Are you an experienced designer who feels stifled by your specialty? Are you a new designer who wants to know how to expand your creative skills? You might be looking at designers whose work covers multiple forms and you wonder how is that even possible? Then you should consider becoming a Generalist Designer.

Generalist Design, also known as cross-disciplinary or multi-disciplinary design is about understanding multiple types of design. At Nollie, we want to show you that it’s easier than it looks, by demonstrating the transferable skills between design fields. In this post, we’ll look at the 12 principles you can use to improve your skills and the benefits of becoming a Generalist Designer.

What is a Generalist Designer?

A Generalist Designer is someone whose creative work expands across several different areas within design. They could be described as multi-disciplinary, cross-disciplinary, or Design Polymaths. 

Polymath (noun)

A person of wide knowledge or learning. 

Leonardo DaVinci is a Renaissance polymath.

They differ from specialty designers who work and operate within one design field. Specialists become experts in one topic, knowing it inside and out. 

Imagine you are a chef, how would you feel if you had to follow the same recipe every day? Or had to stick to one style of cuisine? We understand why a chef would want to want to learn different techniques or cuisines from around the world. It means he can apply those different skills to create food that’s unique, and innovative and expands our palette.

The same works for Music. You wouldn’t tell a musician to listen to one genre or play only one instrument. We know that this would limit a musician’s creativity. But for some reason, we do this within the design industry. 

All design is amazing! Collectively, we can turn ideas into something that exists and works within the real world. We make something from nothing. By learning from different fields, you’ll build a list of new skills and techniques and develop a better understanding and respect for different design principles.

There are many areas where every design field overlaps. You can utilize this to your advantage. By focusing on where these areas overlap, you’ll find it easier to develop new projects and different types of creative projects.

At Nollie, we want to enhance your creative work by sharing design’s transferable skills. We want to show you that you don’t need to stay in your lane. That your creativity isn’t limited by your specialty, your boss, or even yourself. 

We want to share the skills across 12 Principles of Generalist Design, each corresponding with a field within Design but labeled to demonstrate the larger impact it will have on your work:

1. Learning from Past Masters
2. Designing for Aesthetics
3. Designing with Time
4. Designing with Data
5. Designing for Form
6. Designing with Materials
7. Designing for Possession
8. Designing for Atmosphere
9. Designing for Quantity
10. Design for Interaction
11. Designing for Environment
12. Designing for the Future

We’ll expand on these topics later in this post.

The Risks of Generalism

It Requires More Time

“Isn’t it a bit overwhelming to learn multiple design disciplines?” 

It depends on how you frame it. These skills are used within the industry so having these skills will allow you to adapt easier. If you’re passionate about Design, then this opens more doors than it closes. 

You can’t become a generalist designer overnight. You can focus on the elements that interest you most and add new techniques to your skillset. As you learn more from each principle, you’ll discover how it overlaps with others and you can pursue it from there. 

Adding new skills to your creative workflow won’t happen overnight. But you can begin learning from and respecting different fields today.

No Industry Specialisation

You might assume that it would be harder to find work as a Generalist Designer. 

If you’re wondering about the impact of being a Generalist Designer on your career then find any recent job listing within design. They are looking for multiple skills, sometimes requiring more than feasible for the role. It’s become a cliché for designers trying to find work, and we’ll bring this up again later in this article. 

Instead of focusing on a specialty, you’ll be demonstrating that you can handle diverse problem-solving skills. It allows you to adapt more easily and follow the opportunities that are available to you. 

The Impact on your Portfolio

The projects that you complete should be archived in your portfolio, but how it could be cohesive if all the projects cover multiple design topics.

You should have a modular template for your portfolio, which allows you to add or subtract projects depending on who it’s being presented to. They also want to know not just what you’ve worked on, but HOW you work. 

Group your projects together that complement each other. Let some of the pages of your portfolio demonstrate your design process. If you let the viewer into your process, by having multiple (complimentary) projects you are showing that you are capable of more. 

It makes you an asset to a company, not the opposite.

