I’ve been working with design students for just over a decade now and as a result, I’ve had the chance to assign dozens of projects to hundreds of students. I have to admit, the first few minutes following the introduction of a new project is nearly unbearable for me, as 99% of the time, students will stare blankly at me for what seems to be a year. However, once they’ve silently run their own internal formula for judging a project’s potential (possibility, fear, opportunity, pain, excitement, time, discomfort, expense, etc.), they come of out of the trance and begin to take action. This beginning action stage, in stark contrast to the blank stare stage, is one the most intesting activities for me to observe.

The most common first step is almost always one of these:

• Hop online to take a look at examples of similar projects to build up some inspiration

• Pull out a sketchbook or blank sheet of paper and begin writing lists, doodling, and other general brainstorming activities

• Begin researching (AKA reading articles, interviews, documentaries) your topic or subject matter

If you find yourself gravitating towards the first bullet, to immediately hop online to find inspiration, you aren’t alone. This is by far the most common first step I observe. It can be great for kickstarting a ton of enthusiasm for the project’s potential, but unfortunately, I think it’s also the most destructive initial activity you can do.

Ouch, right? I know this seems harsh, but I say this because I want to help, so give me a chance to explain.

Unintentional Copying

Despite your best efforts, looking at visual examples of very similar projects often results in some form of copying. It can simply be a matter of the way the human brain processes and access information, or it might be something else entirely, but over and over again, too much direct inspiration, too close to a project beginning, has some pretty uninspired results.

Let’s say you get assigned a book cover project. You are asked to design a cover for a paperback copy of Alice In Wonderland. If one of the first things you do is run an image search for Alice in Wonderland book covers, it’s guaranteed that you will find dozens of examples out in the wild, both published and unpublished, from professionals and students alike. There will be a wide variety, and you’ll get to see a lot of solutions to what appears to be the same problem. This can feel like a great thing, immediate access to the proof of success can be very inspiring, but unfortunately, its effect is actually quite the opposite.

You will likely gravitate towards solutions that match your personal taste, to unique interpretations, and the more obviously clever solutions. Whether you know it our not, you’ll be reverse engineering design decisions, evaluating color schemes, fonts, image use, and every other detail on the page. This information all gets logged in your brain. This might initially seem like a good thing, but the bad part of all this is that this information will directly impact your decision-making. This is especially true for the short-term.

What happens is when you start to design your project, bits of that influence will make their way into your work and you might not even realize it. It’s unlikely you’ll unintentionally copy a full layout, but chances are it’ll show up as a mash-up from bits of this and parts of that. This is especially the case when you find yourself analyzing (and worse saving for future reference) only a handful of the best examples rather than looking at as many as you can possibly find. This is especially true when the search session happens just a short time before you are going to being brainstorming your own ideas.

There are people out there that believe that as long as your design is just different enough from the others, then it’s just fine to peddle it as your own. This simply isn’t true. Copyright protects derivative works, but it goes much farther than that. A good idea isn’t a chosen from a buffet of existing examples, it comes from actual problem-solving. It comes from a solid understanding of what the exact problem is it your design will be working to solve, for who, and why it’s worth doing in the first place.

Existing examples are almost always devoid of any context. One cover may have been designed to attract a brand new audience, a new generation perhaps, or maybe the goal was a revival of a classic, or maybe an homage to something else. If we can’t know the context, then we can’t assume the designer was working to solve the same problem that we are. A book cover is never just a book cover, this is the nature of true design work.

Inspiration is Cumulative

You should always be working on building your brain’s information database. Fill it with all kinds of information including, but not limited to visual material. All designers need to have a continuous feed of inspiration. Sure, this should include design work created by other designers, but probably more importantly make sure to look for outside sources not directly related to graphic design. Look at paintings, photographs, drawings, sculptures, and buildings. Listen to music, read essays, and prose. Use your mad search skills not to image search a particular project, but instead to locate articles written by other creatives about their process, their work, and their life experiences and devour it all.

If you make it part of your daily routine to immerse yourself in creative inspiration of all types, over time you will have built up a huge amount of inspiration and information. Things will get moved from your short term memory into your long term memory and the mass will begin to homogenize. Ideas and information will blend, overlap, and evolve in ways that are much more interesting and unexpected, ultimately leading to much more innovative and mature concepts that can be accessed at any time.

It’s obvious that this process takes time, arguably a lifetime. Start forming good habits now. The sooner you commit to adding a bit more inspiration to your daily diet, the better off you’ll be. In the meantime, if you get assigned a project, if you feel you absolutely need to do the visual image search to get yourself jumpstarted, then at the very least, please look at as many examples as possible, not just a select few, and then sleep on it. Do not, under any circumstances, start designing immediately after one of these binge sessions. The more information you get and the more time that can pass before you put that information to work, the better it digests, and the potential for direct or indirect copying is much less.

