Developing a Personal Voice Without Chasing Style

You see all the good work out there and want to be distinct, distinct, distinct right off the bat. I think that’s kind of a cop-out, though. If you start designing to a style you think you might like rather than solving problems, you end up with decisions that feel forced. When you force decisions you don’t end up with results that feel natural. Even if you have your own look, it’s not stable. I think that’s why so many folks feel frustrated when it comes to trying to develop their own voice: they want to just pick a look that they like and get there as fast as they can.

The problem is that you can’t “pick” your look. You can’t “decide” on your voice. At least, you can’t do either of those things when you start. Your voice is more about what you don’t have time for than what you do. The constraints of a project define your options. When your options are so broad, you can’t see what’s important. The alphabet is pretty basic, but when you take a closer look, there are a lot of options in even the simplest typeface: How tall are the ascenders? How deep are the descenders? How big is the bowl on the lowercase letters? How tight are the apertures on the enclosed letters? And so on. You get the idea. With a lot of constraints, it’s easier to focus on one or two big picture items like “man, these letters are too tight” or “I wish the weight wasn’t so heavy.”

I think one of the biggest problems is that people give up on their clues in favor of someone else’s style. That’s why you see so many people who are “all over the map” when it comes to their lettering. One day they’re doing script inspired by Jessica Hische, the next day they’re doing sans-serif inspired by Josh Marshall. Your voice comes from the way you solve the same problem from different directions. If you do something, then step away and do a few other things, then come back to it, you’ll have a better sense of whether your initial solution was appropriate, or whether you need to revise it. If you step away, do a few other things, and come back to the exact same problem and try to solve it in a totally different way… well, that’s just style-hopping.

Another thing: I think people expect you to see evidence of your voice in your work. That’s not true. Evidence of your voice is when you feel like you’re consistently making good decisions, even when the outcome isn’t overtly “distinctive”. When you can look at your solutions to problems and feel like they’re consistently appropriate, that’s when you know your voice is developing. That’s when you know you’re doing well.

We hear a lot of people talking about “finding their voice,” like it’s something they can look for and attain when they practice enough or work on enough projects. It’s not something you find, it’s something that you uncover. It’s there, under all the stuff you’re learning. If you just focus on solving problems and revisiting the stuff you did before, your voice will start to show up on its own. The tricky thing is, you have to be willing to not know what your voice is. You have to just focus on making good decisions. If you do that, you’ll be surprised at how quickly your voice develops, and how adaptable it is. It isn’t fragile, unless you make it that way by trying to control it.