07 Dec 2009, Posted by Dan in Design Process, 2 Comments

Design or Copy and Paste?

In my stash of RSS feeds and bookmarks, I ran across an interesting article last month that asked, “Is there creativity in design?”, which got me thinking: is there?

Race cars of today often sport detailed graphics to mimic the sponsor’s company and marketing campaign.

Auto racing is one of my most favorite pass times, and after getting our first computer at home growing up, my eye was on a racing game. Little did I know then that after successfully begging my parents to buy it, that game would put me on a journey to find my love for design, and eventually figuring out that I could make a living designing race cars. Through crudely made websites and a variety of forums, I started to learn the craft of what made a car look good, how to use Photoshop, and gathered a group of friends that helped guide me into becoming better. And in that time period, I never let anyone do the work for me– I insisted on doing it myself and convincing myself that I would never be happy with my final design piece containing anything by someone else that I could have learned and created myself.

Creativity is a very subjective idea– what is creative to some is not to others. Design on the other hand, is something I find to be objective– it’s the plan to make something happen, possibly with a particular outcome in mind. I believe that good design simply doesn’t exist without creativity. As I was learning the ropes of designing cars, the idea of design was never a bother to me– but creativity was. There is only so many things you can do to a car, particularly when a governing body mandates that certain design elements go in certain places, and they have to be of a certain size. Yet in the past 10 years, motor sport design has exploded into something not many people paid much attention to 15 years ago. Cars contain extremely intricate graphics rather than solid-color schemes.

So what makes something creative?

Taking a career in graphic design has always shown me that for every project, there is a set of rules and boundaries that a project must fit. This can range from the size of the paper to the limits a car imposes on us. However, the good designers can look past those boundaries and creatively find a way to make something so amazing that everyone else wonders why they didn’t think of it first. Without creativity, the field of design can’t move forward, and we’d most likely still be stuck with plain white pages of black text in a typeface that was created 600 years ago.

The iMac broke every rule about computer design that was accepted and made people re-think design.

The beauty of creativity sometimes includes the frustrations that go along with it. After all, if it was easy, everyone would be doing it. I suppose to some degree (and for another blog post), there are those out there with no creative bone in their body who still like to tell us how we need to do our job, but for a designer, its just one more element in the creative process. As we push our limit of creativity, we find ways around the roadblocks and come out on the other side with something that changes the way people perceive design.