Design talent is a distraction
Being a good designer is more a way of thinking than a way of drawing. It’s not just about making things pretty—it’s about making them work better.
Tony Fadell • Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making - The New York Times bestseller
Apart from actually creating the design, the main job of a designer is to help other people make good and informed decisions. Designers themselves don’t usually get to make final decisions about the product or service—they advise. And they do this via a lot of discussions, a lot of presentations, and a lot of listening.
Donna Spencer • Presenting Design Work
Michael Bierut, a respected visual designer, said this about luck during an interview[3] with Adaptive Path founder Peter Merholz: “It’s a dirty secret that much of what we admire in the design world is a byproduct not of ‘strategy’ but of common sense, taste, and luck. Some clients are too unnerved by ambiguity to accept this and create gargantuan
... See moreIndi Young • Mental Models
Put simply, if an organization is bad at making decisions, they’ll be bad at making design decisions, too.
Scott Berkun • How Design Makes the World
And though it's useful to be able to tell them apart, design is about strategic and tactical work happening together. At the heart of many stubborn design projects and unimpressive outcomes are people coming in with an incompatible mental models; overplaying strategy or tactics, and neglecting the other.