member spotlight: Jennifer Rash
The following is a guest post from Jennifer Rash (Jen), a super-engaged community member. Whether you follow the community challenges, conversations, feedback requests, or exercises, chances are you’ve come across Jen’s work. Fun fact: Jen is one of the 2020 top five community members ranked by activity (joined only by other members of the SWD team, ha!).
Jen has her own design company focused on helping organizations communicate better through simple visuals. She also shares resources on her website for individuals interested in expanding their design knowledge, like her online Q&A series called DesignTalk—including a few SWD friends like Catherine Madden, Andy Cotgreave, and John Zeratsky. Keep reading to discover her learnings from this project, and don’t forget to pop over to the community to chat with her directly as part of our Nov/Dec Member Spotlight.
Each month, we select someone from the community to highlight through our Member Spotlight. These are people who contribute in ways that foster an even more connected and diverse learning environment. Our goal is to help you get to know your fellow community members a little better and learn from one another.
What’s design? Since I began my career as a graphic designer, I’ve been fascinated by the ever-increasing number of answers to that question. When I started, my role seemed fairly clear cut. I worked on print and later digital communications, mostly focusing on aesthetics—typography, composition, color, photography, and illustration.
Since that time, the designer’s role has grown to encompass outcomes beyond the static products we see or touch. Design now visualizes information in real-time, guides us through decision-making processes, and impacts our everyday experiences in ways we might not even be aware of.
Designers bring skill sets that expand on the traditional visual design education. Designers can include professionals from many backgrounds, including cognitive psychologists, code-experimenting experiential artists, business and marketing gurus, and expert group facilitators.
I started the DesignTalk interview series as an opportunity to explore the ever-expanding nature of design. What are the processes? Outcomes? Expectations? What is design’s role today, and how is it changing the way we see the profession?
Because each participant is unique, it’s exciting for me to dive into their specific work and ask the questions I’d love to know more about (and I’m always thrilled at how generous participants are with their time and expertise). However, some throughlines have surfaced over time that underscore similarities in process and mindset across the interviews.
The following three questions are themes that crop up repeatedly. I’ve collected responses here that show consistency in thought and approach.
How do you define design?
This question gets to the heart of why I started this series to begin with. The answers have been fairly consistent. Almost all of the responses frame design as a process, as opposed to an output. The process described is one of open-minded questioning and an effort to deeply understand the audience. Here are a few of my favorite responses.
To me, these answers get to something core about the creative process. For many designers, there can be a rush to get to the outcome you are tasked to create. There are usually outer forces, preconceived ideas, and deadlines that drive the need to build the expected final product. Where insightful, effective design can happen is in the initial stages, before anything has been built. You can take the time to understand your audience and ask the questions that will lead to creating something relevant and effective, even if it means steering away from what the team and stakeholders think the project “should” be.
What mindset shift do you enable with clients to get the best results? What’s the most challenging aspect of this?
This question stems from a hurdle I think many professionals face, but especially those in the design field. The “What do you do?” question. If you are building an end product, it’s easy to say “I make websites”, or something similar. But to get to the heart of how you bring value through your work, you need to have a way to explain why what you do would be valuable to a client. To create effective work, you are usually describing an outcome vs. a product, and you are probably taking some non-intuitive paths to get to that outcome.
Responses to this question had themes of “simplicity” and the value of getting to the “why” of a project.
I think the mindset challenge here is on both sides—client and designer. For myself, the default setting for a long time had been—”I make this particular output (website, book design, etc.). If that’s what you think you need, let's build it!” It’s taken some time to realize the better way for designers and clients to approach a potential project is to ask “what are we trying to accomplish, and why?”
How do you cultivate curiosity?
At the core of any effective design approach is the good-natured tendency towards curiosity. The best work can come from the impulse to dig deeper and understand more. To be brave enough to shake yourself out of patterns and assumptions, even if that means taking some steps back to move forward.
Many of the interview participants talk about experimentation, and doing additional work and discovery ahead of a project, for the sake of exploration and learning.
I find that cultivating curiosity has a lot to do with granting yourself permission to do so. A lot of times, straying from what’s understood as the “task at hand” can seem like an indulgent activity. Following what you are interested in and seeing what you learn from it, without the constraints of schedules and requirements, can allow you to experiment, learn, and bring fresh ideas to projects. Through these interviews, I got the sense that curiosity and experimentation were key to the successful work of the interview participants.
DesignTalk has been one of the most rewarding self-generated projects I’ve worked on. I’m always so excited to find design experts that are willing to share their insights and grateful for their generosity and time. I’m looking forward to conducting more interviews and to continue indulging my own curiosity about the amazing work out there that is bending the traditional definition of design.
You can find more of Jen’s work and thoughts on her site: rashdesign.com. Head over to the community to chat with Jen directly this month as part of the November/December Member Spotlight.
There are plenty of noteworthy members in the SWD community—too many to spotlight at once. This program is part of our larger efforts to find new ways to share multiple voices and experiences. As you discover great work and ideas in the community, be sure to give appropriate kudos and spread the word!