I have always found (to my eternal frustration) that the biggest misconception about design is that it’s solely a visual discipline. While the visual (what something looks like, how it is manifested, rendered, given form) is an obvious and important part of any design process, to focus solely on the visual is to never fully realise potential – and not just that of your ideas but also your ambitions as a designer and even your career.

Design, I believe, is an intellectual discipline more than it is a visual one. There’s far more thinking that goes on in designing than there is design – I think. This intellectual part of the process, bigger than the actual designing, is communicating what you’re designing and, more importantly, why something is right.

This, of course, is massively helped by an ability to be able to convey such information and persuade others of your argument. To do this, you have to be able to discuss, debate and divulge your creative process in order to bring people along with you. You have to explain all the things you tried, all the things that worked – and that didn’t work – when articulating the point at which you have arrived and are now presenting as if there couldn’t possibly be any other destination. You have to be able to talk about it.

One of the things I’ve increasingly noticed in the students and graduates I’ve worked with in both educational settings and professional workplaces (even those I’ve hired) is a fear of talking about work. A fear of revealing to others what you think. A fear of enlightening people as to why certain creative choices were taken and design decisions were made.

Design, I believe, is an intellectual discipline more than it is a visual one. There’s far more thinking that goes on in designing than there is design

Fear may be too strong a word, but whether it was fear or disinterest, or neglect, it was exacerbated by the global Covid-19 pandemic, where we all got into the ‘you’re on mute’ modus operandi. The plethora of video conferencing apps – Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, Blackboard – are cursed with the irony of overcoming the obstacle of physical distance to only enable a different kind of distance, where it can be easy to disengage with debate and discussion and deploy instead a kind of creative cognitive dissonance. We all know that talking about things is good, whatever they may be, yet when it comes to work, there can be a reluctance to develop that skill.

You may be technically brilliant. You may have strong ideas or good people skills. Yet the designer who can speak well and convincingly in front of others, powerfully and persuasively, will outstrip the competition every time. It might seem unfair, even a bit like cheating, if you happen to have the ‘gift of the gab’, but this isn’t about bullshitting, it’s about understanding what you need to say, and saying it with passion and conviction. Not just explaining your ideas and your decisions but adding to, critiquing and developing your own and those of others.

This isn’t a piece like one of those memefied self-help social media posts that claim ‘five ways to talk brilliantly and confidently about your work and get hired fast’, because here is the true revelation – no one can tell you how to talk about your work but you. However you do it, you need to be able to talk about every facet of how you’ve arrived at a decision, because in design that’s where the value is. But there isn’t a set way of doing that. You have to find your own method, your own terminology and your own voice. There is no right way, there is only your way.

The designer who can speak well and convincingly in front of others, powerfully and persuasively, will outstrip the competition every time

A starting point could be to consider exactly ‘how’ you feel comfortable talking about your work: formally, informally, openly, self-deprecatingly, corporately? What do you want to tell people about your work? What are the positives you feel about your intention and your ambition for the work? And then, what are the crucial points you don’t want anyone to miss about the work you’ve done?

Mention moments, expand on experiments and adopt your own tone when conveying these. Getting these right takes time, practice and commitment, but by engaging in crits and debates and certainly in presentations, slowly but surely your own voice will become much more present in not only how you talk about your work but in shaping the work itself.

I remember being a student and doing interviews trying desperately to gain experience. One designer I saw gave me a placement – my first. I remember the feedback they gave me – they barely mentioned my creativity. Sure, there was appreciation for some of the work I’d done in my portfolio, but I always remember them saying, “I like the way you talk about your work.”

By engaging in crits and debates and certainly in presentations, slowly but surely your own voice will become much more present

At the time, I didn’t really have a fucking clue what they meant, but it stayed with me and I now hold it close and dear as one of the most impactful pieces of information I’ve ever received. It was instrumental to me furthering my career as a designer, to teaching, writing things like this for Creative Review, and having the confidence to set up my own agency and go it alone. All that, just from talking.

I’m not going for the big ‘I Am’ here – you will want very different things for yourself and I encourage and support that. But being able to talk about design, about your work and your thinking, and even yourself, can be the most important tool you can put to use, whatever your ambition.

It can be the difference that convinces a company to take you on. It can be the deciding factor in whether your design goes out into the world or drops into the bottom drawer. It can determine so much more for your work and for you than you can imagine. You just have to remember that your visual is only ever going to be as good as the way in which you verbalise it.

Craig Oldham is founder of design studio Office of Craig; craigoldham.co.uk; Top image: Shutterstock