So What Should I Do First?

Okay, so you might be asking yourself should I become the person who immediately goes to the sketchbook or the one who runs over the to library? Both of these answers provide a better foundation for starting a project than the instinctual visual image search, but I’m going to argue for the research being the best first step, but first, I want to talk a little bit about the doodler.

Write, Doodle, & Basic Brainstorm?

For those of you who identify yourselves as the initial doodler, your approach to the problem is a great way to get the things that are on your mind out onto the paper. I look at it like a page purge. It’s great to record all of the ideas, references, resources, and thoughts you are having in real time, but be very careful to ask yourself if you really have enough information to begin the project. Chances are you don’t.

If we go back to that book cover, it’d be easy to skip right to drawing several rectangles on the page and begin to sketch potential covers. I don’t think it hurts to get those initial ideas out there, but if those sketches aren’t backed up by actual research and information, then they probably aren’t solving the problem. It’s easy to think, it’s a book cover, I read the story (probably many years ago) and have the gist of it. I’ll put a blonde girl, a cat, and a caterpillar on the cover. Let’s go ahead and experiment with those elements and some type.

I’m oversimplifying here, but for good reason. Be very careful. Do you know the story? Is it possible what you are thinking of is the Disney interpretation? Yep, that’s right. You initial instincts are more than likely being influenced by lots of things you aren’t even aware of and worse, you might be unintentionally referencing another designer or artists work directly. Anything that immediately seems familiar you need to ask yourself why it’s familiar. Consider all the other influences and interpretations you might be referencing unintentionally. Find a metric and measure everything you think you know. Question everything and then ask yourself again if you have all the information and you fully understand what problem your design is aiming to solve.

Do the Research.

No matter who you are or which starting point is your go-to move, if you don’t do your research, your project won’t ever hit its full potential. It can be good, but it won’t be great. Those are the facts.

Without proper research and information, your book cover might be beautiful and it might even be somewhat unique, but that’s it. If you can’t explain to me what problem it solved and for who, it’s just a pretty picture. Some beginning designers make the mistake of thinking that the problem was that a book needed a cover, and the who was people who might read the book. This is a huge loss for both you and your audience.

Scenario A

Imagine walking into a job interview with your newly designed book cover. Your very proud of it and excited to show it off, but you didn’t do as much research as you should have. Chances are your interviewer already saw the completed project as part of your online portfolio and thought it was strong work.

Now, imagine presenting that book cover. What do you say about it? Without a strong research component, it’s difficult to talk about the project without providing anything more than a description of the layout, the colors, the fonts, etc. Your interviewer already knows these things, they can see them. They have seen them already.

Scenario B

Now, imagine that same interview only this time you began the project with a thorough investigation of what that book cover needed to accomplish and the best means for accomplishing it. You learned about the specific problems the publisher was experiencing with the book sales. You read the book. You dug into the background and interests of the audience the book needed to reach. You found ways to make connections between the book and the audience, and you designed a cover using that information as your basis. The cover is still beautiful in its own way, but it is so much more than that, and that is why you are excited to show it off.

Armed with all this information, you are able to start the presentation with some statistics about readership among young adults. You explain that certain books are often dismissed for reasons x, y, z. Then you discuss how your approach takes this issue on directly by doing x, y, z attempting to increase readership of these certain books by young adults.

Wouldn’t that be something? Not only have you made a beautiful picture, but you’ve backed it up as serving a direct function, for solving an exact problem, for an exact population. You’ve masterfully explained why you bothered to design this cover, and not just this any cover, this specific cover. You’ve also just clearly demonstrated what an asset you’d be to any company. It shows how you think and how you work. You’ve just undeniably proven that you are not only a good arranger of elements on a page, but a knowledgable person, skilled researcher, charismatic presenter, and killer problem-solver: everything a good designer should be. That information is not available (at least not as directly) on your online portfolio and that is the information that an interviewer is looking for when choosing their newest hire.

Parting Words

Learn to love process, learn to love research, and more importantly, learn to love learning. This is be best bit of advice I can give to any beginning designer out there. The more resourceful you are, the more knowledgable you are. The more knowledgeable you are, the better equipped you are to do great design work.

Don’t worry, there will still be plenty of time for sketching, Googling, and computering, but all in good time. All those things are great, but until you fully understand what it is you are setting out to accomplish, they only function as a way to record and decorate what already exists in your mind.