Over the last months I developed a fascination for the street musicians called “One man band”. They’re a very curious social phenomenon that can be found in almost every country. When I started to pay attention to them a lot of questions came to my mind. The first one was “Why do they do it?”. Seriously, what’s the point of playing ten instruments at the same time? It seems a very hard to do task and it surely requires a lot of practice. They don’t sound very good (with very few exceptions) and of course, nobody likes them, most people on the street are  always trying to avoid them. You may try to pretend that they are not there, but it’s impossible not to notice them.

So, why do they do it? You can say that they do it  for money. But I really think there are numerous of easier ways to get money. The only reasonable answer I could find was that they really like doing it, that they do it for love or madness. And there is no doubt that hey have a very mystical and romantic atmosphere around them. After some research I started to like them. The funniest thing about it all, is that I like more the ones that sound the worse, don’t ask me why. I found all kinds of one man bands from the fastest, to the fatter, the shorter, etc.

Ok that’s a very strange fascination to have. But I couldn’t help myself not to find out some similarities between them and XXI century designers. Sometimes I feel like a one man band. And I’m not saying that I can or like to do other professionals job (e.g.: developers, information architects, etc). I’m talking about all the information you need in mind when you are designing anything. In Internet production case: Usability guidelines, Brand guidelines, Grids, Wireframes, CSS,  Jquery, Sfir, Animation, Videos, Dynamic / static Content,  SEO, Social media, Ads, Tabs, Forms, enough! Sometimes I have to stop and ask myself “what was the concept, once again?”.

Now I believe you are thinking ”so, why do designers do it?”. This I can answer  for sure: we do it for the feeling of accomplishment, for the satisfaction of seeing your idea alive and working. Even though sometimes nobody likes it. Somehow I think that those one man bands have the same feeling. So, while there can be found one man bands playing in the streets, I think we can keep on doing it!

So, it’s all about being able to see the forest and not just the tree, I believe that this concept could be applied to several fields of professional work. Now, why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourself as well as what you think about all this in the comments bellow?