Look inside any agency in town and you’ll see a busy-bee world of designers working on their craft. They wear tight jeans, shirts that don’t match their shoes (except that in some strangely appealing way the do), and a decent percentage of them has awesomely crazy hairdos. There’s also another very short word to describe this lot: young.

It all makes sense! Design is about being fresh, trendy, in the moment. And who better to represent them fresh trends than the trendy youth themselves. If I were to look for a designer, I’d be searching for someone who can spit out spanking new ideas at a blink of an eye and be energized and excited and effervescent all the time. You know… young.

But here’s a question that’s been bugging me for actually a while: What happens to all the designers when they grow up?

There are a couple obvious answers: A. become creative directors; and B. start a design agencies of their own. Except as far as I can tell there are still a lot (a lot!) more designers out there than creative directors or agency owners. Where do they all go? What’s the lifespan of a designer? And what’s going to happen to me?

It’s a little early for me to start seriously thinking about it – I still have a lot of creative juice in me and enough fire to keep me happily churning out design tricks 260 days a year – but a girl’s gotta have a plan! I’m really big on having a game plan, pretty much, for everything in my life. And right now I don’t. And it sort of terrifies me.

Ok-ok, it’s still way-way in the future, but seriously. Where do all the designers go?

It’s a widely known fact for people who spend any time with me, that I’m very impatient. I hate waiting and being waited for. But to my overwhelming relief, it turns out I’m not alone with this annoying vice (well, the first half of it, unfortunately). Evidently, we’ve become an increasingly  impatient society. We skim text, click through images, and install mobile apps before getting past the first description paragraph. I know I do that.

Well, we graphic designers are on to you, impatient lot! …Cue evil laugh here… Did you know that we’ve been devising ways to force you into absorbing information? But, feeling benevolent today, I’m going to fill you in on some of our tricks.

Trick 1: We keep it short and big. Yes, we harass our poor copywriters to write shorter and shorter copy, just for you. Then we spice it up with cool typography and, voila, a headline you can’t miss even if you tried!

Trick 2: We use lots of contrast. Apparently you’re looking for cues throughout the design for things you should pay attention to. That’s why you see lots of bright buttons everywhere, screaming “click me!”

Trick 3: We throw in something that doesn’t look like it belongs on the web. Handwritten fonts will do the trick every single time. It’s quite magical. Second in line are textural effects, like the oh-so-popular torn paper treatment. We’re still wondering when it might go out of style, but that’s not going to happen anytime soon.

Trick 4: We let arrows point the way. This one is quite silly and annoyingly effective. You see and arrow and you look where it’s pointing. So simple.

Trick 5: We let pictures do the talking. They say a picture says a thousand words. Well, sometimes we just need it to say 2 or 3 (like “Add to Cart”), and we know you like that little shopping cart icon with the plus sign, so we give you what you like.

But without you, the reader, the user, the audience – impatient as you might be – we designers are obsolete and out of a job. So we’ll continue to try to please you with cute icons and evokative typography, and continue looking for new tricks to keep you interested.

I guess what I’m really saying is thanks for keeping us on our toes.