Design Quotes Series

This post is one in a series about quotes that influence my design practice. You can read more about it here: 0. Other people’s wisdom

“If you can design one thing, you can design everything.”

— Massimo vignelli

Massimo Vignelli was an interesting guy with some strong opinions. If you don’t know much about him, the one thing you probably have heard is that he believed there were only six typefaces a designer needed to do their job. He was pretty well known for using Helvetica a LOT, so it’s no surprise there.

But, what’s always been interesting to me about Massimo is that, while he was trained as an architect and became famous as a graphic designer, he designed a lot of other things too, many of which were extraordinarily good. He designed furniture, clothing, housewares, buildings, and, of course, lots of graphic design, and it was always relatively easy to see his hand in every piece. He had a sensibility that transcended medium.

I myself am a medium switcher, spending the early part of my career in graphic design (print, web, brand, illustration) before switching to UX/Digital Product. Part of the reason that I “switched” was the realization that there is a core part of the design process that stays the same no matter what medium you apply it to, and being good at that part is way harder than the domain-specific part that makes us a print designer or web designer or furniture designer or whatever.

What I love about this quote is that it is a reminder that design itself is a thing you can be good at, regardless of discipline. There is a core mindset and skills that you need to design anything, and they apply to designing everything. I would even go so far as to say that core skillset is design, and the rest is just domain-specific knowledge. Most of it is not design at all, but production.

The key, in my experience, to being a truly multi-disciplinary designer is not mistaking that domain-specific knowledge for universal principles and applying it where it doesn’t belong.