Designers Can’t Switch Off. We’re Always Looking

I don’t think designers ever really stop working.

We stop doing work, obviously. Laptop shut. Adobe closed. Phone down. Maybe even a holiday if we’re feeling reckless.

But the brain? Still very much open for business.

You can be walking down the street, completely minding your own business, and suddenly notice a shop sign.

The kerning is off.

Not enough to ruin anyone else’s day. The shop is still trading. People are buying sandwiches. The economy survives.

But you’ve seen it now.

And that’s the problem.

You carry on walking, but mentally you’ve already fixed the spacing, changed the typeface and decided the whole sign would look better in lowercase.

Nobody asked you to.

Nobody is paying you.

You don’t even want the job.

Yet somehow you’ve done half a rebrand before reaching the next set of traffic lights.

That happens all the time.

You see a shop and think the branding could be so much better. You pick up a T-shirt because the typeface is lovely. You choose one bottle over another because the packaging has somehow convinced you it has its life together.

Sometimes I genuinely think designers are just magpies with Adobe subscriptions.

We notice tiny visual things and immediately want to take them home.

Holidays don’t help either.

You sit down at a restaurant somewhere beautiful, everyone else is looking at the food, and you’re staring at the menu wondering why the starters are in one font and the mains are in another.

Then you spot the spacing.

Then the hierarchy.

Then the strange bit where somebody has centred one heading but left everything else aligned left.

By the time everyone else has chosen dinner, you’ve redesigned the menu and still haven’t read what’s actually on it.

There is basically nowhere safe.

You can be sitting on the toilet and suddenly find yourself looking at your partner’s moisturiser.

Not using it.

Reviewing it.

Nice bottle. Good weight. Slightly questionable type choice. That cap feels cheaper than the rest of the packaging.

Five minutes ago you were trying to switch your brain off.

Now you’re conducting an unpaid skincare brand audit with your trousers around your ankles.

Public transport is no better.

Trains are full of things to judge.

Maps. Icons. Station names. Safety signage. Advertising. Tickets. Wayfinding.

You’ll sit there looking at a sign thinking, why is the platform number smaller than the information nobody cares about?

Meanwhile everyone else is just trying to get home.

I think that’s the weird thing about design.

After a while, you stop consciously looking for it.

You just see it.

Spacing, colour, balance, type, proportion, hierarchy. Your brain is quietly checking all of it whether you asked it to or not.

And it isn’t always criticism.

Sometimes something is just really good.

A clever bit of packaging. A beautifully simple sign. A menu that makes loads of information feel effortless. A colour combination you wouldn’t have thought of.

You notice those things too.

Probably because you know how hard it can be to make something look like nobody tried very hard.

A lot of inspiration comes from that as well.

Not from sitting in front of Pinterest desperately typing “cool branding inspiration”.

From being out in the world.

A football shirt. A road sign. Old packaging. A book cover. A weird colour on a building. Some terrible leaflet that accidentally gives you a good idea.

It all gets filed away somewhere.

Then six months later your brain pulls it back out and pretends it just invented it.

So I’ve stopped trying to switch it off.

It clearly has no intention of listening.

If I’m going to spend the rest of my life mentally fixing shop signs, judging moisturiser bottles and buying T-shirts because of the typeface, I may as well accept it.

Designers are always looking.

Even when we’re absolutely not supposed to be.