Why Visual Designers Should Write too?
Oh errors are totally fine.
When we were in pre-school, we were taught to read, draw and write. Writing became the medium of how we understood things and to share our thoughts about it aside from speaking. Nowadays, it became easy for us to speak, but difficult to jot down what’s inside our head. It became clear to me that writing became an underrated daily task, we got used to it so much that we never used it for a better life. Yeah writing is a big word, to save you from misery I’ll give a designer’s perspective since the title says it all, chuckles.
History first, I dedicated myself in teaching before landing a job as a UI Designer, school became the grounds of breakthrough of ideas since my students are young, talented and optimistic and here I am, conquering my quarter-life crisis, figuring out how to pay the bills. They honestly think I don’t read their journal but heh! I even write my thoughts on their paper, I read until the last piece, that’s for sure.
Why journal? Reaction paper can be primitive to be a requirement for students, it’s like asking someone to write about something they’re not interested to in the first place. Unlike writing down on their journal, it’s totally on them. I got a lot of insights, they pretty much used all the spaces of a 1/2 sheet of paper, at least most of them. When you’re young, you’re driven, passionate on the things you love but as the time goes by, quality of life upgraded, schedules became full, we got distracted to a romanticized “Good life”, meetings after meetings and bills after bills. We post our thoughts to every social media app we have on our phones, we’re so good at it we never thought it can be a tool to secure a great deal in the future.
Anyone can write, and errors are OKAY.
Designers, Artists, Animators anyone on the Art scene can write, some of us just don’t know how or where to start, many of us are even afraid because someone may point out their grammar errors wherein it should be a good step to become better in writing. When you show your portfolio, when you wanted to share your ideas, visualize or start a project, engage in a collaborative work with developers and clients, you will talk to them but before you utter those ah eh ih oh uh, you have to turn your ideas to words and here is why We Need To Write Things Down People!
A huge number of Filipinos are grammar nazis, can anyone raise their hand for this? It’s surely “off” to you if you’re one of them, seeing a wannabe writer like me committing a lot of grammar errors in my articles, it’s gonna be an eye sore but everyone can be better, eventually. You can start writing 1, 2 sentences everyday, you’ll be wanting to read inspiring blogs and create your own, you appreciate subtitles for foreign movies and most importantly, you read the description before you put that damn item to your cart and checkout. Baby steps!
You’ll be more confident in writing down your ideas because you think more before engaging to an argument. You’ll start a list of your goals, you’ll start writing down your emotions, you’ll think Calligraphy is a good hobby for you, you’ll create your own version of Baybayin. You explore and use all your resources before you write and prepare for the errors because it’s normal.
What you see is what you think is what you’ll jot down.
The more you exercise design thinking, the more you engage to writing. All Ideas should never be stuck inside your head, the world deserve your ideas. And how will they know about it? Knowing something requires understanding, but the funny thing is not everyone understands everything they see, so you have to move the dice. You write it down first, it doesn’t matter if you don’t know where to place that silly comma (,) you just write all the things that matter to you. If your artwork or your project is important then everyone needs to know about it.
About it, the reason why you came up with such idea. The inspiration, because all ideas came from an existing knowledge, what inspires it to be it. The colors you choose, the font style, why the character has a tired looking eyes. Or why you chose #232b2b as the background color of your website.
You write things down to help them understand because not everything can be understood just by simply looking at it.
People will call you artistic if what you’re doing is beyond their comprehension like your abstract paintings and artsy vector illustrations. They call you artsy because they don’t understand, but you shouldn’t just live up to that.
With words to describe your works, people will surely remember it. The way you write about it doesn’t have to be long, to be all accurate and to look smart. You write things down with a purpose to preserve or pass on your knowledge, to inspire and to be understood. People look for something and appreciate it afterwards but if they understood it, it can be a change. You’re not just helping yourself as an artist but to help people understand artists too. Art is not for the rich, design thinking is not only for analytical creatives, it is a knowledge that everyone rights to absorb. And because of writing everything might be clearer for everyone including your piece. Remember, baby steps.
