I’ve found out what’s wrong with me! I have the the Design Disease!

It seems to me that if you’re a designer, a proper designer not someone who learnt Photoshop in between phone calls, then design runs through your veins like Pantone 7418. But more than that, it’s there in every aspect of life. You can’t stop looking at things through your designer eyes. Everything you do is clouded by this thing that lives inside you.

Now, this is no bad thing. But I’m becoming fascinated by how this thing takes hold of us all and I’d like to share it with you lovely people.

So what’s it like, living with this disease? What does it make you do that other people don’t do? How does it affect you?

OK, honest now. How does the design disease affect you? Here’s a partial list of my symptoms. Please note that it isn’t entirely restricted to graphic design.

• See signs along the road and find design faults in them?
• Identify fonts at 65 mph on passing delivery vans
• Drive erratically for a second look at good sign
• Identify the software used by the clip art
• Point out design flaws on building signs to building managers
• Pick wine by the quality of the label design (Thanks for the reminder Noisy Decent Graphics)
• Choose products by the quality of their advertising
• and the inverse, boycott products with badly designed advertising
• Built the rock walls in my landscaping, because I’m the only one I trusted to match my design idea. Dug up the rocks myself.
• Completely gutted and rebuilt the interior of my last house, because the contractor inappropriately mixed design styles
• Have stopped reading a magazine because the design was so poor, even though I liked the contents
• Often look at the source code of other people’s websites, just to see if I agree with how they structured it
• Have given photography suggestions to perfect strangers because they were missing an obviously great shot – (Got thanked!)

Those were just off the top of my head. I’m sure more will come to me as the day progresses.