Part 1: The Experiment That Changed My View on Style

Right, so calling this an “experiment” might be stretching it a bit, I wasn’t exactly in a lab coat with a stopwatch! It was more of a relaxed dive into visual style, blending ideas from design and illustration. I gave myself permission to go with the flow, acrylics in hand. Over a few years, I set out to see what would happen if I painted purely from instinct, trying to let go of any preconceived ideas (easier said than done, trust me). My goal? To see if a unique style might bubble up on its own.

Now, I know not everyone sees art and design as two peas in a pod, but for me, they’re cut from the same cloth. And yes, Part 2 is coming, where I’ll continue with some of my conclusions. Let’s call it a bit of an evolution of this little creative adventure.

Hypothesis: If some artistic constraints are removed, a consistent style may emerge naturally, reflecting the artist/designer's subconscious preferences. Alternatively, adaptability and versatility beliefs may resist uniformity, suggesting that true style can be an expression of diverse approaches rather than a single cohesive identity.

Look, this might satisfy my science friends a little, but having a hypothesis is perhaps where the clinical adherence to scientific standards end.

Why I Set Out on a Creative Experiment

As an artist and graphic designer, I set out on a personal artistic and style hunting 'experiment' to better understand what “style” meant to me. Why? Because after completing my formal education many years back, I found that creative training could be a bit contradictory, even abstract - about how to express creativity. Perhaps it needed to be that way. I’m not here to fix that system or even suggest that it is somehow broken, but I wanted to interpret the experience beyond the bounds of the classroom.

Broadly speaking, design was taught as a service with rules: you’re expected to express yourself, but not too much. Break boundaries, but only in ways that fit the brief. This was design education, and I bought into it. In many ways, this is correct. But what if it is not always correct. Commercial Design serves a purpose and often needs and demands necessary guardrails for expression, balancing creativity with practical objectives. Those guard rails can be of varying heights depending on the brief and the people involved. Yet, there was a twist: our educators would bring in some highly successful designers who had done the exact opposite of many of the things we were learning.

They were super successful, not due to conceptual ideas in the traditional sense, but they managed to make their style the 'conceptual' substance. This was interesting because their clients were gaining the rewards.

Seeing these designers, those who broke the rules and turned their stylistic approach into something clients sought after and valued, left me with a lot of questions. They were considering design as illustration in a way and based on approaching all briefs in the same signature style, the style itself was often the substance. It was perhaps a reflection of the current times or broader period in the same way that music and art fit into movements based on the time they occurred. But what if you just keep outputting the style past the movement? My ego says, 'ya boring', my ego also says, there's value in that. Conflict! Let's explore....

When you keep playing the same instruments or use the same tools in your own consistent ways, you get a distinct style - especially if the approach is novel. You're essentially restricting yourself and in a way showing your limitations as a crafts person. And you can explore other instruments and tools and try to emulate with them what you just achieved with the original ones. But, is that true experimentation or repetition?

An example of alignment of an artistic movement is 'Grunge style design, or Grunge music'. A movement that had a common look which also included fashion and other creative expressions of the times. I'm not going to reference other designers by name.

How did these designers get there? How did they turn their personal style into a selling point, transcending the idea of just having a fresh concept?

In our education, the idea was often rightly or wrongly the holy grail, while style was playing second fiddle, if it was even discussed at all. I get why, we were learning an important lesson about conceptual cleverness and brilliance within a time-restricted educational programme. And I must say that I was clear headed enough to be able to understand many contexts surrounding the educational experience. That is another topic for another day that I probably will not write.

For me, it was only by looking at the results of others’ creative actions that I started to grasp the commercial value of visual creative style, which I saw as a powerful driver in business. Now, style is most often seen in illustrators and fine artists works and projects.

Imagine this from a design student perspective: here were professional designers invited into the course to provide a lecture on their work, presenting to students and openly revealing their creative process, the raw, authentic journey behind their work. No glossy, hidden layers, or the latest homogenised Photoshop tricks or colours. Just pure, accessible creativity laid out for all to see and executed organically with basic tools. The thing that stood out to me was that for many of these designers, their style was completely consistent from project to project. The layout might change, but the style was distinct. Their unique visual tricks and personal techniques remained. It was a little confusing based on what we were learning.

Questioning the Rules to Define Style “The natural conclusion of a great creative solution is often based on the brief, right? But for some designers, it is different. These rare designers are approached for their expressive visual approach (not necessarily their methodology or was their approach and methodology interchangeable?), ...

enabling their clients to use the designer’s distinct visual tricks and personal techniques to offer their own consumers a sense of meaning through what their expressiveness represents.”

I’d always let the 'concept' itself dictate my approach to a design, theme and approach to style. