Erik Akers

Many times I’ve com­mented on how a lot of peo­ple think they are design­ers or some one knows a designer, sim­ply because that per­son has a piece of soft­ware that pro­fes­sional design­ers use and how this all most always lets to sub-standard work that does noth­ing to build a brand or image.

I have many times try­ing to express my thoughts on this and every time it come off more like a rant then any­thing infor­ma­tive so I decided against pub­lish­ing it. But yes­ter­day this arti­cle come up in my Google Reader and it was so to the point of my thoughts on this sub­ject that I think it’s bet­ter just to pass its along then try­ing to write basi­cally the same article.

Unlike other pro­fes­sions every­one knows what tools design­ers use, and there are sites that sim­ply show every­one tuto­ri­als to cre­ate a given result. But art and design is some­thing that evolves into the final result, any time I start a project I may have an idea of what the fin­ish prod­uct is going to look like, but the fin­ished prod­uct never looks like my first idea.

That is the rea­son pro­fes­sional design­ers have some kind of train­ing that leads them through a design process to get to the final prod­uct and not just see some­thing and copy­ing it.

Any designer should be able to show you sam­ple of their work, if they can’t you should think twice about hir­ing them to han­dle any work.