Influences

“Geniality is the ability do make connections” – Leonardo da Vinci.

In the creative process, there’s the step in which we need to “remember”, which means bringing to the table the pool of knowledge and experience we all have, also called familiarity. Imagine all this knowledge as materials an artist can use to make his piece: textures, images, paintings, pencils, and pens of different kinds. The novelty comes on what choices the artists makes, the connections he makes to come up with his final product. One of the things that can block the creative flow of this process is to have something on this pool of knowledge that is influencing the artist so much it starts working as a chain, holding him back and constraining the openness needed to achieve novelty. Graphic designers can be deeply influenced by a series of factors, in different stages of the productive process: his favorite design movement, the designer he’s inspired by, an specific aesthetic, material, and so on. All of this is healthy and expected; unless the “influence” gets so predominant it affects the outcome of the project.

Take me for example, I am widely influenced by the modernist movement and some of it’s most acclaimed designers, which consequently means I naturally tend to apply formulas based on this specific aesthetic to my own work. This helps to create my personal style, which it’s important since Design is a authorial in some level, but it also makes harder for me, for instance, to design things out of the aesthetic of a strict grid, bold simple typography and clean minimalist layouts. If I don’t constantly push myself into other directions, I can get stuck into a design pattern.

It’s important to consider that designers are not artists, in a sense they have clients to report to, conventions to follow, briefs to guide, consumers to relate to and market strategy to respect. Most importantly, unlike art, design is not a personal expression or a manifestation of our vision to the world. Our work belongs to our clients, it’s going to be used by them, directly affected by them and should represent their vision, not ours. But all this does not mean we can’t add a bit of ourselves to our projects. More than that, just by being the designer of a piece, one’s personal background its directly affecting the outcome of the project. That’s why Design Thinking provides us with infinite great answers for the same question. Which leads to an important question: should designers have their own style or should they be chameleons adapting their work for different clients? I believe the answer lies somewhere in the middle. Having your own style does not mean relying on the same solutions and aesthetics (even if they were extremely novel at some point, or still are, to the community). Claude Estebe, web-designer and acclaimed blogger, stated “I feel that the best designers usually have their own style, specially if it’s quite subtle and hardly noticeable in some instances — there is always something of their own that they added to the work. And when you don’t immediately recognize one of their work, after a while you’ll get to say. Ah, now I see it.”

Design trends can be dangerous

“So why close our eyes to the rules and styles around us? We are always looking for something unique and new, even at the cost of incomprehension? After all, if someone is able to create a modern design it just means that he is able to express the spirit of our time!Explore graphic design, inspire yourself and stay trendy!” – TrendList.org

AboutTrendList.org is basically a collaborative website where users can globally share formal inspirations. The site’s aim is to “to spot when and where graphic design tendencies rise, in which countries they are most extended or you can follow their evolution in time.” It is in fact, a useful tool for creatives to be aware of what’s happening, to gather more information and nice references to improve their work. But want thing has to be taken in consideration in the main core purposes of this website, described by them in their about: “Being able to create modern design just means being able to express the spirit of our time”. Is this true? Being creative is just being able to express what’s already there, around us? Or is more than that, to actually be able to bring to the world the ideas that will, eventually, be around us?

They end their about by declaring “explore graphic design, inspire yourself and stay trendy” which basically means that in order to make good graphic design we must follow certain patterns dictated by what’s currently “trendy”. Bringing patternization, comfortableness and familiarity to the process, we can get nowhere else, but to places we have been already. To be aware of what’s happening is knowledge all designers must have, but with one purpose only: improve our knowledge and reference pool. Relying only on what’s already being done to conceive novel ideas is paraxial and unproductive.

Hello Friends,

Today’s post is a reflection on how users behave when using the internet, and how that affects our sense of identity. Truth is, one’s behavior can drastically change when expressing virtually. People tend to say things they would never do in another environment, go trough content that they would not publicly do and even relate to people they wouldn’t. John Suler’s The Psychology of Cyberspace explains that this alteration of the behavior due to some rules: Dissociative

Anonymity– While surfing on the Internet, you can still remain anonymous. There are websites that require identification to let users access their content, but apart form these cases, the online community knows only what you say about yourself. The preservation of anonymity works as a disinhibiting effect. When users separate their actions from their “real” world and identity, they feel less vulnerable about expressing themselves. Whatever they say or do can’t be directly linked to the rest of their lives and there are no consequences for any behavior that would be considered “bad” outside the online environment. Another aspect to be taken in consideration is the “dissociation effect” – an psychological term that defines the phenomenon in which users believe that what they do in the “internet” does no represent what they truly are, disassociating their online identity from the “real one”

Invisibility – In the Internet, no one can see or listen to each other, unless when operating a video or sound device. This power to be concealed overlaps with anonymity but there are some important differences: In text communication such as e-mail, chat, blogs, and instant messaging, others may know your identity, however, they still can’t see or hear you. The fact that you remain physically invisible can also amplify the disinhibiting effect. The speaker doesn’t have to deal with their appearance, how their speech sounds and ultimately he does not have to worry about how others react when you say something. Seeing a frown, a shaking head, a sigh, a bored expression, and many other physical reactions can intimate and work as a blocker on what people are willing to express. A good example of this effect in our daily life is the psychoanalysis in which the analyst sits behind the patient in order to remain a physically ambiguous person, so that the patient feel more comfortable to express their real feelings without the fear of being pressed or judged.

Asynchronicity – In online communication platforms, such as e-mail and message boards, communication is asynchronous, which means people don’t interact with each other in real time. Depending on the device, it can take hours, minutes or even seconds, but it does not have the immediate feedback reaction that a conversation, for example, imposes.Not having to deal with other’s immediate response to your comment can be disinhibiting. People feel more confortable after posting a message that is personal, emotional or hostile due to the fact that they can simply “run away” from the discussion. Kali Munro, an only psychotherapist describes it as a “emotional hit and run”.The

Persistent Identity

The internet, 15 years ago…

Nowadays…

“And so, what I think is really intriguing about a community like 4chan is just that it’s this open place, it’s raw, it’s unfiltered. And sites like it are going the way of the dinosaur right now. They’re endangered because we’re moving towards social networking and towards persistent identity. We’re moving lack of privacy, really and I think in doing so, we’re losing something valuable.” – Moot, Creator of 4chan

The Internet is changing, as a whole. It is shifting from a scenario where users could freely surf and express themselves in the web without any need of identification to a place where we frequently need an actual virtual identification of some sort to make use of the online tools. It’s not uncommon to see websites that require that you actually create a profile account, that it will most likely also be linked to your Facebook account. Some other sites actually require that you have a Facebook page in order to get access to their content, like if having such thing is official identification in the virtual world. The result of such simple decision such as linking accounts of different websites results on the creation of an infinite network of associations around the user’s identity, called “Persistent identity”¬¬– which is, in other words, a sort of a constant identification that gets stronger and more consistent every time the user makes another connection.

These statements contradict the popular beliefs around the Internet being a place where you can freely express yourself without having to worry about the consequences. Although users can express different aspects of their personality in different websites for completely diverse purposes, such as Facebook (usually where people show their socially attractive side by being fun and popular) and LinkedIn (where users preserve their personal sides in order to create an identity of commitment to their careers and seriousness) they are still connected by the simple fact that the accounts are also linked. These two different virtual personas of the same person were intended to be showed in environments with different purposes, levels of social constrains, rules and expectations, but they are in fact connected and adding depth to a bigger identity, that is the result of all these online expressions of the self.

If creativity lies on Uncomfortableness, on the exploration of Unfamiliarity, what role does Familiarity plays on the process of Creation? A vital one. Consider that after being openessly exposed to an object of study and to have created a unique connection free from pre-concepts, the creative must than bring back to table all his background (Step 3: Remember, from the “Creative process for a always-novel mind”). “Remembering” is exactly bringing familiarity to play: the designer’s influences, skills, techniques, contemporary trends, personal experience and aesthetics … Familiarity is everything that consists your pool of knowledge and experience, and for this reason, consists the “Creative Comfort Zone”.

