Having not been formally trained in graphic design, I am always curious about other designers’ process . Some years ago, I was sure I was actually not a good designer because I had a hard time coming up with ideas and implementing them. Then I read an article by Cameron Moll entitled “Good designers copy, great designers steal.” The main point is that being a good designer often means “stealing” the inspiration from another piece of work. What a relief! I didn’t have to come up with all original ideas after all.
So, what is my process?
The first thing I do is make sure I have as much information about what the client is expecting as possible. I want to know what kind of image they are trying to project; what is the main message they want to get across? Next, unless I do truly have an original idea, I will go looking around the internet and maybe the library for inspiration. I check my del.icio.us bookmarks for sites that I have run across in the past and made a note of. For example, I was recently inspired by a book from the library about engraved letterheads from the first part of the last century, and redesigned my personal blog.
That’s the inspiration part of it. Over the next couple of posts I’ll flesh out the rest of the design process.
It’s not called stealing, it’s called “being inspired from”
The same thing applies to all fields that require some kind of design. I work with writing code, and all programmers are “inspired” by other work.
When it comes to the creative part in the process, e.g the phase after the formal brief and research and the boring stuff, you should try out some methods for boosting your creativity. I’d recommend reading Lateral Thinking or Six Thinking Hats by Edward De Bono, though you’ll find great walk-throughs and summaries online.
These techniques helps you escape the rigid patterns of thought, and encourage fresh, creative thinking.
I think its fine like you as to find inspiration for other design as long as you don’t go as far as copying it. I find what helps me when I am stick is to collect together magazines print out bits from the web and paste them up onto A2 card as mood boards – so I can see it all together and decide the type of “feel” I am looking for for my design. I am just reading a book The Principles of Beautiful webdesign and that talks about a similar approach to what you mention. They suggest everytime you see a webdesign you like to take a screen shot and file them in folders – such as 2 column, three column etc, which sounds like a good idea.
Yes, that is a good idea. I tend to use del.icio.us to keep track of inspirational sites, and it works pretty well for me. Thanks for your comment- love your site.
I have only just started using del.icio.us i will try that.
Thanks for the compliment, yours too.
Yes, I think inspired is the right way to think about it. I teach design here in Dublin and I give my students websites and brochures that I would consider to be nicely designed and then ask them to reproduce them as closely as possible. The idea is NOT to just copy but to really look closely at how the designer made the piece look good. Sometimes it can be as simple as a couple of dotted lines to separate sections or it might be just that white space is allowing the design to breathe. After they have re-created the design, I ask them to create a design for something completely different but to use what they learned from the inspirational piece.
all the best
Yes – that’s a great way to learn. I have done that for practice as well. Thanks for your comment!
If an existing work inspires you, and you improve your technique by imitating it, I wouldn’t consider it stealing. You talked about tutorials being a good way to learn Illustrator on another post, but I find that I learn best when analyzing someone else’s work. I don’t duplicate, but I may take pieces add my own input and alterations to create something new.