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Quote
of the Week:
All solitary dreamers know that they hear differently when they close their eyes.-Gaston Bachelard
The Designer as Chef
Khoi Vinh's site, Subtraction, has a nice post about the virtues of smaller-sized design studios. He argues that it's impossible to have 100% excellence/creativity/wonderfulness in a large design agency, since
This craft, and whatever pretensions to art it can pull off, rests so much on the efficiency of transferring ideas from the brain to the hand. This means that in its ideal form, it works best when practiced by a single person. The perfect design staff is a single designer who can conceive of and execute an idea from start to finish—a straight shot from the right brain to the wrist—maintaining the same coherent creative vision throughout.
My comment on his post is worthy of cross-posting here, since it's a metaphor that I use all the time with my clients:
I always give clients who are leery of working with a small studio (or a lone designer) a metaphor for the small shop/single designer experience:
A designer is a chef. The client is the diner.
Diner tells chef: make me a four-course meal.
Chef and diner then discuss what they'd like that meal to be, what the diner's tastes are, how it meshes with the chef's style and competence.
Chef goes to buy ingredients (sometimes the diner comes along, or has already brought the ingredients with them. Interesting restaurant, eh?)
Chef retreats to kitchen. Cooks.
Presents meal.
Diner eats.
If the chef and the diner have chosen each other well, then the diner should leave satisfied.
Perhaps a strained metaphor, but for me, the content are the ingredients, and the designer is the chef who puts it all together to make something palatable.
And we all know the old saw about too many cooks. If you want a (perhaps) more predictable meal, go to the Olive Garden. Or Burger King. You'll get served faster, but your meal will taste a lot like the one served at the next table. And it won't be made just for you.
photos by ericmcgregor and katayunLabels: design, small business, writing
posted at 8:35 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
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