But from time to time I come across designers whose work isn’t boring, and when I do I want to work with them. As this happens more, I've noticed some common factors. It’s not an issue of personality... I take it for granted that there is a gene in designers that 1) gives them a craving for everyone to think they’re right on target and 2) once everyone agrees with them, makes them change their mind. This gene isn’t all bad; in fact, it can be good... because every idea gets challenged with its opposite, and then pushed toward a better final product. What’s more, it’s a trait that writers have too. Our advantage, however, is that most people these days consciously notice design: “This is cool. I want to make out with the designer!”... while they are less conscious about their absorption of the copy: “I should buy/ believe/ befriend this.” (Oddly enough, even this trend is part of the evolution of design history -- 150 years ago a book’s jacket was, at best, of secondary importance).

I should also point out that it doesn’t have a lot to do with clients. Yes, picking the right client makes all the difference to designers. But to your creative collaborators, it’s often less about what it's like to work with the client and more about what it's like to work with you. By and large I see clients like parents ... you’re not responsible for what you’re given by them, just for what you do with it.

What I look for is a designers who recognizes that design always, always fails. Always comes up short, can never quite accomplish what it’s trying to do/say. This is not trailing into some pseudoacademic rant about the arbitrary nature between signifier and signified. It’s deeper than that. It’s something Faulkner wrote about words, that took me years to understand: “words are a shape to fill a lack.”

Designers are by their nature obsessed with the material. Yet their goals of communication, beauty, expression are immaterial, stretch beyond the material. The best designers, like the best priests, understand that designers and audiences alike are able to tap the transcendent only able to tap the transcendent through the concrete . And we know that this concrete world is full of death and half-resolution and insufficiency, as well as beauty and ideas worthy of expression.

One thing that separates a great designer from a good designer is the ability to create the best design possible out of concrete materials, while knowing that it will always fall short of its transcendent goal. This produces the same sort of beauty that we find in the blues -- another communication familiar with the dissonant harmony of yearning beyond this life for a better one, combined with love of this world. When Hooker's voice is slightly off key and off rhythm, by missing the written note, he produces something that is in its context even more beautiful and more meaningful.

So if any of my creative collaborators are reading this... this is why I see our work as worthwhile. Of course, we do live in the material world. So if you’re a designer I’m not working with, and are paying upward $100 an hour for copywriting, please don’t read this post. I’d love to work with you.