Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Reed Knecht

Craft: The seemingly impossible skill of making something by hand. Perfectly.

It was also the number-one buzzword that every first-year design professor ranted about for hours. Notably, a lack of this glorified skill caused over a third of the first-year design students to drop out within the first few weeks. The ones who stayed expressed their disdain for it throughout the entirety of the year.

In a sense, I think our reasoning was backed by the presumption that graphic design only involves digital skills and that anything outside of the digital bubble is useless to our trade and even below our artistic abilities.

I racked my brain trying to make sense of why we were cutting out a million tiny squares and carefully gluing them to paper instead of creating them in Illustrator.

Or why we had to fill up a notebook with a collage of photos we found on Pinterest when the easier process would have been to simply create a Pinterest board.

Or how in the world they could force us to sketch out hundreds of marker thumbnails, only to re-create six options digitally.

You get the picture.

I did it because good grades are a thing. Internally, I hated it because I just couldn’t understand the value. Why go out of my way to make my job harder and more repetitive?

It really wasn’t until I started my internship that I realized the tremendous value of craft. Every X-Acto knife cut had to be precise. Every decal had to be placed perfectly. The background colors of those decals had to be within a 10% range of the product they were placed on.

You may think that I only had to do these things because I was an intern, rather than full-time designer, but you’d be wrong. Every designer in the department knew how to cut and comp. Perfectly. And often.

The first semester of my second year came and went like a hurricane, and both classes were focused on a single task: design for an imaginary company and create a brand book to portray said designs.

Easy.

That is until you realize that a huge portion of making a book involves an endless amount of craft. We had to perfectly print, bind, sew, glue, and fold. Every menial assignment I had completed during year one came back to me.

Cutting out a million squares made sense now that I was cutting larger, more important pieces of paper to bind within a book. I was now comfortable with an X-Acto knife and didn’t cut my fingers every five seconds.

It became clear why I had been taught to glue things together perfectly now that I was gluing a seventy-page book together.

I digress, but the point is that perfection in craft rarely comes easily. It’s not a mysterious talent that people either have or don’t have. It’s something that you work hard at to master— something that has to be repeated hundreds of times before you get it right.

I suspect some people left in the first couple weeks because they assumed their success in design would come from a natural creative talent that is mysteriously bestowed upon a select few who create everything perfectly, with little thought. The reality is that proficiency in design is 5% talent and 95% craft.

The amazing truth is that the majority of skills in this job can be learned, and in general, they all revolve around the overarching skill of craft. Perfecting this isn’t easy, or even fun, but it will get you to where you want to go. The shift in that perspective will inevitably enhance your abilities and change your career.

So work hard, master your craft, and go far.

The Importance of Craft was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Importance of Craft

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