I have always found (to my eternal frustration) that the biggest misconception about design is that it’s solely a visual discipline. While the visual (what something looks like, how it is manifested, rendered, given form) is an obvious and important part of any design process, to focus solely on the visual is to never fully realise potential – and not just that of your ideas but also your ambitions as a designer and even your career.

Design, I believe, is an intellectual discipline more than it is a visual one. There’s far more thinking that goes on in designing than there is design – I think. This intellectual part of the process, bigger than the actual designing, is communicating what you’re designing and, more importantly, why something is right.

This, of course, is massively helped by an ability to be able to convey such information and persuade others of your argument. To do this, you have to be able to discuss, debate and divulge your creative process in order to bring people along with you. You have to explain all the things you tried, all the things that worked – and that didn’t work – when articulating the point at which you have arrived and are now presenting as if there couldn’t possibly be any other destination. You have to be able to talk about it.