A few weeks ago AIGA NY had both Joshua Davis and Lorraine Wild speaking at two events in the same week. Seeing them back-to-back was fascinating. In many ways these two designers couldn’t be more different.
The core of Joshua Davis’ style rests on his illustrations—everything for him starts with the illustrations he makes. The way he goes about creating his illustrations is really ingenious. He thought to himself, how can I make beautifully complex images without doing so much work?
He writes programs that let him feed in vector art (that he mostly draws on a Wacom from inspiration he finds out in the world) and various parameters and then sit back as the program generates endless and endlessly-complex variations. He then grabs the variations he wants, tweaks them a bit, and then uses them as the foundation of his designs.
While his illustrations are stunning, and his process is fascinating, I didn’t really connect with him as a designer.
Lorraine Wild spoke of designers (like Davis) that have a formal style that they apply to everything they do. While she admired many of these designers, she thinks of each project as a problem that gets approached in a different way, and she solves that problem in whatever works best for that particular context.
This dichotomy between approaches to design isn’t exactly new, but it came as a perfect reminder for me after having seen Joshua Davis the night before.
Seeing formal designers like Davis makes me slightly depressed, because I’m not an illustratior and it’s not easy for me to create formally beautiful works out of thin air. Sometimes I get frustrated and try—I’ll open a blank photoshop/illustration/indesign document and think to myself, “okay… now I have to create a great design”—but it never works.
So I need to keep reminding myself that I’m not a formal designer—I’m a problem solver. It doesn’t make sense for me to start designing until I have a problem I need to solve.
