Posts Tagged ‘creativity’
Tuesday, April 30th, 2013
Not so many designers draw now. The benefits of drawing as a language, a process, a means of working through problems are widely overlooked. The idea that drawing is for making pictures inhibits creativity.
From primary school on, drawing is seen as something you either can or cannot do and is permanently welded to a sterile idea of ‘picture-making’. Observational, note-taking and thought-processing drawing has no place and the innate perception and creativity common to most young children (I have seen primary school sketchbooks to shame some illustration degree students) is rarely understood / encouraged. Where creativity survives education, degree teaching’s first task is to remove a decade and a half’s conditioning. Inhibition sees students of design timidly sketching an idea in 4H pencil, more concerned with what onlookers might think than than generating more ideas.
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Tags: creativity, design process, drawing, problem-solving
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Thursday, February 14th, 2013
Most of us walk around with eyes closed. A slight exaggeration, but almost true. The inside of our heads is built to ignore the familiar. Observation is a key component of creativity—yet it can take the worst of shocks to fully switch it on.
Living largely via pixel & glass and distracted by everyday concerns we neglect the actual world as a source of inspiration. For those of us without the time / inclination for a Buddhist attention to the now, it can take awareness of imminent death to force a clear-sighted perspective.
As a music enthusiast I was upset to hear of Wilko Johnson’s recent cancer diagnosis. His old band Dr Feelgood
were a timeless one-off. I saw him play late last year—he and master bassist Norman Watt-Roy two fiercely animated Dickens characters. Wilko’s career was resurgent, boosted by Julien Temple’s terrific 2010 documentary Oil City Confidential (highly recommended BTW, even if you hate the music). He’ll be fortunate to see this year out, but in a recent interview spoke of feeling “alive and …existing in the moment”, his appetite for music (and astronomy) in no way diminished. This reminded me of legendary TV writer Dennis Potter, whose original and innovative 1978 TV drama series Pennies from Heaven made powerful use of music—still possibly my favourite piece of TV (The Wire / The Sopranos / Breaking Bad / Treme etc. notwithstanding). In a famous last interview (he died in 1994) Potter spoke of an ecstatic appreciation of nature: “…the blooms were the bloomingest blooms ever…”.
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Tags: creativity, design process, innovation, music, observation
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Tuesday, December 4th, 2012
Don’t mean a thang if it ain’t got that twang… © Alembic
Most designers enjoy music for mood-management or constructive distraction and many also grapple with an instrument in their spare time. Finding significance in detail is another inextricable part of design activity—A History of the World in 100 Objects and the Boring Conference attest to the the wider appeal looking for big stuff in minutiæ.
I enjoyed Boring 2011 hugely but could not attend this time—so an invitation to contribute to Keechdesign / Yamaha Design Studio’s Something Like A Musical Instrument event was timely consolation. For it, contributors were asked to speak for a minute or two on an object with some connection to music. Talks ranged from a concise presentation of the flosspick as “the world’s smallest stringed instrument” to a demonstration of trombone mute development by David Keech (not only a fine designer but an actual proper musician as well). A fuller selection of contributions can be found on Johnson Banks’ ‘Thought For the Week’ blog. My effort was something like the following:
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Tags: communication, creativity, design, inspiration, music
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Friday, August 31st, 2012
The 1950s new town dream: envisioned, achieved, forgotten.
“Everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance” (Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus).
Some of us avoid ruining clothes by checking washing instructions. Fogeys young and old appreciate looking after a good pair of shoes. Some humans may have read a few pages of the user manual that came with their car / TV / computer. But most of us pay scant attention to looking after stuff. Our high expectations and short attention spans have made ‘care’ a tiresome inconvenience.
Architects, designers and other creators are blamed when their enduring work ‘fails’ in the long run. Poorly maintained 70s buildings routinely get torn down where a little care might have preserved the optimistic social statements they once made. The City of London’s Barbican Estate is a rare exception to the rule.
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Tags: accessibility, communication, creativity, design process, industrial design, information design, maintenance, Stevenage, vision
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Monday, June 11th, 2012
Excited D&AD 2012 graduate Student Award nominees pose for photographers as ravenous creative agency heads look on, drooling.
Working for nothing is now a prerequisite for a career in graphic design. The creative industries think little of helping themselves to the best of the year’s graduate brains for nowt in return – some travel expenses if you are lucky, maybe even a ‘gift’, for the most fortunate of all even something called a ‘job’. Apparently this is fine. For agencies and successful graduates, internships really work. For thousands of others? I did wonder how we came to so vigorously embrace this exploitative state of affairs. Then I remembered that this was how I got started.
I am about eight years old. Some people are still looking at large black & white TV sets, not everyone has fixed line telephones and none have mobile communicators, which are barely a gleam in Gene Rodenberry’s eye. I am not sent to work up chimneys, nor live in a workhouse, but at this point in history mothers do still turf their sprogs out to explore the world after breakfast and neither know nor possibly care where they are until they (usually) return at tea-time. On such a day out I stumble across the local museum, a four-storey Edwardian house and universe of its own where live exhibits (newts! frogs! mice!) share space with static displays of gin traps, roman coins and methodically skewered moth corpses. (more…)
Tags: communication, creativity, design, design graduates, exhibition design, graphic design, illustration, internships
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Saturday, April 28th, 2012
Image via Flickr user Nullalux
A five-star furore erupted a couple of weeks ago in the US as the AIGA added ‘justified’ (effectiveness) criteria to its its established graphic design awards. Stoked by a passionate plea from Pentagram’s Paula Scher the dust is still in the air. Crudely reduced, the argument is about art vs. commerce. Beauty, exploration and inspiration vs. quantifiable outcomes and the somewhat true suggestion that the two are forever opposed.
