Dear Graphic Designer

Dear Graphic Designer,

Let’s now find out how a method from the sports domain can be applied to a creative one.

Before we begin, I’d like to invite you to consider this:

An athlete’s approach: I believe that there’s an athlete in us all. After all, everyone has the strength, fitness, and flexibility to perform in whichever field they’re in. Can we rethink athleticism as a mindset or a way of doing things that isn’t limited to just sports?

Graphic Designer = Athlete: In the same way that athletes have their sports of focus, we’re no different––like those who focus on [running]¹, we focus on [graphic design]². Just like athletes, we also go through intensive training and face plateaus. That’s why it’s helpful to switch things up and train other muscle groups so that we don’t burn ourselves out in the process. By doing so, we’ll also develop wider ranges of motion so that we’re prepared to deal with future plateaus and to adapt to foreign environments.

Read on to find out how a plateau led a fellow graphic designer (also a participant of the program) to discover that cross-training was the solution that she needed to expand from her sport of focus:

1. Training equipment: Like how an athlete uses specific equipment to train with, so do we. For some of us, we were trained to use a mouse, a keyboard, and Adobe from day one, and are expected to still do so as they’re the industry standard equipment in both educational and working environments. For this graphic designer, she became conditioned to feel at home with the presence of such equipment, so whenever came the time to transition into new environments, she felt “safe” as long as they’re in sight.
2. Muscle memory: This is developed from continuous engagement with a specific activity. In the case of this graphic designer who found herself deeper into the commercial field, her specialization looked like so:

   (graphic design (digital marketing design (performance marketing design)))

   This meant that her training also became more controlled through the use of specific muscles required for quick turnarounds for deliverables. As a result, keyboard shortcuts became the tool she relied on to facilitate this optimal workflow: finger gestures were paired with specific functions, and combinations were memorized through repetition and association with specific software.

Years into this routine, the flow was abruptly interrupted by a sudden moment of awareness and dissociation: she watched her fingers perform automated operations but was struggling to catch up with or make sense of the very action herself.

Is flow a good thing after all, when you find yourself in a state of trance that leaves you feeling displaced? Has it been an orchestration of planned choreographies that are fixed to movements and leaves no room for other variations or alternatives all this time?

1. Plateau: When speed and quality were the most valuable assets in the working environment, creativity and quality were put on the back burner. With the only equipment she knew to use, she found ways to infiltrate or to “misuse” them as an attempt to break out of the so-called safe environment she felt trapped in. She wondered: if developers can “imbue” an object “with the power to do something” and if interfaces can “define the roles computer users get to play,” (Lialina, 2018) is it possible to take on the roles of developers and interface designers in our own unspecialized ways?
2. Cross-Training: Despite the attempts, the limits of the mouse and the keyboard remained, and the urgency to escape this place she called home grew stronger. It was time to hit the road. She found her first shelter in physical computing, and it was through this environment where she discovered that there are other layers that also exist behind and beyond these shortcuts and interfaces. For the first time ever, it was even possible to create alternatives of the equipment was trained with. Not only that, but this environment could foster the ‘awkward behavior’ that can help her get a better understanding of the interactions among skills, tools, and medium (Snelting, 2018). Yet, something still felt out of place. While ‘making’ enabled a more liberating way of working where the focus can be on the process itself for a change, its association to ‘fab labs’ and ‘makerspaces’ can also be intimidating for newcomers. Also, while ‘hacking’ and ‘reverse engineering’ were common terms within this space that somehow resonated with her way of working, it was more about applying these methods in broader contexts that are not limited to the field of hardware and electronics.
3. Cross-Making: Now going into the Cross-Making program, she learned about another term that she found more relatable: ‘critical making’ that “connects two modes of engagement within the world that are often held separate”––critical thinking and physical ‘making’ (Wesseling and Cramer, 2022). How can we cross-train ourselves to develop tactics of an athlete and a maker to maneuver through the industry pipelines and standardizations and repurpose them as launchpads to explore alternative and more suitable and relatable ways to learn and make? Can learning from other environments help us re-approach the tools we’re expected to use in the environments we were trained in?

Let’s now put this to the test in the next session!

Cross-Maker-in-Training

¹ Insert sport here.
² Insert 'sport' of focus here.