The fact that you can never learn this field and that you can keep on doing it and keep on changing and growing and challenging your own assumptions makes it a act of grace that you can stay in and keep doing it. Success on a project is, 1st you have to say who's success, What you want to do is see that every succeeds on a project, there are three legs to this stool there's you, there's a client and there's the public and you want everyone to succeed. The client's wish is usually to sell more things or to have people to come to a concert or whatever it is, you want that to work, you want something experientially that's interesting and that you believe is as good as you can do it and finally want the public to be satisfied with what you do and respond to it. So success I suppose is when all three of those components of every design feel that the result has benefits them in some way
The biggest challenge for people who've been in this field for a long time and that certainly includes myself is not getting bored or disinterested in what you are doing and the biggest challenge is how do you maintain your personal vision and your own sense of appropriateness to something that you have to maintain that independent professional response very often you are asked to do things that you know weaken your own personal conviction and the balance between living in the world and understanding that the client has an area of authority and also trying to maintain our own separation from that authority and still do that good work and still solve the problem. A part of the complexity of being in the design world, style is really brain style is how you think you might say it's a bold thought and so what you wanna see in a designer's work is thoughtful and imaginative work the translation of that in to a physical object varies widely to some degree depending on what the skill set is of the designer, unfortunately many designers have limited hand skills in fact most of them can't draw they weigh out of the paper bag and that limits them to existing programs and existing material I think one of the things that is interesting is wether you can distinguish the work of one person from another because the stylistic things that came out of ones hands is no longer available. So that most important thing becomes the way you think. The fact that designers have a voice the practice of an ethical response to what's going on in the society to me an essential opportunity for them but I don't expect the designers to be any more than good citizens but by being good citizens what that suggests to me is an intervention in the activities of our time. Designers seem to be increasingly concerned about there effect on the environment on elections on the politics in general and i think that is a very positive orientation.
I have been willing to stay on the case and for everybody who wants to be a successful designer, it depends how you define that success, the secret of success from my point of view is to maintain passion in what your interested in don't be worn out by the difficulties of the field or the ignorance of the client or the pressures from your peers or the envy that you have on the accomplishment of others, STAY ON THE CASE, AND ENJOY WHAT YOU DO.