Product designs must function yet fashion design takes liberties with practicality. Graphic designers – working on apps & apple juice, brands & bus timetables, ebooks & exhibitions, websites & wayfinding – juggle widely varying blends of function and aesthestics. Some good graphic design contributes enduringly to our visual culture, but a great deal of it has a mayfly lifespan shifting sandwiches before being binned. Really good graphic design looks upliftingly great and fulfils an useful function. (more…)
Tags: awards, creativity, graphic design, innovation, inspiration
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Saturday, March 31st, 2012
Art School culture is fading in the thrusting modern world of cost-effective business-facing academia. Design students often have meagre studio facilities, thin access to staff / peers, so learning good work habits takes longer. Students are often found frozen in the headlights of an oncoming deadline and need help coralling their thoughts. I need to actively manage my own remaining brain cells more these days – general decrepitude, plus the distractions that are part of How We Do Stuff Now. Our unfocussed floundering brains need coaxing now and again.
Creativity was more taken for granted than taught in art schools when I attended St. Martins (as much to be with musicians as designers). I found it disappointing: despite being within spitting distance of Denmark Street the muso thing never took off (blessing in disguise #243618b) and my portfolio was ‘mixed’. Fortunately my first job was with Wolff Olins, then more like art school than art school. It was populated with eccentrics from burnt-out 60s casualties to clever inspirational people, applying a wide range of approaches to creative stimulation from Heroin to The Times crossword. It was instructive to compare the the appalling consequences of the former with the more manageable virtues of the latter (still can’t complete that crossword, though). WO was producing some of the most innovative work of that time and it came from those with the more sustainable attitude to creativity.
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Tags: art school, creativity, design, innovation, inspiration, problem-solving
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Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011
York Hall: terrible drawing, great venue
Taking time out from the everyday for mental refreshment is usually sound advice, as is “Don’t sweat the small stuff”. Conferences usually trade in comfortable & exotic locations and the promise of rest and revelation. Getting away from it all is supposed to help you get back into it all – an appealing (if often costly) idea. An alternative is to take Art & Science’s great lesson: Everything Is Interesting If You Look At It In The Right Way – and step in to the everyday.
This weekend (parted from a hard-earned tenner) I made my way to Bethnal Green’s York Hall, venue for the second Boring conference, founded/organised by James Ward, whose business card should surely read Chairman of the Bored had not Insurance Salesman James Osterberg got to that title first in 1979. This year’s expanded event was alluringly titled Boring 2011…
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Tags: Boring2011, communication, conferences, creativity, detail, inspiration, words
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Saturday, November 5th, 2011
Back in nineteen-seventy-when? a young me wrote to the Astra Fireworks Company for some samples of their firework labels – the examples here are from the collectionette I received by return. Within a few years, the postwar explosion of richly decorated British firework packaging had suddenly fizzled out and most firework production had reverted to its original source, China.
Now our fireworks are designed to appeal to the Michael Bay generation, named ‘Street Legal’, ‘Air Strike’, ‘Big Bad Dangerez’ (whatever that means) and so on, their packaging fit only to be viewed in the dark. UK ‘Bonfire Night’ never went away but got transformed into two weeks of shock & awe nervously monitored by the Noise Abatement and Dead Pets’ Societies. Thanks to Health & Safety we must now ‘stand well back and be well amazed’. As if looking at the TV, watching Baghdad burn.
Remember Remember is a wonderful exhibition in conjunction with The Museum of British Folklore at stately Warwickshire art gallery Compton Verney (past events include The Tulse Luper Suitcases) that vividly reminded me of what we have lost. Revisiting fire festivals going back centuries, the exhibition also focuses in delightful detail on post-war packaging & presentation of fireworks in Britain. Names like ‘Martian Ray’, ‘Barrel of Imps’ and ‘Mine of Serpents’ evoke a more innocent time. Simple designs, largely by semi-skilled employees rather than designers, printed in limited colour have all the character, wit and fun of what used to be a thrilling, intimate and accessible celebration of darkness, fire & sausage rolls.
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Tags: charm, collections, communication, creativity, decorative tradition, fireworks, graphic design, illustration, inspiration, visual culture
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Thursday, September 8th, 2011
An awful lot of very good graphic designers celebrate their success in the profession by leaving it. Is this because they cannot wait to get away from design? Surely not…
A recent blog post by Steven Heller concerned one Kent Hunter, a gifted designer I met briefly in the 80s whilst working for a transatlantic corporate graphics concern. Kent is a very talented chap indeed who amongst other things I remember art directed some ground-breaking annual report work for Time-Warner. Having had a very successful career with Franfurt Balkind, Kent and his partner have now opened an antique store in Millerton, NY.
Around the same time, in our London office Suzi Godson was a highly talented, clear-thinking designer I enjoyed working with. She bailed out of a very promising design career to become a successful Author and Times Columnist.
John Larkin was co-founder (with Tim May) of Design House Consultants, which was (and still is as far as I know) a very successful business, although John has long since departed both design and the UK to St Tropez for a new life as a hotelier.
There are plenty of other and higher-profile Poachers-turned-Gamekeeper: For Ben Schott (of Original Miscellany fame) and Dave Eggers (of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, What Is the What, McSweeney’s and-much-more fame), graphic design activity was just step on the road to greater things.
What makes these escapees so keen to leave design? A desperate desire to never work for the man again? (understandable); a fundamental hatred of hard work? (not likely); A sudden need to assume a new identity for tax purposes? (possibly)…
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Tags: communication, creativity, design, graphic design, innovation, inspiration, problem-solving, service design, words
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