What makes a designer a good designer?

Years ago we organised a series of meetups at CMD Amsterdam around the question what makes a thing a good thing. We’ve let that question rest for a few years. But it kept itching. So we’re starting a new series of events around an updated variant of this same question. This time we are less interested in the thing, and more interested in the person. So the question we want to investigate is what makes a designer a good designer? And related questions like what makes a designer a critical designer?

We’ve started organising a brand new series of meetups at the CMD school of design in Amsterdam. We’ve invited an eclectic mix of digital experts to help us find an answer to this complicated question. The first three events are already planned, so block these dates and please do come by. It’s been too long we met.

The first speaker is in this series is Peter Biľak. You might know him from incredible ventures like the Typotheque type foundry, the Works That Work magazines, or the incredible Fontstand font rental service. Peter will come by and talk to us about what he considers good, researched, informed design. This meetup is on the 17th of October, and indeed, that’s this Thursday today, at 16:00 on the third floor of the Theo Thijssenhuis. I’m very much looking forward to seeing you all there. Please get a free ticket at our eventbrite page, or via this Gathio link If you let us know you are coming, we’ll make sure we have enough chairs during, and enough bites and drinks after the talk.

On the 14th of November Yolijn van der Kolk and Robbert Broersma will come over to talk about their work on the NL Design System. Next to reflecting on the question what makes a designer a good designer, they’ll talk about the successes, but they’ll also talk about some of the things that went wrong. Again it starts at 16:00 on the third floor of the Theo Thijssenhuis. A pattern emerges.

On the 12th of December a team from Q42 will come over to talk about a project that is at the moment still a secret.

Our colleagues, my students and me, we are all very much looking forward to seeing you all at these three events. We haven’t planned any talks for 2025 yet, if you have any suggestions please let us know.

The meetups are of course for inspiration. We try to invite people who have something really interesting to say. The meetups are also about meeting people in an informal setting. Everybody who is interested in the topic is more than welcome, either laypeople or experts. Also interesting for some organisations: these meetups are not mandatory for our students. This means that the students who do attend are the more motivated bunch. You might want to meet them. They sure want to meet you.