Design isn’t that hard. All you have to do is read the creative brief, do a day’s worth of research, sketch out a few “concepts” (those are an increasing rarity these days), flip through a couple books and magazines to find a look that seems to work out well, slap it all together in photoshop, quark and illustrator, and boom! Completion. Insta-design. Maybe the “instant” part takes a couple months but really, what does time matter when you’re essentially churning out the same crap time and time again, dressing it up in different clothes applying a layer of foundation to cover the wrinkles. Somehow though, everything still looks so old.
We all rubberstamp things. In terms of profit, its not necessarily the worst idea in the world and without some amount of financial consistency we’d have to give up design altogether and become welders or waiters. Complacency and the frustration dancing with it is nothing new, people frequently question if “design is in a rut,” it’s a common topic of conversation, both casual and involved. “Are we hitting a wall?” seems to be the calling card, however silently, to many designers young and old, and like any other obstacle, sometimes the failed efforts to break it apart render one too fatigued even to work around it. And so it goes.
Back to Flatland we go, where comfort reigns supreme and an all too frequent response is either to justify the regression—because, if you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backwards, nothing sits still—with tales of exhaustion or uncontrollable circumstances, or procrastination masking promises to forge ahead boldly some other day. Because for all the 60-hour weeks and melodramatic journal entries or late night phone calls or desperate emails, shouting alone to fill our personal creative vacancies, deep down we know that design need not be so difficult. All you have to do is go through the motions, open up your bag of tricks, borrow from someone else’s if need be, and repeat the same basic processes that figure into every project.
It’s easy to wonder what the point of doing anything new really is. And, truly, what point is there? What value does that serve? Why does it matter if you design a brochure with a message that no one ever articulated, visualized it as no one had ever dreamed?
I firmly believe that whenever an artist or philosopher discovers something new or reimagines the familiar in a way never before conceived, the rest of the world advances with that thinking. The collective bar for all of us is raised; that moment of brilliance can never be revisited, never be used again to move us from one point to the next. This has fascinated me for years and it continues to motivate me to this day…sometimes the struggle is hopeless, sometimes I prefer to rubberstamp and regurgitate, but for some reason, for some seriously unknown reason I think, I press on. Applaud others when they succeed. Challenge myself, challenge my friends and colleagues. What motivates you to discover the new? How do you deal with the obstacles that invariably step in to ruin your day?
I think someone needs a vacation.
On Jul.30.2004 at 02:11 PM