Small Studio

Dig Yourself

Hey, do you have a few minutes spare? Let’s try a little exercise that will get you thinking about YOUR WHOLE LIFE UP TO THIS POINT.

Grab a pen and some paper and draw these things:

  • a face
  • a circle
  • a triangle
  • the words ‘zoquo’ and ‘ushnuu’ (bonus points for knowing what those words mean)
  • any animal of your choice

Take as long as you like. Once you’re done, look over your design. Where did you put the triangle? In what style did you write the words? Does your face have dots for eyes or big boogly realistic ones? Is it a human face? Was the animal a lion or a beetle? WHAT DO THESE THINGS SAY ABOUT YOU?

Sadly, I can’t answer that. Mainly because I can’t see what you’ve drawn, but also because using spiky lettering to draw ‘zoquo’ doesn’t make you a creative genius, and choosing to draw a fish doesn’t necessarily mean you will live a long life (but I truly hope you do). However, if you look at some of the more subconscious choices you made while drawing (the composition, how heavy you drew lines, how curvy or jagged those lines are, whether there is a lot of detail or not and so on), you get a little ‘core sample’ of what I call your ‘unique personal aesthetic’. There is probably a cooler name for it, super extra bonus points for coining a better phrase.

Everyone’s handwriting is different despite all of us being taught how to write at school. Likewise, you have your own individual design sensibility that comes through regardless of the formal training you’ve had.

Now that you’re thinking about your personal aesthetic, cast your mind back.  Try and recall your design work up to now, including work you did as a student. Try to answer these two questions:

  • Are there any themes or common elements appearing?
  • Can you think of events in your life that may have contributed to them being present?

I’ve long held to the notion that musicians play and write to a personal inner rhythm, which is set partly by genetics and partly from experience. I believe that there is something similar visually speaking, too. Why is it that some people love minimal design, some are continually drawn back to lurid colours, and some like an almost vertiginous level of detail to what they design?

It’s very important to try and think of your core aesthetic as being ‘trend independent’. I think that even if you went from David Carson imitation to space triangles, you would still have basic commonalities in your style.

To offer an example, I know that chaos and a certain lowbrowedness is present in my work. I can vividly remember the first time I ever picked up an Iron Maiden cover, and also the first time I walked through the horror aisle of the local video library in the 80s.

Applying this knowledge

If you’ve ever done a Myers-Briggs test, read Stengths Finder or done a ‘What Star Wars Character Are You” survey (I am Jar Jar Binks according to this one - clearly a very flawed test), you’ll probably see where I’m headed with this…

So you’ve had a bit of a think about the core elements of your personal aesthetic and you’ve got some answers. You like this because of that, x is common to your work because y happened a way back when. Awesome! Now you can use that knowledge to do stuff like:

  • Find design companies that demonstrate a similar aesthetic so you can go work for them
  • Find complementary designers to team up with so you can collectively cover wider stylistic ground
  • Devise ways to use your understanding to help you respond to client work (this may even be just being conscious of recurring problems such as “why do I keep getting frustrated when the client wants something simple?”)
  • refine the themes that you have found and become an expert in your own stylistic combo.

This has gotten a little bit ‘crystals and dolphins’ but hopefully reading this has sparked some thoughts in you about bypassing stylistic trends to understand THE ULTIMATE DESIGNER WITHIN or something.

Oh, and if you email your drawing to paulk@smallstudio.com.au we’ll put it up on this page.

It may help to have this song going in the background when you’re doing the exercise…

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