I wonder if such discussions are confused by the use of "talent" in the
singular. Don't various sorts of design require various combinations of
(multiple) talents? Even within a field like graphic design there are
great designers with particular strengths and weaknesses.
I assume Paul Rand was talking about two important talent sets that are
valuable for graphic design--a sense of 2D space that aids making
formal decisions and a tendency to leap to ideas that are sufficiently
abstracted from the mundane statement of the task to be engaging yet
are still connected enough to be productive. These are two different
talents/sets of intuition that sometimes but far from always reside in
the same person.
I suspect that we could come up with a list of other talents that
particularly serve graphic designers well in their specialized world.
(Rand was very talented if we look at particular graphic deign-related
talent sets but less so if we consider others that many of us think
important.) We could also come up with a list of talents that are of
great value to other sorts of designers but not particularly important
to or valued by most graphic designers.
Gunnar
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