Designpreneur?

Recently I read James Reeves’ article on Speak Up called "Design Equals Writing," where Reeves raises some interesting comparisons between the professions of writing and design. But what caught my attention was Candy Chang's comments about Reeves' article. Candy has graciously let us reprint her comment here on B L A N K. Her thoughts shed some light on our recent post about the changing relationship between design business and design.

I think James brings up a very interesting perspective with the design/writing analogy. It has made me wonder why I have thought of the graphic designer as a client-serving professional, rather than, more simply, a visually-eloquent person. Perhaps it was the way graphic design was introduced to me, perhaps it was some near-sightedness on my part. When I finished design school and first entered the job world, I was frustrated with lackluster content and waited for the Righteous Project to come my way. After a long period of whining, I realized how silly this was. Who was stopping me from creating my own satisfying content? Eventually, I co-founded a record label and started an online store. Now I lay out articles for The New York Times, work on my own “art” projects for exhibits and competitions, and look forward to combining my graphic designer self with a masters in urban planning to become some kind of graphic urban designer planner artist monster.

It took me awhile to understand that I was not somehow fleeing the purpose of design education by choosing these other routes over client-based design. It makes perfect sense that designers create their own line of products or venture into art exhibits, just as writers write their own novels. Design is essentially about expressing yourself visually, so a designer with some ideas of their own... But why have I thought of these as departures from graphic design, rather than a natural category of? Is there no closer term than “entrepreneur” and “artist” to connect them to the design world that they still belong to? Shouldn’t these roles be different kinds of designers as equally as the client-serving designer (which is a ginormous category in itself)? Maybe I’m just splitting hairs, but I have a hard time answering “what do you do” with a succinct answer.

The writing analogy reminds me of Steven Heller and Lita Talarico's "Designer as Author" MFA program at SVA. This is exactly what I am championing – pushing the traditional service-oriented attitude to include an empowering and nebulous category that seems to deserve its own title(s). I don’t doubt that I’ve only begun to think about things that have been thought of before, in the same way that the previous discussion on design writing has mirrored others.

Candy Chang is an artist, designer, and musician with a penchant for urban planning and public art. She and Reeves co-founded Red Antenna, a design collective based in Brooklyn. She is currently an art director at The New York Times.