Why I Enjoy Working Across Different Design Disciplines

When I decided to dedicate my professional life to graphic design, I never really considered specialising in just one discipline. Perhaps it was curiosity, or simply the desire to discover how far a profession with so many possibilities could take me, but from the very beginning I found it difficult to imagine myself always doing the same kind of work. Brand identity, editorial design, packaging, campaigns… each discipline seemed to present different problems while, at the same time, offering a new way of understanding what had attracted me to design in the first place: communicating an idea through visuals.

As the years have gone by, that curiosity, far from disappearing, has only continued to grow. I have had the opportunity to take on projects that are very different from one another, and that variety has become one of the things I enjoy most about my profession. Because moving from one discipline to another also means changing the way you think.

Never Just One Thing

There are designers who find a particular discipline to specialise in and build practically their entire careers around it. I have always admired that ability to explore a single field in depth until mastering every one of its smallest details, but I have never felt that this was necessarily the path for me.

What attracts me to graphic design is precisely its breadth. Building a visual identity from scratch means thinking about how an organisation wants to present itself to the world. Designing a publication requires organising information and establishing hierarchies capable of guiding the reader. Packaging also introduces a physical object, a surface that stops being merely a medium and becomes part of the experience itself. A campaign, on the other hand, presents the challenge of condensing an idea into something capable of capturing attention and communicating a message almost immediately.

They are different problems, and each one requires its own particular way of approaching them. Perhaps that is precisely why I have never wanted to choose just one.

Different Problems, Different Ways of Thinking

Working across different disciplines has also taught me that design is not simply about applying a particular aesthetic to whatever happens to be in front of us. Every project begins with a different problem and, therefore, the solution cannot always be the same.

Sometimes the work begins almost entirely from scratch, and a whole visual language has to be built around an idea. At other times, that language already exists and the real challenge lies in understanding it, respecting it and finding enough room within it to create something new. Sometimes information and its organisation sit at the heart of the project; in others, a single image has to take on almost the entire responsibility of communicating.

That constant need to change perspective is something I find particularly stimulating. It forces me not to become too comfortable with a single way of working and to approach every project by first asking myself what it actually needs, rather than deciding in advance what it should look like.

Everything Is Connected

However, the more time I spend working across different areas of design, the less clear the boundaries between them seem to become.

A visual identity does not end with a logo. It may eventually live within a publication, a campaign, a package or practically any other medium imaginable. An editorial project needs typography and composition, but it also needs to understand the identity it belongs to. Packaging may require illustration, photography, art direction or even the ability to tell an entire story within just a few centimetres of space.

The disciplines may change, but many of the principles that support them remain connected. And having worked across several of them allows me to transfer knowledge from one area to another, sometimes finding solutions that probably would never have appeared if I had looked at the problem from a single perspective.

Curiosity as a Way of Working

After several years working in graphic design, I still do not feel the need to choose a single path within it. And perhaps now I understand why.

I have always been curious by nature. I enjoy learning, experimenting and discovering different ways of doing things, even when that means facing something I initially know very little about. That uncertainty can be uncomfortable, but it is also often where the most interesting part of a project begins.

I do not know what kind of projects will find their way into my hands five or ten years from now, or what new disciplines might spark my curiosity along the way. And, quite frankly, I would rather keep it that way.

Because, in the end, it has never been the format that interests me most about design. It is the possibility of finding, time and time again, a different way to tell something visually.