Comments on: Is originality superfluous?

By: Selby

Selby — Mon, 15 May 2006 01:41:19 +0000

YES yes yes yes YES! I so agree with all you've said and it couldn’t have come at a better time for me.

I was discussing this issue recently with a friend who is (also) a Graphic Designer and who was feeling ashamed of a recent In-store promo shed done, as it was a bit too bright n tacky etc. according to her ( I never saw it as she was too embarrassed to admit who it was for), and she thought it wasn’t "good design" -whatever that is. She was sure she was right because as well as being her own opinion, she’d been told by all the other designers she works with it wasn’t "good design".

The point I tried to make to her was that yes, it would be nice, if we all did amazingly wonderful, and original, and inspiring,and just world changing etc. design all the time, but for most of us with the other commitments in our lives, it ‘just ain’t so’; and the way it most often ends up, is moments of brilliance, interspersed, with design that gets the job done.

The important thing I said, was that 1) The client came away happy their needs had been understood and met and 2) The design achieved the purpose it was set out to achieve. In her case it was sposed to push more product, so I said “ was the client happy with it? did it push more product ? o.k , then it WAS good design, and you can tell everyone else to ‘shut it’ “.

As we speak I’m emailing her a link to this article and I hope she’ll read it and at least weigh carefully what you have to say and see if it’s worth taking on board.

Good on you, for being willing to question the establishment, and the way things have ‘always been done’ in our industry.

By: Stacy Westbrook

Stacy Westbrook — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 17:47:54 +0000

In the book Design Research, there's a great essay on creativity that defines creativity as the ability to take past experiences and new information and synthesize them to create a new form/idea. That's exactly what we do as designers, which makes sense because that's also what we do as social beings. Our understanding of the world around us is predicated on our ability to take the past and the present and make something new out of it. We're constantly remixing our knowledge of what we experience.

Roland Barthes' Mythologies takes an academic look at this socio-cultural revision of which we are all part. As designers, we have to be deeply aware of how myth revision (or story telling, and retelling) work within culture and communication.

In my daily work, effectiveness of function is more important than creating original forms. I work within our clients' brand guidelines, so that limits how "original" I can really be to a certain degree. My goal is to create something that meets the client's needs *and* the user's needs, and then to make it look good. It's fun to push the limits of the brand guidelines and see how far I can go before they break, and to apply them to something the guidelines creators never considered.

For the industry, I'd like to see a greater emphasis put on evaluating and critiquing effectiveness of communication and function, and less emphasis on the "glossy" qualities of design. As you say, design isn't art. If something looks cool but fails to communicate, then it doesn't work.

By: Glenn Robinson

Glenn Robinson — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 06:17:44 +0000

I agree completely with what has been written, especially:

"Designers should always be expanding their knowledge of design, history, popular culture, politics, music, art, social conditions; moreover, we have to try to understand what motivates our own human interaction."

To understand what and why we are designing will lead into the functionality of our designs. Thus delving into the balance of function and form. Which should come first? I personally think that from excellent function comes great form. Look at much of the asian minimalist designs that focus on the efficiency of function, in turn creating ground breaking designs.

But still, where does the originality come from? From that one crazy dream, or from making something from the past your own. I really don't know. But I do feel there is merit in having balls enough to do something no one else is doing, despite the fact you may have seen it done similarly in your old art history book.