In most cases, designer is a servant of the brand he/she works on. Good brands leave very little space for “your style”. If the brand has no style, that’s brand’s problem. If I was hiring a web designer for an agency working with strong brands and he had a very strong “style” that he couldn’t abandon, I probably would have very little work for him.

Now, *creating a style* to suit a particular purpose or define a brand, that’s a whole different story.

I won’t comment on the idea that focusing on one style helps being really good at it rather than average or mediocre. I can think of a few “yes, but…” things to say about that, but it’s been discussed above already and I don’t really have a clear opinion on this.

What’s interesting to me is the idea that the client will pick a designer with a style fitting their project. Well, I guess this will happen sometimes, but picking a style for a project is art direction, and most clients don’t have an in-house designer doing art direction for them. So if designers specialize in styles they like, and clients pick a style and find a designer doing that style… nobody ever does art direction, and it’s likely that the project will suffer from this.

Today, the emphasis on style over content in much of what is alleged to be graphic design is, at best, puzzling. … The deluge of design that colors our lives, our print, and our video screens is in harmony with the spirit of our time. No less than drugs and pollution, the big brush of graffiti, for example, has been blanketing our cities from Basel to Brooklyn. Much of graphic design is a grim reminder of this presence.

The qualities that evoke this bevy of depressing images are a collage of chaos and confusion, swaying between high tech and low art, and wrapped in a cloak of arrogance: squiggles, pixels, doodles, dingbats, ziggurats, and aimlessly sprinkled liliputian squares; turquoise, peach, pea green, and lavender; corny woodcuts on moody browns and russets; art deco rip-offs, high-gloss finishes, sleazy textures; halos and airbrush effects; tiny color photos surrounded by acres of white space; indecipherable, zany typography; tiny type with miles of leading; text in all caps (despite indisputable proof that lowercase letters are more readable, less formal, and friendlier); ubiquitous letterspacing; visually annotated typography; revivalist caps and small caps; pseudo Dada and Futurist collages; and whatever “special effects” a computer makes possible. These inspired decorations are, apparently, convenient stand-ins for real ideas and genuine skills.

Even though some of these ideas and images may be useful from time to time, when they are employed relentlessly and indiscriminately they become mere cliches. This is what defines trendiness.

Comparing visual noise in modern design to drugs and graffiti might be a little dramatic, but his ideas from 1993 are still relevant today: style doesn’t matter. Content and ideas do; and ultimately, they dictate the form our communications take. Personal style, in the face of a well-defined brief, doesn’t matter at all.

What’s more, most of what we see as ‘style’ is inherently trendy and will be irrelevant soon, if it isn’t already. Style changes. Good ideas stay the same. It’s our responsibility as designers to focus, not on style, but on having the skills to solve our clients’ problems, regardless of what visual devices we end up using.

http://mikekus.com/

This is what’s lacking from web design: personality! All sites these days look alike because everybody is scared to make a statement and just wants to copy Apple with a safe, crowd-pleasing style.

Web design won’t be taken as seriously as other forms of design until we as a profession grow some balls (sorry ladies…) and start assuming our own personal styles.

http://www.quora.com/Should-designers-have-their-own-style-or-be-flexible

This way they won’t be lost for posterity

What happens when your style is no longer marketable? When no one wants it? Ask Mr. Carson about that.

What about when you want to change your style? What happens when your voice evolves and you’re no longer doing work that looks exactly like the work you were doing earlier? All those clients who hire you because they like your style, as opposed to how you solve their problems, both in aesthetics and usability, will no longer want to work with you, no?

And most of all – style is so easily copied. The whole Web 2.0 moment was exactly that – a charge of designers deciding to copy one another (that’s an over simplification that’s sounds more aggressive than I mean it to), until every site looked the same. We’re about to go through that (or already are) with white space and an elegant use of type (though, that’s a good move, but I’m willing to bet many designers who go that way will do it for stylistic reasons, not truly understanding why it works, just knowing/hoping that it does). So while you’ve spent your time developing your style, so have others, probably the exact same style, or, they’re about to steal it. How do you compete with that? An inferior designer will blatantly copy your style and charge a fraction of the price because they’ve spent less style developing their skills so value them less.

Good design has never been about being able to style. The voices of the designers may come through, and yes, I agree, designers should be hired in part because of that voice, but like any good singer, the designer can’t forever sing in the same tone hoping people will continue to buy their wares. There needs to be flux, an ability to change the pitch and tone and pace and emotion as the songs (the client) change, and the lyrics (content) demand it. And how tiring is it when a musician keeps rehashing the same sound?

Do you think it appropriate that Da Vinci did scientific drawings and sculpture or maybe should have stuck to drawing and painting? I’m not talking about the media here either. Pick up a drawing of a helicopter from Da Vinci’s sketchbook and it looks like a Da Vinci. It fits in with what he did, even though the subject is completely different from the norm.

I think you can be good in a lot of things and have skill in many but like Jin said, focus on something (or a few) and be great at it. Very few achieve greatness in many fields. Just look at some sports figures that can transpose their raw skills from baseball to basketball to football or golf. Same with design, very few can transpose their work from say one medium to another or be up to a challenge to do a game design vs. a website. Print to web is another example where skills are different but a good designer who can adapt to each is recongizable no matter what the end target type is.

I agree it’s an evolution. Learn the fundamentals, experiement in different medium, find your strengths and weaknesses then establish a brand. In fact I find with good designers, brand comes and an output of work rather than a goal of effort. Let the style bubble up and refine what you get.

A wide understanding of design is very valuable, but it’s not incompatible with having your own style. You can know what your style is, and then consciously decide to veer off from it.