“Commitment to the profession. Being receptive to all possibilities / ideas. Pragmatism is essential, but the great designers are able to go outside logical boundaries, and introduce the new.”

Needless to say, I also believe that while there is talent involved and there are some people who are naturally gifted in the area, it isn’t impossible to achieve greatness. I am almost 17, fairly young, and if I deemed it impossible to reach “greatness” I wouldn’t even be on this site! Logo designing takes a lot of effort though and it does require a unique and open-minded way of thinking. I believe it isn’t something you can necessarily study, but it is something you develop over much experimentation, observation, and execution. In fact, I believe stumbling upon this site was my first step to greatness.

In my experience there are some designers who think more in “icons” and make amazing ID people. Other designers tend to think more in “layouts” and make terrific design-system and application designers. No one person is good at everything, I suggest designers get a good feel for what they are good at and focus on it.

Here are some key things that make a good designer – equally relevant in ID work as in most other types of design:

1) intuition and experience – must have understanding and eye to quickly understand the challenge/context and not waste time pursuing irrelevant solutions

2) wide degree of lateral thinking – must be able to generate many, many, many diverse ideas

3) deep well of talent – must be able to execute, weed and develop/refine to generate the most potent work

Most of these skills come with practice and working/learning under others with a trained eye.

Additionally if you work within a team it is crucial that you work collaboratively to achieve the best results. (Designers tend to hide in their box and want to reveal their “masterpiece” at the end, which unless you’re a superstar this rarely works better than designing as a well-aligned team.)

Regardless of the amount of talent you have, you still need to work/practice your art and learn all you can about it to be TRULY exceptional. Talent with passion!

Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers gets at some of your question, David. Ten-thousand hours to greatness, he guesses?

I don’t know about this. I do know there’s something electrifying about being with a true talent – be it in art, or music, or child-raising. You can’t help but know that you are NOT him/her, regardless of the hours you’ve invested in the vocation. (Or, if you are him/her, you would see that others are NOT you.) True talents can be couch potatoes and still captivate me.

And make me jealous.

I would never have reached this point if I did not have a passion for music.

The great logo designer are the people who are talented and educated, but also are passionate about their art. That passion somehow shines through in their work in subtle ways that moves others.

[...] http://www.logodesignlove.com [...]

I think it’s a great skill/discipline to spend hours evolving a logo design, for example, then being able to go right back to the one you did after 20 minutes and realizing that was the one.

Being proud of what you do but not too proud to discard all that extra work you did and seeing that part of the process being just as important as creating the design.

I don’t actually think that makes any sense, reading it back.

Screw it!!

I’m not saying you can’t self-taught the typographic rule, book design, and all the other design principles. But I know first hand that even though it is possible, it’s very very very very hard. There is a need for trial and error. You have to get yourself to a point where you don’t know why your work sucks, your professor just told you that it is. You threw away your original concept of beauty, you swallow all your pride that you brought with you into your third year, that is when you ascend from amateur to professional level.

Again, I’m not saying you can’t do it yourself, but it’s very very very hard. And I’m not even talking about the facilities and all that. This assume that you don’t have money for design school but you have money for Mac Book Pro and access to paid typeface, like the ones started with, oh I don’t know, the letter “H”.

Plus most of the opportunities we have comes from the university we attended. The people we met through there. Friends with big plans for the future. Internships. Guest lectures. Our professor’s connection. Sometime our family have connection, and sometime we can meet with friends online. But not all humans are social type, if you know what I mean. I have many friends who are by all means “good” designers but I have to literally drag them out of their apartment to attend lectures and meet with other people within the industry.