Take a simple design project.

Ask these questions:
What is most important: the message or the look&feel?
What does your work boil down to: communications or cosmetology?

Binell and Bielenberg’s lengthy but insightful article “How to Build a Gre nade ” in Communication Arts paints a compelling argument that some designers get lost in the cosmetology and forget the communications.

The order is inward to outward: bones, guts, flesh, clothes.
Content first.
Always.