Sat
May 10
2008
If true beauty is more than skin deep, then perhaps true inspiration lies in the people behind the work that we admire.
I think it’s in the nature of creative people to be on the lookout for sources of inspiration. Part of it probably has to do with our desire to evolve and improve our work.
It’s really great to see some of the stuff people churn out. There’s some fantastic work out there, and it’s both enlightening and humbling to see people put their heart and soul into making their ideas a reality. Many of these ideas are concepts and solutions that I’ve never thought of before.
And that’s a wonderful thing.
A lot of work inspires me. Unfortunately, I just see the final product. It’s difficult to understand the objectives, rationale, and gut instinct involved in its creation because I wasn’t part of it. I can only reverse-engineer the process into fuzzy answers.
And even if I’m able to figure it all out, there’s oftentimes still a sense of awe. I think we’ve all experienced that feeling of, “Damn, that is awesome—wish I thought of that.” Depending on how amazed we are at the sheer genius of the work, we might find ourselves debating whether we should just throw in the towel and pursue something else instead. But while many do call it quits, those of us who are passionate enough persevere.
Part of it is because we want to be better and prove to ourselves that we are capable of matching the work that we admire. It doesn’t really matter if we ever do attain these levels of genius, and in all honesty, most of us probably never will. But as long as we’re improving, it doesn’t matter. It fuels our hope, and hope is a powerful motivator.
Then again, the work that we admire didn’t materialize out of thin air. There are people behind these projects, and any project is more than the sum of its pixels, brush strokes, and markup. Instead of trying to create the same work ourselves, we should try to understand the what, why, when, where, and how surrounding the original work. The answers to these questions exist in the minds of the creators.
Rather than seeking inspiration in the work itself, perhaps we should focus on finding inspiration from the people behind it.
RSS comments for this post
Previous post Next post
Permalink
Your name:
Your e-mail:
Your website:
Your comment:
neoGT
Mon, Jul 7, 2008
I think you could not be farther from truth on this post. If we’re able to understand the process and the why a designer did something i think we could be able to deliver the same quality of work (obviously depending on our own experience and expertise in the given field). Could it also be that those good designers have just got to almost memorize and know by heart those “design gold rules”? and they just apply those tips and tricks using different color schemes and fonts while creating compelling, constant work? I mean a designer knows that the more “rules” he learns, the easier is to create better work… ie: u look at a design (graphic, web, 3d, illustration, or whatever your field of expertise is) and it tends to get easier to praise and value the work of a fellow designer because you know those guidelines, u know if its an effective design or not….
So id say its a combo between doing your homework and do some research and trying to find patterns in effective design in any medium and a summary of experiences that lead us to that urge i think most of us can only explain by saying we love what we do, we live our lives one pixel at a time, so we spend most of our time trying to improve the quality of our lives.
Permalink