Design
Felix Hartmann
Why the best designers steal from everything except design.
The most interesting visual thinking rarely comes from looking at other people's visual thinking.
The reference problem
There is a particular kind of design work that is immediately recognisable as the product of someone who looks primarily at other design work. It is competent. It is often technically impressive. It understands the current conventions well enough to deploy them correctly. It also has a quality that is difficult to name but easy to feel. A kind of secondhandedness. A sense that the ideas arrived via other ideas rather than via the world itself.
Where the good stuff comes from
The designers whose work has stayed with me over the years share a quality that has nothing to do with their technical ability. They are all, without exception, people who are deeply interested in things that are not design. One is obsessed with the history of cartography. Another reads extensively about organisational behaviour. A third has spent years studying the architecture of markets. This is not incidental to their work. It is the work. The design is where the other interests arrive.
What stealing actually means
When people say that good artists steal, they do not mean plagiarism. They mean that the best creative work takes things from unexpected places and transforms them into something new. A structure borrowed from music. A colour relationship lifted from geology. A typographic logic that comes from the layout of a medieval manuscript. These things do not arrive in the work as references. They arrive as thinking. The source is invisible. The quality is not.
The danger of the design feed
The algorithmic design feed has made it easier than ever to see a lot of design very quickly. It has also made it easier than ever to produce work that looks like the feed. This is the central tension of working in a visual discipline right now. The tools for staying current and the tools for becoming derivative are exactly the same tools. The only defence is to spend at least as much time looking at things that are not in the feed as you spend looking at things that are.
What wide reading does for visual thinking
Reading widely does something specific to visual thinking that looking at visual work cannot do. It introduces structures and logics and ways of organising ideas that have no visual equivalent yet. The designer who has thought carefully about how an argument is constructed in writing, or how a musical composition creates tension and release, or how a garden uses space to create sequence, has access to a set of ideas that most designers working purely from visual references do not. This is a genuine advantage.
The designers worth watching are the ones who are looking at everything except what everyone else in design is looking at.
The ones doing it well
The designers doing the most interesting work right now are almost universally people with wide, idiosyncratic interests outside the discipline. They are harder to pin down stylistically because their references are not shared. Their work does not look like the work of their contemporaries because it is not coming from the same places. This is not a coincidence. It is the direct result of looking at different things.
What this means in practice
In practice this means reading books that have nothing to do with your work. Going to places that have nothing to do with your industry. Developing interests that do not appear on your professional profile. Paying attention to things that you cannot immediately see the use of. The use will arrive eventually. It always does. The designers who have understood this are the ones producing work that still feels alive ten years after they made it.
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About the author
Felix Hartmann
Contributing writer at Commonplace. Writes about design, travel, and the decisions behind things most people use without ever thinking about. Has a habit of turning a short piece into a long one and an even worse habit of being right about it. Based in Berlin.
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