How does one become a great designer?

In this blog I want to discuss the nature of how a designer becomes a great figure in the history of design. How is one influenced? Is credit due to those surrounding you? How do you make a difference and become an influential character yourself? I won’t label myself as a great designer, but my influence to design comes from persistence and a need to express myself in the only way I know how. I am not one with words, I’m an introvert, I love to read and not surprisingly I love to draw. 

One designer who’s influenced me is Robert Brown John. He’s a source of inspiration to graphic designers everywhere. His ability to design partly stems from the people he met in his life, starting at a young age Laszlo Moholy-Nagy gave him an appreciation of the everyday objects. His life and work were one and the same. He had very modernist beliefs; his work was simple, and his ideas stripped back to the bare, but this is what made him a popular designer. There are other elements that factored into his success and that was being in the right place at the right time; as a graphic designer it’s important to get out there and form connections with other designers. Money didn’t matter much to him as it does to majority of designers, given a commission of £3000 it would take him £3000 to complete, so he would never make a profit. The downfall to BJ came from his drug problem. He became difficult to work with, his family split up, wasn’t able to form professional relations with his clients (was late to meetings, most times not even showing up). He had this creative self-destruction thing going on, but I think he could back his ego by the outstanding work he produced. He had the ability to simplify and simplify until he had absolute distillation of the idea.

He has taught me that keeping things simple is sometimes what’s key to design, but his short life due to drug abuse also teaches me the value of improving relations; in the end he died alone, and the question that repeats in my mind was was he really happy even with all his success?

‘In the last 15 years, in typography the real advance has been the use of type not as an adjunct to an illustration or photo, but in its use as the image itself.’ BJ back in 1963




Figure 1 Christmas Lobby Sculpture (1958)

Books Read:

King, Emily (2005) Sex And Typography. Princeton Architectural Press.