Wednesday, May 2, 2012 was, for me, a day seemingly full to the brim with Mike Monteiro. I received Mike’s new book “Design is a Job” in the mail, the video of his talk at TYPO San Francisco became available (which I had been waiting for since missing the live stream), and we happened to be passing the video of his infamous “Fuck You, Pay Me” Creative Mornings talk around the office because of a phone call that needed to be made. On top of all that, like some kind of curiously yummy icing, he seemed to be pretty active on Twitter.

That was a fun day. Monteiro’s always good for a chin-scratching chuckle. But as I was watching his TYPO talk that evening, it occurred to me (at about the 20 minute mark, for some reason) that Monteiro embodies something akin to a watershed moment or tipping point in the consciousness of the design industry as a legitimate industry.

In other words, we – as a design industry – are becoming self aware.

Cogitamus Ergo Sumus

Oh Lord, this is big. This is like ‘Gutenberg big.’ Well, maybe not, but it’s still big. Maybe ‘Northrop Frye big’ with respect to the legitimacy of Canadian Literature (see? I capitalized it.). Furthermore, it’s a crisis, in the sense that it marks both a threat and an opportunity for designers, a crystalline point at which the very essence of our industry is being shaped.

While that comment sounds a shade on the melodramatic side, I don’t think it’s wholly untrue. Work with me.

On one hand, Monteiro is calling bullshit on a popular myth. He makes the observation that most people think of designers as ideological ‘creative’ types who keep irregular hours, wear stylish shoes and eyeglasses, and are able to bill clients for daydreaming and messing about with pencils and computers. Yet this isn’t the case. Designers (the good ones, anyway) are often ‘normal’ people who keep normal hours (because they realize they’re in the service industry), and – this is the key part – rely on established processes and principles to solve real client problems. The shoes and eyeglasses are notwithstanding.

On the other hand, Monteiro is calling designers out. It seems this fantasy, this myth about designers, is perpetuated by our own kind. We do it (I believe) by idealizing and pursuing the ideal of the designer as iconoclast, but we also do it by our own utter lack of professionalism and perspective on what it is we actually provide. We’re ignorant, we lack faith, and so we’re scared. When people are scared, they become guarded and antogonistic; in the service industry, that’s suicide, since we’re being guarded and antagonistic with our clients.

And that’s where it gets curious for me. How is it that, for so many decades, design in all its various forms has so utterly failed to establish itself as a valid industry worthy of the respect it deserves, even within its own ranks? Why are so many of us still so ignorant and so faithless and so scared as to require Mike Monteiro?

SUAC!

The narrow public perception mentioned above doesn’t help. Situation in point: Ben and I laugh about an acronym that exists in the software engineering world: SUAC. Software engineers come up with ‘interesting’ solutions that they hand over to developers, who are told to not ask questions and just make it happen, or SUAC: Shut Up And Code. Well, the same, we laugh, is often expected of designers: Shut Up And Color.

So how is it that this disrespect continues to happen in an industry that has a distinguished history spanning many decades, and is responsible in large part for the terrific success (and value) of so many endeavors and brands? The answer Montiero seems to lead us to is that we (or many of us) actually have no real sense of – and therefore confidence in – what it is we provide as designers; that lack of sense (nonsense?) bleeds into the ways in which we present ourselves generally to the world, and specifically to our clients.

This, to be blunt, is a problem. This lack of confidence, this weird and unrealistic preference to focus on craft and image and not on professionalism, perpetuates an agonizing public ignorance, perhaps best illustrated in the Request For Proposal process.

RFP = Request For Problems

There have been some loud grumblings about RFP’s in the design world lately. A List Apart published a rebuke of RFP’s not too long ago, and Monteiro’s criticisms run parellel to this. I even see these criticisms to be related to the short-comings of focus groups as expressed by Malcolm Gladwell in ‘Blink’, the reversal of bureaucratic norms as expressed by Jason Fried in ‘ReWork’, or the more general and long-standing disenchantment with bureaucratic procedures as an abdication of individual responsibility. In all cases, there is a formalized sheltering of the individual from taking responsibility for decisions.

