that I probably see more design before breakfast than designers twenty years ago saw in a week.

Instagram. Behance. Pinterest. LinkedIn. Design blogs. Newsletters.

You can’t move without someone rebranding a coffee shop. And that’s both brilliant and terrible.

There’s inspiration everywhere, but there’s so much of it that genuinely good work can become another image you look at for two seconds before moving on. There are a few designers I keep coming back to, though. For completely different reasons.

James Barnard

I really like what James Barnard has built.

His work is incredible, but it’s the simplicity around it that I find interesting.

His focus is very clear. Logo design, identities and explaining the thinking behind them. There’s no attempt to make design feel mysterious. He shows the work. Explains it. Teaches people. Moves on.

Barnard has talked openly about building his audience through educational design content, including the moment a logo-design video took off and brought a huge amount of attention to his business. That’s particularly interesting to me now because I’m building PKO.

As designers, I think we’re naturally tempted to make our own businesses complicated. We agonise over the portfolio. The positioning. The animation between pages. Whether the button should move four pixels when you hover over it.

Meanwhile, somebody else simply explains what they do clearly and gets hired. There’s something to learn from that. Barnard’s work reminds me that clarity doesn’t have to mean boring.And showing how you think can be just as important as showing the finished thing.

It’s actually one of the reasons I want to write more of these.

James Martin

Made By James is different.

What I like about James Martin is the personality. You know there’s a human being behind the work. There’s an opinion. There’s humour. There are rough sketches. There are things that haven’t been scrubbed clean by an agency marketing department. And increasingly his work talks about branding in terms of reputation, recognition and trust rather than simply treating the logo as the finished product.

That resonates with me.

I’ve spent enough time designing brands to know that you can create the nicest logo in the world and still end up with a terrible brand. A logo is part of it. So is the photography. The copy. The website. The advert. The email somebody receives after buying something. How the person answering the phone talks to you. All of those little things accumulate.

I’ve also always liked designers who aren’t precious about showing the messy bits.

Martin’s process is known for putting sketching front and center, rather than only showing beautifully staged final outcomes. I think there’s something reassuring about seeing that.

Good ideas don’t arrive as immaculate vectors. They’re usually a wonky drawing first.

Milton Glaser

Then you’ve got Milton Glaser.

Completely different era. Completely different world. But still ridiculously relevant.

Everybody knows I ♥ NY.

What I love is how little there is to it. Four characters. Three letters and a symbol. That’s basically the whole thing. Yet it became one of the most recognisable pieces of graphic design ever created.

The original idea was famously sketched while Glaser was in the back of a New York taxi, before becoming part of a campaign intended to improve perceptions of New York during a difficult period for the city. There’s something lovely about that. No giant moodboard. No 96-slide deck revealing the strategic rationale. An idea. And an exceptionally good one.

Glaser described design as identifying a problem and improving the existing condition. That’s a very simple definition, and probably one of the best. It’s also something I think about a lot, because design can become incredibly self-indulgent.

We spend so much time looking at other designers’ work that sometimes we end up designing for other designers. Would this look good on Behance? Will somebody save it on Pinterest? Could this win an award?All perfectly reasonable thoughts. But there’s a person on the other side who just wants to know where the bloody button is.

Glaser’s work is a reminder that the idea comes first.

Three very different lessons

I don’t think I want to design exactly like any of them.
Not because they’re not incredible designers. That’s not really the point. What I want is bits of their thinking.

From James Barnard:

Be clear about what you do and don’t be afraid to teach it.

From James Martin:

Let some personality into the work and show the process, not just the polish.

From Milton Glaser:

Find the idea. Then get out of its way.

Those three things probably describe quite well where my own thinking about design is heading.

Less decoration for decoration’s sake. More clarity. More ideas. More personality. And more willingness to show what happens between receiving a brief and uploading the pretty finished image.

Because that’s increasingly the bit of design I find most interesting.

Not just what somebody made. Why they made it and what was going through their head when they did.