Specialty is Devalued

Some experienced designers who work within one field might not share this view, and that’s ok. If you are interested in only one design topic, then follow it and go be the best version of yourself. Become an expert in that one topic.

This is more like choosing the variety pack of cereals vs buying one brand over and over (That’s two food references, maybe I’m hungry). There are going to be people who are always loyal to one thing. But as for us, we need a bit of variety in our lives. 

If a Jack-of-trades master of none is oftentimes better than a master of one. What does that make a Designer-of-all-Principles?

The Benefits of Generalism

Having a better understanding of how every design field interlinks allows you to be more creative. It allows you to solve problems more easily, resulting in faster workflows and creating better work.

Adaptability

Being versatile allows you to navigate your career on your own terms. The design industry is constantly evolving, and right now we don’t know the impact Artificial Intelligence is going to have.

Becoming a Generalist designer allows you to increase your problem-solving skills and ensure sustained success in a constantly changing world. It means you can adapt to different opportunities and stay competitive.

Innovative Curiosity

Curiosity and learning play a huge role when designing. New experiences and interests help fuel your inspiration. Research is vital in any well-thought-out design process. By learning from different users and experts for projects, you’ll begin to understand topics you never thought you’d ever learn.

As you begin to learn new things, and your understanding of the topic grows, you can begin to find new opportunities that could be explored. Feed your curiosity and you’ll find the idea of learning more dynamic than you did at school. You’ll find things you can change or combine with a topic from somewhere else to come up with something innovative.

Emotional Well-being

Creativity is linked with good mental health benefits. Humans are not designed to do the same thing day after day, year after year. Our brains are incredibly complex and they want/need all kinds of new input and experiences.

I’ve met many specialty designers who have been in their career for decades, some even making 6 figures, who still feel stifled in their career. The reason is that they are no longer challenging themselves mentally, yet with their large workload unchanging, many end up experiencing burnout.

Taking this approach to your design practice allows you to fight off burnout by diversifying your creativity. 

Cognitive Benefits

To be a generalist designer you will develop a growth mindset, where you can see opportunities instead of challenges. Continually improving yourself and developing a new relationship towards learning.

You can challenge your comfort zone and grow your confidence and your sense of accomplishment. It will open up your creative exploration as you start exploring new topics. Ideas will incubate and come to you out of nowhere. 

Entrepreneurship

As you begin to learn more design skills, you’ll become more adept at finding new trends and potential opportunities. As you grow more confident in new design principles, you’ll find ways to spot chances you can capitalize on.

You’ll be able to use the iterative framework set out in the Polymathic Process to help develop a business. Prototyping and developing your ideas centered around people’s wants and needs translate perfectly into business development skills.

Increased Collaboration

As you learn more of design’s transferable skills you’ll have more expertise you can use when dealing with other designers. This level of understanding can allow you to communicate your ideas more easily and improve how you collaborate.

As you begin to research topics for your design projects, you should always reach out to experts to help you understand their world. These could be specialty designers or people who specialise in an industry that your design needs to work with.

Problem Solving

As you develop your skills across these multiple areas of design, your ability to problem solve will get better and better. Each new project will open you to new challenges, and with practice and sticking to your process it will get easier each time.

Being able to problem solve more effectively will not only impact your design, work but its also a skill that transfers well into your personal life. Knowing how to tackle challenges professionally, can allow you to use the same out of the box thinking to personal problems.

New Perspectives

Learning something new with design does something fun but weird to your brain. It shows you the world with a new perspective that you can’t avoid. If your an experienced designer, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Suddenly you begin to see examples everywhere you look.

Its kind of like buying a new car and suddenly noticing the same make and model everywhere you go. The same goes for design. Once you learn what makes good typography, for example, you’ll notice the fonts used in your local signs, posters, etc. 

This phenomenon is called Frequency Illusion, and it feels very weird. Like you’ve unlocked a way of seeing the world that no one else can see.

You’ll see examples of good and bad design. You’ll need to explain to your non-designer friends that you got distracted by a font, which always raises an eyebrow. But hey, it keeps you interesting!