But Monteiro pushes this further, right into the lap of the designer, saying very clearly that the reason that organizations resort to the RFP is because they don’t understand the design process they know they need; it is the responsibility of the designer – and the design industry in general – to help organizations understand what the design process looks like so that they can seek an adequate vendor with a measure of insight.

Monteiro is shedding light on all of the things we all know to be true, whether you’re a designer or a client; that designers solve real problems (or create meaningful opportunities, whichever you prefer).

Monteiro’s a Punk

Monteiro is not doing something new. Not at all. The AIGA, RGD, and GDC – to name some professional graphic design associations – have been providing designers with tools to educate themselves and their clients on their profession; that it is a profession, that it’s not just coloring or making things pretty, that it has principles, and that research-based design processes provide measurable value to organizations and their surrounding communities. Many books over the past decades have been written about design processes and principles, design history, design professionalism and practices, so it’s safe to say that we – designers – do in fact have a sense of collective self through established history and practice.

Even as an individual, Monteiro isn’t doing something new. Many others have made the case for professionalism outside of institutional framework, and – I’ll say it – some of these publications are more useful to me than Monteiro’s.

But – yet – Monteiro is doing something new, something that all the resources of a professional association and most individuals could never provide:

Balls.

Balls as in backbone, spine, attitude, perspective, stance, confidence, assurance, and so on. It’s not something qualified or institutionalized. It’s just there in Monteiro, with the weight and simplicity of fact. And he makes it accessible.

You see, Monteiro comes at this whole business as uneducated, unqualified scum. He, like a surprising many stars of the design world, has no formal education or professional standing in design. And yet he is a designer of deep experience, most recently as owner of Mule Design, a web design studio of note in San Francisco. And so he is able to speak not from an institutional soap box, but from experience, from having made (and learned from) his mistakes.

This is the difference. Monteiro is unvarnished and pragmatic. He speaks with the authority and baldness of a soldier from the trenches, one who has come through the other side with a broader perspective borne from mutual understanding with and sensitivity for the client, and rejecting the ‘otherness’ that institutional perspectives inevitably inspire. Hence he’s a punk, in the historically proper sense of the word.

There is at least one other like Monteiro in this regard; Andy Rutledge who, like Monteiro, has a sharply defined perspective that helps him stand out from the mushy middle of most of North American society. But Rutledge is antagonistic in a way that Monteiro isn’t, so a lot of people write him off, and I think for good reason. Granted, Monteiro alienates his share of people and suffers no fools, but he does so with Carlin-esque humor – which, if you’ll allow me the luxury of performing some reductionism on George Carlin, is at once confrontational to and respectful of the intelligence of his audience.

Because of this attitude and accessibility, Monteiro and his book stand to cause a watershed-like shift in how the graphic and – in particular, I think – the web design community understands itself as a profession. I’m curious to see what the next few months and years bring.

We’re All Still Just Making This Shit Up.

There is another thought that seems to lead from these previous thoughts, that might be worth exploring; the reason that the professional tools and attitudes supplied by our design institutions have effectively failed (and that Monteiro’s are succeeding) is perhaps due to the fact that most designers – particularly web designers – are un-institutionalized. Or, in other words, many designers (like me, like Monteiro) have no specifically design-related education, or often even professional experience, and have fallen into professional design practice through circumstance. Web designers in particular don’t even have any professional designations or associations. We’re like the welders of the contracting world: we’re not an official ‘trade’.

That means there is a large cohort of design professionals that have – literally – no idea of what they’re doing, historically, technically or professionally. Granted, many do know what they’re doing, especially those that have some kind of institutional affiliation (though it must be said that even among ‘registered’ designers there is no guarantee). But there are just as many, if not more, who do not have any real sense of what design, as a profession, actually entails.

Monteiro is speaking to these folks.

And I for one welcome it. I say that not just as a person who came to design without education or previous professional experience and therefore understands what benefit a book like Monteiro’s can provide, but also as someone who wants to see a stabilization occur within the graphic and web design fields, to the point where the disciplines have achieved some kind of solidarity and general respect.

Until then, I’ll do what I can to help the cause, which includes recommending Monteiro’s book as a starting point.