Designer as translator
Designer as performer
Designer as director
Form and content were two separate entities.
The misconception is that without deep content, design is reduced to pure style, a bag of dubious thinks. In graphic-design circles, form-follows-function is reconfigured as form-follows content. If the content is the source of form, always preceding it and imbuing it with meaning, form without content is some kind of empty shell.
Designers also trade in storytelling. The elements we must master are not the content narratives but the devices of that telling: typography, line, form, color, contrast, scale, weight. We speak through our assignment, literally between the lines.
There is thinking and making and there is thinking through making. The problem with work is well documented: Is there room for ideas in the context of dealing with someone else’s problems?
Designers speak between the lines and a design career is a series of inherently irrational accidents imperfectly molded into something seemingly coherent.
Design is always about creating a physical effect: it is both read and felt.