Each new thing you learn will alter your perspective and give you that new lens to see the world. The more times this happens, the more you can see the overlap between them. You’ll begin to see the bigger picture.

You can read more about the experience of Frequency Illusion in this post.

Sound good?

The Context of Generalism

Generalism isn’t anything new. It used to be the way designers used to operate. Before design was broken up into specialties, it was known as the “Applied Arts.” Most designers at the time used their skills across different types of projects. 

This is why if you’re studying, you’ll find designers in history whose work covers multiple types of design work. We will delve more into these designers in our Past Masters series.

The Industrial Revolution introduced the production line, pioneered by Henry Ford. It showed that it is more economical for one person to do the same job on a production line over and over again. This mindset lead to the rise of specialisation within the workforce. You are being trained to do one job well.

Universities now focus on getting their students into the workforce as quickly as possible. It plays a large role in their rankings and how they measure success. There’s no issue with focussing on getting a job after university, but the focus wasn’t on your creativity. Leaving many people later into their careers feeling stifled by their profession.

Many famous elite Design schools used Cross-discipline principles within their courses. Most famously was the Bauhaus School of Arts, which allowed designers to try different design specialties within their first year before deciding where they wanted to expand. It was closed just before World War 2 by the Nazis. 

Many of the most elite design schools still share this multi-discipline philosophy. Schools like Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands, ArtCenter in Pasadena, USA, and the UK’s Royal College of Arts. 

So unless you went to one of these amazing design schools, then this information has been kept from you, until now.

What are Design’s Transferable Skills?

At Nollie we’ve broken down the transferable skills with Design as 12 principles. Each principle is related to a design field, but it’s named by the impact it will have one your work. These will be the principles that you can use in multiple ways across different projects. 

The more of these principles you learn, the more you can see how they overlap and work together in harmony.

Case Studies from Generalist Designers

They say “we are standing of the shoulders of giants” meaning we should respect and learn how our current design landscape was formed by the influences of the designers who came before us.

If we are looking at designers who we could consider Jack-of-all-trades, who were they and what did they accomplish? With all the advances in technology and education how come we are less adaptable now?

In our Past Masters series, we will look into famous creatives who have the skills to work within multiple fields of Design. We will look into famous polymath designers past and present, checking out their work and figure out what skills we can learn and use in a modern context.

Use these posts to get inspiration and learn from the greatest designers and apply them to your work.

Designing for Aesthetics

Aesthetics is the visual language that is conveyed in your design work. Many of the principles of aesthetics are contained within the field of Graphic Design and photography.

In this series we cover elements like Colour Theory, composition, choosing typography and visual hierarchy of Graphic Design to know what makes something look good.

Graphic Design is one the easiest forms of Design to start. You can begin learning the principles with just a pen and paper. You can begin almost immediately. There is a list of different software that allows people to learn at any level. If you are new to Design, this where I would begin.

As you learn the principles of what makes something look good you can apply that to other design projects.

Designing for Quantity

Designing different quantities of your design correlates with the principles found within Industrial Design. Industrial Design centers around the creation of products and equipment that can be used and interacted with by the masses.

Industrial Design is about creating products to be used by many. It will require you to learn to design for humans of different sizes and shapes. You will need to learn how to create your designs to a specification, and creating dimensions for your design that can be supplied to a manufacturer. 

As you develop Industrial Design skills, you’ll be able to understand how to design around manufacturing and creating work that can be produced to a large scale.

Designing for Possession

People feel emotion towards design. One field that this holds true for the most, is the world of jewellery design. Giving jewellery to someone provokes a deep reaction, just ask anyone who’s been engaged!

The longer the person holds onto the piece, the larger the connection and emotional attachment someone feels towards the jewellery.

The piece might stay in someone’s family for generations. 

Designing around jewellery gives you an understanding of designing something timeless. It becomes more treasured as time goes on.

Designing for Materials

Since we’ve started with the food analogy, designing for Materials is like knowing the ingredients in a recipe. Choosing different ingredients impacts the taste of the food. Thats how materials work within design.