The bigger this zone is, the more pieces the Designer has to play, the more connections are possible to be made, and consequently, the better the outcome of the work will be. Curiously one can only improve his “Creative Comfort Zone” by exploring what’s outside of it. When a Designer adventures on Uncomfortableness, he will inevitably be exposed to unfamiliarity: new experiences, new knowledge, new sensations, new techniques and eventually, he may even conceive a novel idea, which will eventually become part of his Familiarity too. I call this “The Creative Phagocytosis” because I believe that the movement of this “group” of knowledge that we have behaves like an cell, devouring what’s around it, absorbing it to become part of the group.

 But there’s also another interesting about the comportment of this pool of Familiarity that can be related to the cell behavior: Once a new object is incorporated to the cell, its size grows bigger as well as the area that touches and reacts to the environment, improving it’s capacity to feed, since a cell can only incorporate something that is surrounding it. Back to the creative process, the more you know, the more you can discover. The largest the “area” your Familiarity, the largest the area of Unfamiliarity you touch, leading to a superior number of opportunities for exploration, novelty and growth.

Needless to say, the bigger the “Comfort Zone”, the hardest it is to explore what’s out of it. Roger von Oech notes: “As people grow older, they become prisoners of familiarity”, simply because we tend to rely on the things we know and understand, instead of taking risks outside this area. Novelty needs the Uncomfortableness: if we do not bring something from outside our Familiarity into a project, we will be working with the same materials as before, what will ultimately result in a already visited and obsolete outcome.

The following process was developed based on William Altier’s 3 step to creativity, the 5D’s of design and some other interesting references yet to be discussed in this blog, and intents to dissect the “ideal” step-by-step procedures that a creative thinker must fulfill in order to achieve a novel outcome. The following text is a provisory abstract selected from my Thesis for my Master’s Program at Pratt. oriented by David Frisco and advised by Tom Klinkowstein.

Hello Friends,

The following text is a provisory abstract selected from my Thesis for my Master’s Program at Pratt. oriented by David Frisco and advised by Tom Klinkowstein. I’ll be posting a series of thoughts on this blog, as a way to both register my journey and also to expose my perspective on Design.

To constantly produce exciting novel outcomes every new project is undoubtedly, the Designer’s main challenge. If creative thinkers don’t constantly pushes themselves into the direction of new, they you eventually fall into developing design patterns, which means that they are ultimately repeating themselves, applying the same formula to answer different questions, leading to familiar places. The development of such habit will reduce the novelty potential of design outcomes and ultimately only take designers to places they’ve already been, constraining their creative capacity. 

Tim Brown, president and CEO of IDEO

There was a time when designers were know for being a kind of project oriented jack-of-all-trades. If you ever had the chance to study the history of this profession, it certainly came to your mind some incredible fella like Massimo Vignelli, who for example, designed great furniture, important brands, stationary systems, exhibitions, urban spaces. He even had time to turn into a design evangelist, passionately preaching his convictions about typography and grid systems. If you have no idea of who I am talking about (you should search him up), you can always go back to Leonardo Da Vinci and argue that an inventor is just a nick name for designer (or the other way around?).

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Hello Friends,

Working in a big corporation can be a hard task for in-house designers: Low level of creative freedom, superficial tasks and having to deal with professionals that underestimate the value of design thinking. 

“Design is where Science and Arts break even” - Robin Mathew

Welcome friends! This is the first post in my new design blog – a side project from my graphic and web design business practice. The intent of this blog is to present a resource not only to myself, but also to my clients, friends, colleagues, fellow thinkers and others I’ll meet along the way. Its purpose is to stimulate discussions, share inspiring ideas, and any other interesting knowledge that I will discover during my journey.