Invite yourself on a tea party or coffee date with the best designs you can find. Go enjoy their company.
My first expierience with good coffee is memorable for me. The first time being in San Francisco, I had to go to Sightglass Coffee, not becuase I was into coffee but because I had been watching then Twitter rave about Square’s new POS system. You just walked up, ordered, gave your name, and Square took care of the rest.
In order to try this glorious new tech I had to order a coffee, after mucking through the baristas snobbery I landed on a latte. Mind you coffee was nasty to me, every sampling I had had to that point was just dirty bean juice. Sightglass changed that.
Fast forward to today and I am normally the biggest coffee nerd in most of my friend circles. My wife has graciously endulged my obsession and allowed a coffee bar to take up a good portion of her kitchen. That moment taught me to find where the bar was set high and work backwards from there.
Developing a Palette for Design
As I did for coffee so I did for design. I would spend time on Twitter pulling on any thread that someone I admired was raving about. That lead me to collecting books on design, finding a following amazingly talented folks on the internet that shared what they were making. Typography was something that came up a lot, so I doubled down in that area, to the point of even attending a type setting class.
All this raised my bar for design, showed me how good it could be, how much you could obsess over the littlest of details. They say you are what you eat, I think the same goes for coffee and design. When you pull back the curtain and watch the intensity of labor, knowledge and craft someone puts into designing, you develop a pallette to see the fine details.
Steeping in it
Documentaries are one of my favorite resources. This is where you get to see behind the scenes, the history, the struggle and the victories. Light and Magic, Objectified, Helvetica, and Rams are some of my favorites. This was me consuming as much of the process as I could, steeping in design.
One of my favorite quotes is from Clayton M. Christensen.
Questions are places in your mind where answers fit. If you haven’t asked the question, the answer has nowhere to go. It hits your mind and bounces right off. You have to ask the question – you have to want to know – in order to open up the space for the answer to fit.
This to me is an amazing blueprint of how to brew and steep on something. You ask questions, questions about it, how it was made, why it was made, if it’s serving a purpose, did that purpose improve upon anything, did it bring joy, does it contain a message. Then ask your self questions, have a dialoge disecting what you see.
Soaking it All in, Enjoying it
I think it’s important for it all to come full circle. If what’s driving your passion doesn’t produce joy and excitement, you have no fuel to repeat the cycle and dive further in. Find the silver lining in all you put your hands too.
Herein lies the caveat to steeping and setting a high standard, you can not let it destroy you. You are insanely unique, no amount of copying or being inspired by others work will ever replace them nor will it change the fact that you are you. Your unique history and insight on the world is what sets you apart. That’s the solace and your best defence against comparison.
Go forth and make that which has yet to be made.