Ceramics is one design field where the choice of materials at the start of the process plays a big impact into the end result. Developing an intimate knowledge of materials in this process, will allow you to develop skills in selecting and understanding the materials you use in your work.

Building this appreciation for materials will impact you on a larger scale, you will have an understanding of material attributes and learn how materials will affect the final result of your design. 

Designing for Form

Fashion Design is one of the best ways to introduce you to designing around the human form. People come in all different shapes and sizes, yet an item of clothing can be altered to fit most.

Fashion is also highly personal, it’s one of the ways we show our personality. Everyone has different tastes, different styles and culture around clothing. Fashion encompasses colour, pattern and fabrics constructed into patterns that make up the garments.

Learning to design in this field will allow you to balance aesthetics with designing around human sizes and shapes. It will allow you to use your own artistic expression alongside designing something that allows someone to express themselves.

Designing for Environment

Your environment plays a huge role in your life. Knowing how to make your space functional and beautiful comes from the realm of Interior Design. Interior Design is about arranging spaces that allow the people within to enjoy the space, and the space to work for them.

You’ll look at how spaces are used, and what layout best suits the people in the environment.  You’ll look at how colour schemes, lighting and furniture work together to create a cohesive space that people enjoy being in.

Designing with Time

Designing around time can be distilled with Animation. Animation is about manipulating time to create the illusion of motion. 

Animation comes in many forms.Traditional hand-drawn animation is what was used in old Disney movies. Vector Animation which used to create two dimensionsal characters and scenes, like South Park. 3D Animation, creates a three dimensional style, like whats used in Pixar movies. 

Time plays an important role in Animation as all attributes of the motion link directly to when something moves. Animation can be one the most effective ways to enhance your storytelling ability.

Designing with Data

Data is pivotal in understanding the needs, behaviours and performance of users.

It is vital in business, and used to form opinions, business decisions and design elements. The design field that best relates to data is Infographic Design.

Knowing how to convey complex data in a way that’s engaging and easy to understand will massively help you in your design career. It removes some of the complexity and instead demonstrates the data visually.

Design for Interaction

Humans love something that’s interactive. We love to engage and feel part of the experience. Good Interactive design can feel seamless, whereas bad Interactive Design feels clunky and hard to use. We can also expand upon interaction by introducing motion and submersion through Motion Graphics and Virtual Reality.

Knowing the way that people interact with your work can be covered in User Experience (UX) Design which when paired with Graphics makes User Interface Design (UI). We can also use design to allow interaction between Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality.

Design for Atmosphere

Atmosphere comes from Lighting Design. Lighting has an intense impact on people, affecting their moods, sometimes subconsciously. It creates an ambience in the space and can be used functionally to direct the attention of the viewer.

You’ll look at how light alters a space between natural light from the sun and creating artificial light that complement the overall space. Lighting can be a statement piece within the home so you need to create something that can create impact while being functional.

Lighting is an often overlooked design principle but it plays a huge role in how we feel within a space and even how we understand how we interact with the products around us. For example, you can tell when a product is turned on by lighting.

Design for Future

Lets face it. In 2024, the future is looking pretty weird. We don’t know how new technology is going to impact our careers.

We have Artificial Intelligence being used to create new ideas pieced together from stolen content. The tough part is this technology is revolutionary and does have it’s benefits. We’ll look at ways you can ethically use Artificial Intelligence in your work, without stealing someone else’s work.

We also need to work towards creating products that don’t damage the environment once they’ve been used. As designers, we are responsible for designing the products, technology and clothing that goes out into the world. We need to demonstrate how you can utilise sustainability in your work.

What is the Polymathic Design Process?

If learning every principle sounds a bit daunting, just know it’s easier to incorporate these principles together than you think.

Becoming a generalist designer is about adapting your process to make you more versatile. Every design specialty follows a similar process or workflow. Many fields follow the same outline but use industry-specific names and jargon. So why not adapt it to work for designing for different projects?

A design process, is every designer’s secret sauce. The workflow used to get from the start to the finish of their projects. Every designer’s process is personal to them, and allows them to develop their creative ideas effectively. 

