Drawing Inspiration
Where Do Our Creative Concepts Come From?
The artist Elsworth Kelly is famous for creating some of the most breathtaking colorfield paintings ever made. Firmly enshrined in the pantheon of modern masters, his works are a staple of every modern art textbook and gallery wing. On a recent trip to the Philadelphia Art Museum, I spent a few minutes sketching in the room they have devoted to Kelly’s monochromatic paintings. Moments like this are rarely originally meant for me to find inspiration for creating graphic work, but they almost always pop back into my head when I’m considering a graphic problem. The treatment of the line and the relationship between color, in this case, monochromatic value, find their way into the front of my brain when I’m addressing section breaks in web design or the relationship between a graphic symbol and the typography of a logo.
When I look at a great artist’s work, I find myself wondering where they found their inspiration. In the case of Elsworth Kelly, we have troves of his photographs that were at one point compiled into a book. Kelly’s paintings often consist of single fields of color, sometimes spread across multiple canvases juxtaposed against each other on gallery walls. They’re about the relationship between color and value. Sometimes, they contain simple shapes and colors that play against each other in large fields. The funny thing is that when you look at his photographs, you see that these large abstract color paintings were often direct representations of the play of light and shadow that he saw in the real world. Kelly wasn’t interested, it seems, in making sure the viewer understood where his inspiration came from, but seeing his photographs, it’s clear that he was drawing inspiration from the world around him all the time.
How We Do It?
To quote a famous piece of media, “This is the way.” We’re seeing a massive shift in what works in the creative world lately. We’re moving away from a veneered authenticity toward storytelling. The real authenticity that users crave comes when a creative demonstrates their careful observation of the world around them and how it relates to their subject matter. It creates a narrative that any user can imagine themselves in. When designer David Carson began his seminal work at Raygun magazine, his style developed after years of working at surf magazines. He introduced a photographic collage style that would come to define an era of West Coast rock and roll aesthetic. It clearly came from a person who understood the audience. Carson himself had surfed professionally for years before becoming a designer. Living the lifestyle and deeply understanding the people led to an authenticity that would inspire designers for decades to come. His work became a visual language through which people could imagine the culture.
The early 20th-century collage artist Kurt Schwitters created expressionist collages from scraps of printed material and trash he would pick up on the streets of Berlin. His works have large blocks of typography, deconstructed images, and shifting tones of color. All of them were made from pieces of media that he picked up after someone discarded them. The imagery and text, disembodied from its original context, distance it from its original meaning, but they become part of the statement he is making in his compositions. The point is he found inspiration in the world around him and LITERALLY put it in his pocket as a tool for future storytelling.
Curiosity Saves the Designer
I know what you’re thinking: “I’m doing a rebrand for a B2B Plastics manufacturing company. How exactly do I find the authenticity in that?” Obviously, we can’t all be as much a part of the culture as Carson was a part of surf culture in the 1980s and ’90s. I think the answer is to foster our curiosity in all things. When you see Elsworth Kelly’s photograph of a concrete pylon casting a shadow on a NYC sidewalk it may seem at first like there’s little relation between that and the emotional resonance that he achieved in the end painting by creating competing fields of red and green. The trick is that Kelly found the common ground between a creative challenge and the world he was experiencing around him.
The best way for us to find these threads with which we weave it all together is our intellectual curiosity. Curiosity is what is going to make you take a picture of a half-destroyed billboard or a trampled Doritos wrapper. Curiosity will inspire you to try to find the particular hex color of a vibrant sunset you saw on the way out of the grocery store. (Also, why do grocery store parking lots have the best sunsets?). Visual and intellectual curiosity is the way to produce truly original design. Sure, you can spend hours on Behance or scroll through your favorite designer’s Instagram feed, but you also need to search for inspiration in your real life.
Finally, if you carry that curiosity into your client meetings, I promise you’ll find ways to connect your inspiration to the task in front of you. Clients may not be passionate about visual storytelling, but you don’t have to dig too deep to find what excites them about their industry, services, or clients. Tap into that interest with the same intellectual curiosity you use to discover inspiration in the world around you. The connections between the things that inspire you and the things that move your client’s business will reveal themselves.
Jake Trunk
Creative Strategy Director
Jake Trunk is our Creative Strategy Director. He brings a passion for creativity, sound design principles, and a desire to provide delightful digital experiences. Jake is always eager to walk our clients through the process of understanding their users, identifying the users’ needs, and creating digital products that help them accomplish their goals. His aim is to always provide innovative and intuitive solutions to digital problems. Jake brings skills in all kinds of creative mediums from digital illustration to website prototyping, and he believes that the muscles of creativity grow stronger not only with repetition but with stretching. Outside of work, Jake can be found in his art studio working on his latest paintings, or spending time with his wife and two small kids.