But What About the Little Fish?

Designers spend so much time paying attention to, crowing over and inspiring after the best work in the industry. The annuals, the awards, the competitions; our industry is a constantly-changing smorgasbord of outstanding work covering every conceivable category. This provides an endless opportunity for those in the trenches to keep up to date on what the hottest agencies are doing, what works and what doesn’t, and generally get a pulse on the industry.

But that’s only a fraction of the industry.

The vast majority, of course, is comprised of the run of the mill agencies and studios producing work for run of the mill clients. But that doesn’t for a second take away the potential for such work to inspire another designer.

Inspiration can loosely be defined as coming across work which excites your desire to produce the best work you can, and that should never change. But where we look for inspiration must include the run of the mill alongside the outstanding, the mundane alongside the magical, if we want to further ourselves as individual designers.

Let’s face it: a solid 80% of any regular designer’s daily workload is spent paying attention to the details. Line length, colour selection, layout; most of what we do as designers has as much to do with properly executing the big idea as it does coming up with it to begin with. Likewise, 80% of our projects are not the award-winning billboard campaigns, but the small jobs in between.

So if we’re looking for a kick up the pants, what better place to look for inspiration than the work produced by the smaller shops around where you live, if not the world? Seek out their website; search out their collateral; look for that professional edge which would lead any prospective client to pick them as their agency of record over anyone else. There’s as much to be gained in taking a close look at a brochure an agency produced and asking yourself why they chose that typeface, why the layout the way it is, and why the images work with the text, as there is in asking yourself the same questions for a big-money billboard.

Anytime I come across marketing collateral for any company, I pick it up (and take a copy, if I can), because I want to find out what makes that piece tick. Hotel desks and tourist offices are littered with tacky brochures, but they’re all stacked up next to pieces from a local theatre company: a traditional source of groundbreaking creative collateral. Pick them up, find out what you like and what you don’t like, but more importantly, find out what makes a piece work more than another piece. Look at it objectively, from the perspective of its intended audience, and ask yourself why they did what they did.

The other day, I was flipping through an interior design & architecture magazine to get a feel for what’s going on in another field of design. After the first few pages of ads of large-scale photography and sparse copy (some of which worked, admittedly), I found myself flipping quicker, thinking that the ads weren’t effective because they weren’t grabbing me. Well, they weren’t, but that’s entirely because I wasn’t the target audience of those looking to buy new flooring or a kitchen sink. The fact is that one particular modernist ad — dominated by seemingly arbitrary white space, oddly-placed rectangular-framed photographs and copy set in middle-grey geometric sans text — reflected so well the interior designer’s works and philosophy that the ad sang to me upon a closer look and second chance.

There’s inspiration everywhere, if you look for it. Question why and why not to anything you see, and you’re well on your way to gaining a broader understanding of how to tackle any project which comes your way. Michael Beirut had it right when he noted that designers don’t design for designers, they design for everyone else. We’re better off paying attention to how other people design for others, as one day they might be our clients too.

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The opinions expressed in this blog are entirely my own and in no way whatsoever reflect the positions of Applied Arts or anyone else I’m affiliated with.