Every process is unique to each person, although everyone will follow the same steps. Sometimes a design project might already be underway and you only need to use some of the points rather than go through the whole process.

The Polymathic Process is our process guide that can be used and adapted to fit different design projects. 

1. Brief & Planning

A creative project is set out in a project brief which sets out what is required from the project. This includes a project brief, normally set by the client. It is up to you to determine how you will work to create the work for the expected deadline using your process.

2. Research

Research is fundamental when it comes to generating new ideas. It allows you to delve into your topic and develop an understanding of the solutions available. 

You should go out and speak with experts, these people love to talk about their subject and would allow you to create something that fits well within their world. It’s a great way of building your network.

Reach out to the people who are intended to use your design. These users will provide valuable insight into what they expect from your design and the issues they currently face, that your design could solve.

As you collect all this data, put it within your Design Specification. A living document that evolves throughout the project which lists your design’s attributes as data.

3. Concepts

Now we get to the fun bit. It’s time to start generating ideas. Your first idea is never your best one, so think quantity over quality and put down a good number of diverse ideas. They don’t need to be good, they just need to convey your idea. This is called Ideation.

With a large collection of ideas generated through ideation you can select a handful that work the best for your client. These ideas are then fleshed out a bit more with more detailed sketches and more information. These are presented to the client to inform how to proceed.

4. Development

As you progress through your project, one or two of your ideas will begin to stand out as a clear winner. It’s now time to focus on these ideas and begin taking them towards the final result. 

Prototyping plays a big role in this stage. As you progress, test out your ideas with prototypes to ensure that idea works for its intended use. Follow up with the experts and users from your Research stage and get their feedback.

5. Detail

By this stage your prototypes and feedback should indicate that your idea is viable and completes the intended solution required in the brief.

Spend time polishing your final idea before submitting it. If the devil is in the details, then where are your wee devils that need to be addressed? Use this time to get your idea to a level that looks perfect.

6. Pitching

It’s now time to hand over your design to the client in a pitch. This is where you outline your idea and explain the reasoning behind your design decisions.

 If you followed the Research and Development stage correctly you should be able to answer WHY your final idea looks or functions the way it does. Knowing the reason why is equally as important as to what your idea is.

Having a comprehensive Design Specification massively helps with pitching. As you’ll have all the data you need to recite in your pitch already in your document.

7. Portfolio

As a designer, the most important document you will ever use is your portfolio. It is what decides if you get a job. It demonstrates your skills as designer. It’s also an archive of the projects you’ve worked on.

The final stage of any project should be adapting the project and it’s solution into a few pages that demonstrate you going through this project and the final result.

It’s up to you to market yourself, put your work in your portfolio, on your social media or on sites like Behance or Dribbble.

How to Become a Generalist Designer

What Software Do I Need? 

Adobe Creative Cloud

Thankfully many of the software you need to use to cover these range of topics are contained within Adobe’s Creative Cloud subscription. Adobe is the industry standard for Design, and knowing how to use them will massively help you integrate into the working world of design. 

An Adobe Creative Cloud subscription provides access to 21 apps, including Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, AfterEffects and PremierePro. A subscription will provide software that spans Graphic Design, Video, Photography, Illustration and Social Media. 

Adobe also offers a free portfolio website with every subscription with Adobe Portfolio, you can use to send to employers. It owns Behance, one of the best platforms where you should post your finished work online.

Also students can get 65% off their Adobe Creative Cloud Subscription. Plus one month free for a limited time!

Other apps

While Adobe’s Creative Cloud has a great selection of apps that allow for dynamic design work, you will require other apps that help round out your skillset. These apps include Fusion360, Blender, Figma, and Unity.

Below we’ve listed the software we would recommend for each design field.

