No this isn’t some treatise by Jean-Paul Sartre. I was reading my morning dose of thought-leadership-tagged blog feeds and came across an article in Fast Company: Beyond Design, 10 Skills Designers Need to Succeed Now. I usually gloss over these because they’re inevitably formulaic and a little trite, but I stopped this morning because we have a new intern and I thought there may be a few good gold nuggets of wisdom there for her. In fact there were but that’s not why I’m writing. I was taken aback by this bullet:
Objectivity & Self Awareness: Assess yourself and your work, and view yourself through the eyes of others with a realistic understanding of your capabilities.
Seems simple enough but so many people I come across not only can’t do this for their own aesthetic visual design work, they can’t be objective with themselves in regard to their other non-design skills.
People have always remarked that I’m extremely critical about myself and my work – almost to the point that I’m unrealistic on the other end of the spectrum. But I think I have to be. There’s so much great design out there and so many challenges that would benefit form sound design thinking that by reminding myself there’s so much more ground to cover I keep hungry. I provide order to the gamut of bad-to-great design by placing myself in the spectrum and trying to understand what separates my work from better design. And it’s that honesty with myself I try to maintain since, for me, its undeniably linked to being objective and self-aware.