I built my entire career on one sentence I read sitting on a library floor.
In my second year of art college, I slipped and smashed into a library bookshelf, knocking a book to the floor. Picking it up, I was immediately grabbed by its bizarre title: Forget All the Rules You Ever Learned About Graphic Design. Including the Ones in this Book. By Bob Gill.
Intrigued, I sat down in the library aisle and read it cover to cover. I was barely into the first chapter when one line stopped me cold:
“Unless you can begin with an interesting problem, it is unlikely you will end up with an interesting solution.”
Bob Gill
On reading that sentence I understood, for the first time, what it actually meant to be a designer. Until then, the closest I’d come to designing anything was to copy something I liked. Gill’s book taught me that to design something is to identify and solve the right problem — and that the two are not the same thing.
His own work proved it. A client came to him called Rent a New Yorker, looking to brand tourist guides. The obvious move: a skyline, a clean typeface, done. Gill found it boring. So he asked a different question: how do you communicate that these guides are authentic New Yorkers? His answer was to give the logo a New York accent. He explains:
“I decided the most interesting problem to give myself was to say that ‘our guides are authentic New Yorkers, they’ll really show you New York!’ Well, how do you communicate that a guide is an authentic New Yorker? Eventually I came to the conclusion that if I could give their logo a New York accent that might in some way communicate that these are real New Yorkers. So I suggested to the client that they could spell their name in a New York accent: ‘RentaNooYawka’.”
Bob Gill
He hadn’t just solved the problem — he’d found a better one hiding underneath it.
Years after that library collision, I was lucky enough to interview Gill and thank him in person. He was exactly as brusque as I’d expected — not particularly interested in having changed my life. But the conversation stayed with me, less for what he said and more for what he represented: a designer ruthlessly defined by his principles, who refused to accept the first version of any problem.
Good designers don’t just accept the problem they’re given. They test it. They ask whether it’s the right problem, or simply the most convenient one. If the problem is vague, the design will be vague. Everything else — colour, layout, typography — is downstream of that clarity.