What a difficult question. ’What am I inspired by?’ To nail it down to a single source or a single moment is impossible. I could have chosen the architecture of Peter Zumthor or [seminal talks series] Ted, or the typefaces of Hoefler & Frere-Jones. But these are all too obvious to anyone with their radar up.
In the end, I chose you, my fellow peer group. This is why.
Clients don’t trust designers. For those who live their working lives by Excel and Powerpoint, we can seem hopelessly unstructured in our thinking introverts who find it hard to rationalise what we are thinking. What we do is seen as soft and non-commercial. As a consequence, they feel the need to dominate designers; to tell them what to do and how to work. They are, to put it bluntly, frustrated designers. As a result, very few clients get the true value they could from their commissions.
But my point is this. In the dark hours (and there have been many of those), one thing will make me ’believe’ again, and that is seeing some piece of work that makes me think, ’I wish I had done that’. It will be something simple, but also special. And it could come from any designer, established or fresh to the industry.
All I can say is thank you.
