Wednesday, August 30, 2006
its been a surprisingly tiring 2 days. but i've learnt so much. i know that this unabashed exploitation of my otherwise total unemployability is awful, but i stand so much to gain that i can't complain. when cheryl called me last week to do this presidents design award thing, i accepted on a whim, simply because a. i was happy to hear her after such a long time. b. i was bored and c. i was planning to visit dsg anyway.so, we hung out at oriental hotel with the jury. oriental hotel is nice. its.. oriental, but in a chic, modern way. the lounges and restaurants are thoughtful and sophisticated, and the suites that we were doing the judging in were just extravagant. we contemplated staying the night in there.
so, the first thing i learnt was that design can come in all shapes and sizes. of course, we already know that. but, watching the presentations somehow made it that much clearer to me. desing could be anything from haute couture, to the uncle who makes the packaging for camel brand peanuts. who;s to say that one is more of a designer than the other?
but then, if everything visual, and sometimes, not even visual, can be called design, then how do we differentiate the designer from anyone else, or a good designer from a wannabe? listening to the candidates made me think that the difference is in vision. its hard to explain-- you know what its not, and you know it when you see it. its the state of being there, but yet somewhere else altogether at the same time-- being more than you are. thinking more than what you've been given. having some sort of deeper and further vision than just meeting immediate demands. i know that this all sounds horribly contrived, but that's really the best way i can chose to put something that's so easy to identify, yet so hard to explain. and even harder, i reckon, to ever do.
the other thing i learnt, which surprised me, was how little it takes to survive, or indeed, not just survive but succeed, in this industry. i can see how people can make more than ends meet by just churning out design after design, campaign after campaign. these aren;t neccessarily amateurish or unprofessional (although alot of the entries, i think, kind of were), but they can be totally unthinking-- striving to be different or to be designer just for the sake of it. there need be no sense of pushing boundaries, no need for cleverness of ideas or that special x-factor ingenuity. so much gets by, and gets celebrated, acknowledged, even awarded. i think i've been so used to the idea of design as an eclectic, totally committed to finding the 'aha" moments that only the most creative and witty and talented minds coudl acheivem, but now i can see how those examples were precisely that-- examples, ideals and outstanding cases. apart from these cases, the market is just saturated wiht a million gazillion semi-designers, all slogging hard to crank out that super new logo for macs or somthing.
2 Comments:
"By faith, we see the world called into existence by God's word, what we see created by what we don't see." - Heb 11:3(The Message)
faith starts from e vision. :)
~hey~ Clara, your blog is pretty beautiful!~ and you can always find something special in the life~
happy every day!!~
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