I’ve been asking myself that question a lot recently. I still don’t know the answer.
I started my first design job back in 1997, as a design assistant in an in-house design department of a national chain of English language schools. It wasn’t easy but the skills I picked up in that job have been incredibly valuable and aspects of which have stuck with me.
The thing about being a Graphic and/or Web designer is that to be really good at your job, you have to be good at more than just design.
I’m always working against the clock so being efficient in my workflow helps buy a little bit of extra time (and I need more time). This efficiency can come in the form of building up a collection of Photoshop web layout templates that you often use. To employing good discipline with email checking, response and filtering. Working as a freelancer is great in some ways as you get to define your own workflow and processes to suit you and your client, the challenge comes when you need to work as part of a team and adopt different processes.
This is where the question ‘Am I a good designer?‘ comes into play. Working in a team you need to be flexible and transparent with your processes, and it can sometimes be a challenge to suggest and share what you think might be better ways of getting things done. Is your way really any better? Does it really matter? If projects fall behind schedule and design has been compromised then I suppose it does matter.
Back in 1997 when I started out, part of my job was to create ‘job bags’. The studio I worked in was print based so each job we did had to packaged up into a cardboard file with the original brief, copy changes and corrections, transparencies, artwork on a Zip disk, any receipt relating to costs and a file copy of the print job. The advice I was given by my boss at the time was that anyone should be able to firstly find the relevant job bag easily, and then find what they needed in it easily. Over the years as I moved more to web design I still adhere to that theory in my digital organisation.
Efficient work-flows need to be proved and demonstrated. I think that along with good design skills and good communication, the ability to streamline and improve a design, and build work-flow goes a long way to making a good designer. Whether or not it actually makes ‘me’ a good designer is yet to be seen.