There are people I work with who truly long to be creative in design. They desire the ability to pull together typography, colors, graphics, content, and design elements that make a website really pop and to create ultimate eye candy for the web. I love their enthusiasm and drive to learn. After all, sometimes you just don’t know until you give it a whirl, and it’s better to try and fail than to not try at all! But try as they may, there is always that one awkward question that haunts me and is difficult to respond to, but I have to be honest …

Can Anyone Be a Designer?

The short and straight answer is no, not anyone can be a designer. I believe we are all born with a gift. That gift might be drawing or it could be writing, mathematics, singing, carpentry, or break dancing (which is definitely not my talent). We are all given certain abilities that we excel at and others we couldn’t do to save our life. And that’s OK.

Having a designer’s “eye” is a gift. You either have it in your DNA or you don’t. This doesn’t mean that one who aspires to design cannot learn or grasp the fundamentals of the art, but that it would be very rare for them to be good or excel in their pursuit. Purchasing a Mac and Adobe Photoshop is easy. Understanding typography and color theory is not that difficult. Installing a WordPress theme and editing CSS with Firebug can be learned in a day. Knowing and feeling what is great design and how to bring together all the creative elements is almost impossible – unless you have the gift.

What I encourage people to do is this … find your gift and invest in it. You will be much happier when you are spending your time in something you were created to do. I would love to play basketball like Michael Jordan or jam on guitar like Eddie Van Halen, but even with practice and commitment, I will never be able to live the magic as they have because their talents are not my talents. I might believe I can fly and touch the sky, but I will never be a basketball player or rockstar. It’s not in my DNA and I am good with that. Instead I can focus on the areas I CAN touch the sky with and this will be the most beneficial investment for my time.

If you’re not a web designer now and want to be, don’t hesitate to explore the possibilities or experiment, but just remember that successful designers are born with the DNA to do what they do.

You will start seeing some new things around here soon and I can only thank Mike for helping “draw out” some forgotten passions of mine.

It is an open door to another world just waiting to be discovered. We get to explore whatever ideas come to our minds and create without limitations or restrictions. There are no rules. And while I love the opportunity for exploration, exploration in and of itself is not always profitable for business. Sometimes a designer should start with a foundation already laid or work from a map already charted. I am talking about recycling your work.

True artists usually have a disdain for the word “recycle”. They rebel against anything that is not original and view semi-custom work as unimaginative, lazy or cutting corners. But sometimes the art is in the eye of the beholder and client work cannot always be our masterpiece. There are times where recycling your design is just as effective and more profitable than creating everything from scratch.

I am a fan of using work you’ve already created, especially when a client or customer has seen something you’ve done and says “I want that!” Recycling is not cheating, nor is it lazy. It is an effective way of helping clients get what they deserve and want. Ultimately that’s what matters.

What do you think?