@Kyle: you are not alone!
@Kristine: I’m working it out. But be reassured, my ego is not damaged, and I sometimes think of myself as a design demi-goddess (or I pretend to…)
@Mike: Glad to hear that! Thank you!
@Peter: Samir IS flawless. He has a rationnal explaination for almost everything in life, from design to gogo dancers.

@samir Nice one. Your logic is flawless. Assuming that the bell curve is dynamic, i.e. the set of bad,average and super designers is in flux, then there is still hope and virtue in pushing one’s boundaries because we might get to the other side of the bell curve one day.

I shall write a letter to the Supreme Council of Average Design explaining my plans. What’s their postcode?

You are unique! You are one of a kind designer. Love it, work it, improve it, whatever – just be what you are…. a designer!

@BJ You are indeed pretty suspicious. Born with a name like Kern? Meeting Paul Ran? Loving your job as much as you do? I suspect you to be sent by them to confuse us. Or worst, you may be one of them, trying to tell us that you’re average. Damn this disguise, we saw you there!

First we must come up with a proper scientific definition of the “average designer”. So here goes:

average designer
n.
The designer obtained by dividing the sum of the super-set of all designers by the number of designers in existence at any given moment.

If you rated all designers on a scale of 10, these rock-star designers you speak of would be 9s or 10s. They have to be with all those super powers at their disposal. Unfortunately, the world is filled with bad designers. They’re the majority. You know, the people who like to set headlines in Times New Roman Bold stretched horizontally to fit the space, and who will swear by Comic Sans as the best body type invented since Baskerville! These people are 1s and 0s on our designer scale.

You know the problem with averages, don’t you? Because there are so many of them, and since the average designer is a perfectly scientific mathematical calculation from the whole, these bad designers are making average designers 2s and 3s rather than the 5s, 6s or 7s we could be!

It’s an outrage! Death to bad designers!

Unfortunately, since us average designers are mathematically so untalented, we can’t possibly design a devious enough plan for the mass destruction of bad designers. It just wouldn’t work well. We’d think it was brilliant when we first did it, and even when we were presenting it to the Supreme Council of Average Design, but then we’d remember too late that we forgot something obvious and ridiculous that ruins everything. After that we’d all just sit around and complain about clients on the interweb and nothing would ever get done!

Now, as horific as this is going to sound, the only way to raise our average selves to higher levels might be through teaching all those bad designers what a grid is, and kerning, of course. Who knows, sometime in the future we might even be able to make them understand rhythm and composition. I’m almost afraid to say this, but sometime in the perfect future maybe bad designers can even be made to understand usability and interface design *gasp*!

To that day we look forward, when the bad shall rise to new levels of OK-ness, and the average designer shall at last take their rightful place in the pantheon of wnnabe rock-stars!

(^_-)
Samir

So we all agree that they don’t really exist. I’ll sleep better tonight.
Thank you guys.

That’s what I think anyways. Think about it. It could be possible.