Speider Schneider wrote an excellent piece on Six Revisions about How Wannabe Designers Burden the Profession.
Absolutely brilliant.
Here is Speider’s check-list to see if you are a designer or just playing around:
If You’re A Designer
- You are the weird kid who drew in your schoolbooks while other kids studied hard and told the teacher you weren’t working.
- You make a living, or at least a good part of it (the economy being what it is), from design.
- Peers treat you like a professional.
- You’re somewhere on the first page of Google for something you designed.
- Relatives demand you do a logo for their new business and you wish lightening would strike you dead right there at the dinner table.
- You want to strangle people for offering you $50 to design a website for them.
- You worry about a client paying so you can make the rent and eat.
- You complain about having to pay the outrageous price of some design publications.
- You get angry and call the people in the design magazines “overrated hacks.”
- You consider wearing a hook and eye patch from all the design software you have to pirate.
- You know the difference between RGB and CMYK and know they are not TV stations.
- You think crowdsourcing and design contests are eroding the industry.
- You swear your kids will never go to art school!
- You are starting to see a point to this article.
If You’re A Wannabe
- You were the kid telling on the kid drawing in his/her schoolbooks.
- When a relative asks you to do the logo for their business you get excited and tweet to your 12 followers about it.
- When you walk up to a group chatting at a design event, they roll their eyes, become very quiet and scatter quickly — while you are still in mid-sentence.
- You are on the first page of Google only for being arrested or burning down your house by smoking in bed.
- You get excited at $50 for designing a website.
- Your spouse pays all the bills and you have no idea where the checkbook is kept, nor do you care.
- You subscribe to every design magazine to put on the coffee table but never actually read them.
- If you read the design magazines, you feel anxiety rising within you because you are jealous of the people in the publications.
- You ask your spouse to buy the latest version of Adobe CS, 24 hours before it’s released and they do it just to shut you up.
- You enroll your kids in every art class there is in town and go with them and yell about how their work is “sloppy” and “lazy” until they cry.
- You think this article is mean and I’m an idiot.
So, who are you?
Whether you are a professional or just playing around, I suggest you give this a read.
[via Six Revisions | Image via D. Sharon Pruitt]
Matt Riopelle says
Nice list. But professionals pay for the software they use and don’t worry about the designers featured in design magazines.
Eric Dye says
Good point. +10pts for you, Sir!
Brian Notess says
I sometimes pretend to be a designer.
Eric Dye says
A good pretender.
Matthew Snider says
I am both!
Eric Dye says
😀
Marcus Williamson says
Fake it til you make it 😉
Naw…
I’m dig’n the article and all its saucey goodness.
Would you say this is $50 worth for a website? http://cl.ly/2F2d2r3I0g0l2G2J1v1a
Eric Dye says
Love the minimal look. It’s all the rage … at least that’s what I read?