Should graphic designers know how to draw or not?

Is there a consensus on whether or not graphic designers should know how to draw? Should drawing and sketching be a part of the creative design process? And is the answer relative?

No, the answer is not relative. While drawing a still life and designing on a grid are different tasks, both are skills that rely on the ability to discern spatial relationships and piece together a composition using some form of mechanical skill. Software-based design is really only a digital approximation of its analog predecessor: pencil and paper.

The deception of digital tools

Digital tools do away with things like erasers and smudges, but they don’t give us more skill—and neither do they take any away. They are neutral. They reveal what fundamental spatial relationship skills we already have. If we can’t create a decent composition on paper, we aren’t magically going to be able to create one on the screen. But the ease with which we can iterate and tweak with software can very easily hide (gasp) the fact that we might just be wandering around without a digital clue.

Photoshop is not a pencil

But drawing is different. Drawing forces the motor skills to make real time, quasi-permanent decisions, while honing spacial discernment skills to be more accurate by practice. They psychological process of drawing is in a sense more like real-time performance. There is a sense of “now” that heightens the urgency to execute correctly, similar to what musicians experience when playing live. Digital tools erase the sense of urgency with a cognitively true, and yet subconsciously false, sense of unlimited freedom:

• The true freedom digital tools offer is freedom from physical media that can wear out, show signs of effort, and that ungraciously reveal our struggle with them.
• The false freedom digital tools offer is that while providing “unlimited undo’s” from our mistakes, they remove the sense of urgency from our mistakes that we most learn fundamental skills from! They can act as opiates on our design-fail sensors.

For instance, the fastest way to learn a piece of music is to play it live, not piece it together in a music composition application. Although you can do it that way, your depth of knowledge is limited by lack of live engagement if you only choose the safe, sterile, and antiseptic world of digital-only music composition and playback. We can’t lessen the need for physical contact with either musical instrument, or physical art media.

Artistic relatives

So what is the consensus? It depends who you ask. If you ask designers that can’t draw, the answer is no. And in a sense they’d be right if they have some measure of success. But if you ask designers who can and do draw, you’d find that the answer is yes, that designers should know how to draw and should practice routinely. In this day and age, who is right? For the camp that believes good enough is good enough, no drawing is necessary. For the camp that believes only the best is good enough, drawing is a means of attaining the best skills possible.

Do you have to draw to be a good designer or not?

At the same time, you really don’t have to draw well to be a decent designer. But knowing that great design skills are built on basic classical art skill sets should give us pause, if we don’t draw, to consider what we might be missing out on. Great design skills are based on timeless and quantifiable skill sets we can objectively learn and measure.