After a conversation at lunch today with Sven Elligen and Alex Coles, I have come one step closer to realizing how I fit into this online design community thing, and the answer is… not as much as I thought. For the past few years I have been trying to make the connection between the design community and the blogging community. It seems like every big designer has an equally successful design blog, and I’m not sure how I haven’t realized this before, but that really isn’t true. The reality is that most of the blogs that I read aren’t by successful designers. They are by successful bloggers (which has dramatically reduced the number of items in my Google Reader as of late).
Without a doubt, there are some really great designers with really great blogs. However, the fact that these two things require different sets of skills is inescapable. I’ve been rounding this corner for a while, but I am really starting to realize that the people I admire as designers are not necessarily the most vocal online and they don’t necessarily have the best or most popular blogs. While this is a fun realization, it also leaves me back at square one in some respects. Where do I find the really great designers, and how do I build design community with them.
Designing a Community
There are some really great ways to meet other designers in the online community and I am really appreciative for those tools (Dribble comes to mind). However, it seems that most of these tools are are based on sharing the final product. Even most links on twitter are based around sharing a piece that is just finished. While I think this part of the community is very important, I also feel like it is over emphasized. What interests me more is the process of design.
Without understanding the process of how a design was created, we’re really just looking at one big internet gallery. We need someone to create the tools for designers to collaborate on projects together. I want to find the places where I can share roadblocks in the thought process and ask for help, not by crowd sourcing it, but by creating real relationships with real people that I can talk to about real things. From what I understand, the development community does this much better than the design community. Code is open-sourced rather quickly and then people work on it together. People share ideas and help each other a lot. This interconnectivity is increasingly important as we sit behind our screens day after day after day.
My Community
For me, the community of people I work with is very important. It’s one of the most fun and fruitful parts about any project. Some designers are great at working alone. I’m just not one of them. I am most inspired when I’m in conversation about a project we are working on or a particular design philosophy. I am most productive when I work closely with a team. And for me this is one of the main roles of blogging (and a lot of the other community tools we use).
Blogging is another means of communication. I have, for some time, valued the opinion of some of the thought leaders in the design community, and have aspired to offer that same type of advice. However, they are thought leaders because of the valuable things they have to say, which is where we differ. This is why I have decided to rethink how my website is structured.
I enjoy writing and so I think I am going to keep my blog. However, as I was thinking about a new site design, I realized that blogging is not who I am as a designer, and therefore it should not dominate my design website. This means that a redesign will take a little longer as I think about a better way to adequately represent myself on this site. I’m really sick of “Hey, I’m Josh, and I’m a really awesome designer with a great fun personality”, portfolio types of websites – so shoot me if that’s what I come up with.
All That to Say
This is more of a ramble than anything, but I have been wanting a better way to connect with the (quality) design community for quite some time now. I am still searching for it, but now I will be taking steps to create it as well, and to become a valuable part of it.
Let’s work on something together!
If you have any suggestions, or feel I have missed something, I’d love to hear from you