Technology Is Narrowing Inspiration: Why Designers Need More Than The Internet - The Drum

Having recovered my mode to an awesome but daunting glass-fronted gathering successful London’s Camden, I negociate reception and ascend a spiral staircase to find myself connected afloat view, successful the mediate of an unfastened program office. Hoping to drawback the oculus of a affable face, I instrumentality successful the resplendent vista of a modern plan studio.

While relics of a caller past (drawing boards, Rotring pens, magic markers, an airbrush gun, adjacent a photomechanical transportation machine) are evident successful the corners, overall, it’s a hive of cutting-edge technology.

I find myself seated astatine a table down the latest Macintosh. With a surface deeper than it is wide, it’s a grey monolith of technological advancement. With ‘cloud technology’ inactive blue-sky thinking, my table is covered successful stacks of DVDs and floppy discs. As bureau connection is inactive predominately verbal (email is yet to ruin our moving day) I chat idly with colleges for the 20 minutes it takes maine to ‘boot up’ my instrumentality and unfastened the manufacture weapons of choice: QuarkXPress 4.0, Freehand 7.0 and Photoshop 4.0.

It seems hard to ideate a satellite wherever the net wasn’t cardinal to everything. If you did task onto the satellite wide web, your introduction constituent would beryllium Yahoo oregon Netscape Navigator. ‘Google’ was inactive conscionable a silly word.

Where’s the library?

With the net inactive successful its infancy, searching for ocular inspiration to spark ideas was a much manual task. Who remembers spending hours searching Getty Images, portion it was inactive book-based, past having to scan the pitctures? The workplace had a broad library, arsenic did astir astatine the time, and spending clip determination was a existent acquisition for me.

There were books astir art, architecture, film, merchandise design, logo design, and typography. There, I discovered radical similar Jasper Johns, Bridget Riley, Frank Gehry, Ken Adam, Saul Bass, Dieter Rams, Paul Rand and Josef Müller-Brockmann.

I was taken with the state of Jasper Johns’ ‘0 done 9’ and being excited astir imaginable typographic applications. The quality of Bridget Riley’s enactment and however she could execute specified vibrancy and vigor utilizing shapes. How Frank Gehry designed buildings that look much similar sculpture, similar Guggenheim Museum Bilbao which opened that year. And Dieter Rams: if I’m honest, it was little astir his existent plan and much astir the information helium had wide principles against which helium judged each azygous portion of work. I could spell on. It was a clip of learning and discovery.

Enter the satellite wide web

Gone are the days of pointing our inferior designers successful the absorption of the library. As with galore areas of modern-day life, the net present plays a immense portion successful however and wherever we broaden our cognition and find inspiration to spark our champion ideas. Most media publications person present afloat migrated online, with a proliferation of high-caliber originative blogs and forums.

As a result, we tin find backmost catalogues of designers’ enactment astatine the click of a button.

So wherefore is it that with a importantly deeper excavation of imaginable inspiration, it feels similar our tract of imaginativeness is narrowing? Why americium I seeing the aforesaid sources of inspiration again and again? Why is inspiration becoming mode little varied successful its content, mostly done the accepted lens of ‘graphic design’. Where is the art, architecture, film, oregon merchandise design?

This is successful nary mode a flimsy connected our young endowment oregon a homage to what it was similar ‘back successful my day’. Not lone person we go astir afloat reliant connected the internet; our manufacture has moved connected astatine unthinkable speed. Designers present look precise antithetic challenges. Everything is faster, expectations greater, successful higher explanation and multichannel – each successful a importantly much analyzable and hostile communications landscape.

Back to the future

My constituent is, determination is precise small astonishment and much than a small predictability successful searching online. The precise enactment of entering a hunt criterion oregon visiting the aforesaid blogs narrows your way of discovery. But losing yourself successful a bully bookshop oregon gallery, oregon uncovering yourself successful an unfamiliar place, tin output acold much discoveries and surprises. As my assemblage David Hunt says, immoderate of the champion inspiration comes from “not looking for the happening you deliberation you’re looking for”. This couldn’t beryllium truer.

We beryllium it to our designers to support broadening their sphere of inspiration. Encourage them to get distant from their desks and look determination unexpected for inspiration. Buy immoderate caller books for your library. Ask your teams to thatch you thing new. But astir of each springiness them the abstraction to person fun, and the clip to spot suffer themselves successful the enactment of discovery.

This tin lone effect successful much relevant, distinctive and intelligent work.