Australian INfront

CONTROL+COPY || CREATE+NEW

Posted by Marcus Piper on 11th January 2010

Right. Column two comes hot on the heels of column one and why... well I'm feeling inspired. Not so much inspired to create in the day to day graphic design sense, but inspired to write my second column. There you go - inspiration comes and you have to grab it - no matter what hour, what day or what condition the surf is in. It's pretty good right now. Damn.

So what's bugging me. I'm seriously f[]king bugged right now. Why? Why? Why? Because I've just seen the most blatant piece of rip-off graphic design since we called that guy Xerox at uni. 

And that comes to the heart of my final comment in Column one. Take a lead, don't just plug it in.

Last year my studio became involved in the Authentic Design Alliance. An alliance of furniture importers trying to stop the tidal wave of copied 'designer' furniture from China though education of the purchasers rather than through legal battles with the likes of Matt Blatt. We were very proud to be involved in this as originality is something close to our hearts. It's what we do and without it (in any medium) the entire creative machine grinds to a halt. 

It's a simply cycle, designers create and a brand picks up on that creation and puts it into manufacture. Many hours are spent developing the tooling, engineering and final product before it is mass produced and shipped world wide. In the end the product is sold by the local distributor and the sale price flows back down the chain - brand, manufacturing companies and then the designer, so the cycle starts again.

You buy a fake you break the cycle. Designers don't see much of that sale price - royalties are percentage based and modest until you hit the heights of Marc Newson. Many of my friends here in Australia are hard working product designers who have products in production by European companies. It's not a glamourous life and the amount of money forked out on international travel just to meet these manufacturers face to face - in the hope of product being picked up - is dwarfed by the end financial result of the royalty cheque.

So in all forms of creation, originality is to be supported and respected, but in this case - the impetus of this column - it has been completely disregarded by members of our industry and claimed as original. I can't name names, and I can't show pictures but what i can do is remind 'us' that copying another's work because it looks cool is so morally, professionaly and creatively wrong. Full stop.

And that's the rant. But it's not the essence. I touched on Herb Lubalin and Avant Garde last column and it's over use in our world, the more edgy helvetica perhaps? Well that's it for me. Inspiration shouldn't be purely aesthetic, otherwise we really are just copying and not creating. Not thinking of a new solution, not thinking of the solution at all but self-gratification as 'graphic designers' as a sub-culture not a profession.

Let's look at movements in music or recent decades. Punk, grunge, Electro, and then they start mixing together - Battles is a great example of a cross over group. If we were all happy with three chords and a super fuzz pedal then the world would have stopped in 1991. But musicians continued to create, experiment and develop new genres. And with it culture and cultures evolved.

When Microsoft Word came out and the world became obsessed and of-fat with desktop publishing, graphic design as a profession became transparent to the wider world. Templates and clip art were the order of the day and clients began requesting such things as they new it or simply just did it them selves. The world became generic for a bit there until the reigns where re-claimed.

And how did we combat this... we did it better and had to re-educate the world that there was more to what we did than simply making things look pretty. That there was thought, strategy and intelligence behind our 'work' and our degrees were worth something.

So you will share my dis-belief that in this day and age, that the tiny few studios still think they can get away with ripping off someone else's work. I'm not claiming any crown of aesthetic originality as that is virtually impossible, but I can assure you that anything our studio produces is directly generated through a thought, idea or problem / solution and thus - I consider it original. And that goes for pretty much every studio / designer I come across. Why? why? why? would you bother.

Back to inspiration and perhaps trying to get something positive out of this. Inspiration can come in many forms but there is always something deeper than the face of a product. There is serious amounts of time spent finding that niche in the market, especially from a brand's aesthetic point of view, which the brand can call their own. And that is what we get paid for. That is what makes us professionals. And that is what makes the projects we love so special. So come on guys, let's start looking deeper into those projects we love, and source our inspiration from the approach not the look and feel. 

So to finish up - I was introduced a few years ago at the Milan Furniture Fair to a design writer for a leading English newspaper as a guy who'd just designed a new font. "Why do we need a new font?" the woman exclaimed. Why? 

Because if we stop creating - then creation stops, culture stops and (less importantly perhaps) we're all out of a job.

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