Inspire me.
Wednesday, July 16th, 2008
One thing I’ve always been good at is making things work. However, the one thing I wish I were better at is conceptualizing. Let me explain- in high school I was part of this awful post-punk/emo band. I was the drummer. I think I did an alright job of playing our songs, but what drove me up the wall was my inability to write anything creative or original. I would just find the most simple, easy beat and go with it. This- I’ve noticed has carried over into my career as a web designer (I say designer- not developer only because I’m just not at that stage yet). I have an eye for design- but I usually take the easiest way out. I love typography because it allows the content to be part of the design and I don’t really have to make an original layout/design.
This is definitely not necessarily a bad thing, but I see room for improvement! I’ve been struggling with the concept and design of this blog (among other things, like if I should really even try to run a blog). So I’ve got one design, it’s pretty good on sketch paper, I need to find the time to develop it, but I may just find that I’m not done with the sketching just yet. Perhaps there are more ideas in my head that I need to get out.
Tonight in class a fellow student- talking about another professor- said something interesting about creativity. The thought he shared sounded a little like this - So you have a design, and some element, say an orange spatter. Make it purple. Purple may not match the rest of your design scheme, but just make it purple. Then try to work it into the design- you may find something you would have never expected works.
I hope that I can carry this into practice in my own endeavors, that I can add new things to my design vocabulary just form experimenting with ideas that I may not really like. Perhaps design is not really for me at all and I should just work on programming (front and back-end) - but I don’t like that idea either. All of us want to be perceived as artists, but the person I can’t convince is myself.
Update:
So the next day I find this on You Tube-