• Aesthetics (Graphic Design) – Illustrator & Photoshop
• Time (Animation) – Adobe AfterEffects & Adobe Animate, ToonBoom
• Data (Infographics) – Adobe Illustrator & After Effects, Venngage, Piktochart
• Time (Fashion Design) – Adobe Illustrator & Photoshop, Clo3D
• Interaction (UX, UI, AR, VR) – Adobe XD & Adobe Aero, Unity, Figma
• Atmosphere (Lighting Design) – Adobe Photoshop & Adobe Illustrator, Dialux
• Materials (Ceramics Design) – Photoshop and Illustrtator, Fusion 360
• Possession (Jewellery Design) – Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, Rhino
• Scale (Industrial Design) – Illustrator & Photoshop, Solidworks

All of the software listed are industry standard, and would be highly beneficial to know and use. Design shouldn’t be restricted by your financial ability, so we’ve provided a list of open-source alternatives. 

What Equipment Do I Need?

What equipment do I need to become a Generalist Designer?

Notebook

By far my most important piece of equipment I would recommend to any designer is a good notebook, and using it often. I’ve written before about the importance of notebooks and it’s something I believe is one of the most underrated tools in bettering yourself as a designer.

A good bullet notebook can allow you to write or sketch ideas, without lines interfering. You can write down your ideas, doodle, write task lists and most importantly write down any advice you receive from other designers. 

A notebook should be used consistently. As you learn new design techniques you should write it down. The act of writing improves your memory of a topic, but if you ever forget you can easily go back and find that information.

Sketchbook

You will need somewhere to sketch out your ideas. In the Design world, we prefer to use A3 size paper. In the United States, that’s Ledger / Tabloid size.

Depending on how you like to organise your work you can have one sketchbook for everything your working on, or have smaller sketchbooks split into different projects. Smaller sketchbooks allow you to organise your work easier, but one sketchbook allows you to find your ideas quicker.

Computer

You’ll need to have a computer with enough power to handle Adobe and other design software. The minimum requirement for Adobe products is 8GB of RAM, although they recommend using 16GB. If you use their software on an underpowered computer, it won’t function properly.

If you have any laptop recommendations, please leave them in the comments! I’m looking for a new one, so open to any suggestions. Would anyone recommend a Surface Pro?

3D Printer

I use 3D Printing a lot when it comes to prototype my ideas. I recommend the Snapmaker 2.0 a 3-in-1 modular printer. It uses modular components so that you can switch between 3D Printing, CNC cutting and laser cutting. 

Essentially the frame and bed and function of the 3D printer stay the same, but the moving head can be replaced with different modules. One which extrudes filament for 3D Printing, another that fires lasers to cut and etch materials and another, that can fit drillbits to cut and engrave materials. 

It’s great in that it allows for a diverse range of projects, and as a generalist it works in my favour to have one machine that can handle different workloads for different projects. Rather than buying three different machines, I can just use one.

I also really like that it fits comfortably on my desktop, but doesn’t compromise on bed size. I also really like the bed levelling feature, because if you’ve ever tried to manually level the bed of 3D printer its really fidgety and can take ages to get right.

You can find out what tools we use in the Nollie Workshop.

Sewing Machine

A sewing machine will allow you to work through Fashion’s transferable skills when learning how to design around Form. It will make things easier than sewing by hand.

I use my wife’s basic one for now, but from experience I really like the Brother models. Especially the ones with an embroidery feature.

Other Equipment

If you want to find out more about the equipment you can find all items we use, including small tools and other equipment in the Nollie Workshop.

When can I become a Generalist?

Mastering all the techniques will take time, but if you want to go on to grow your creative skillset, it’s worth the effort. Remember you can learn at your own pace and apply these principles to the topics you enjoy to keep it fun and engaging.

But now if you’ve experienced the mindset shift that comes from taking this approach then you can say you’ve already started. Plus design is constantly changing, there’s never really an end point. Focus on what you find interesting and use your curiosity to fuel your learning. 

Keep Up to Date

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Conclusion

Generalism is a tool that used to be used by Designers which has been lost to specialism and left many feeling stuck or pidgeonholed in their design careers.

Hopefully now you understand that become a cross-disciplinary designer will expand your creative skillset, improve your ability to collaborate and allow you to see how different types of design overlap.

Now go out there and get creative! 

Nollie Design is here to show you the transferable skills within design. If you want to keep up to date with the latest posts, subscribe to our news letter on follow us on social media.