Christian San Jose
Hi, I'm Christian, a Creative Director at Create.ph.
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Anonymous asked:How do you call yourself by profession? As a freelancer, I've seen people call themselves graphic designers and multimedia designers, how do I distinguish one from the other?
I’m a designer.
Not a Graphic Designer, Multi-disciplinary Designer, “Multimedia” Designer, UX Designer, Web Designer, Layout Designer, Visual Designer, Print Designer.
Being a designer encompasses all mediums, but it doesn’t mean you’ll take on work from all platforms. Having an understanding in design allows you to find solutions for the problems of people, presents a more helpful and meaningful way to make things work, and allows everyone to live better.
The education of a designer shouldn’t be focused on one particular discipline or specialty when starting out, even though that will allow you to hit the ground running. You may develop a keen sense of the trends in magazine design, or have deep knowledge on how to layout the perfect billboard - but design is an ever-evolving practice that you’ll find yourself dealing with clients that want their Company Brochure designed, even if it’s explicitly stated in your resume that you’re a “Web Designer”. We might not take the job, but the duty falls on us to broaden our skills - to study, familiarize and differentiate each design discipline for ourselves, so we can easily translate from one medium to the other, and reasonably have certain specialties - not solely based on our proficiency or preference of software.
Our job doesn’t stop at addressing the client’s design goals with just a finished product, it’s also each designer’s responsiblity (!) to help them understand what we actually do and why we make each decision in our designs (e.g., why we put their logo here, why we used a serif instead of Comic Sans, etc.) For every client that knows what you’re really capable of and hires you for your specialty, there’s one that has no clue what you actually do. Our value to clients shouldn’t be all for what we make - the product, our real value lies in why we do it - the process.
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Designers,
It’s 2011, not 20 1 1.Learn how to kern. Happy new year!
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Design tip: Never copy something beautiful, but always ask why it is.
twitter.com/csj89
