Hi Pamela,
"Nope". Collections cannot be sorted. As a workaround, you could, however, add a custom parameter at the Project Level called "Designer Role", manually load it with the names of the Designers in your company, and then sort (and filter, and group, and chart) by that field.
I've used this technique in the past many times -- one such dropdown for each key role -- and found it to be very useful. In fact, if you make the value of the dropdown the ID of each user, you can even filter on those key role parameters using $$USER.ID, which has even more advantages.
Regards,
Doug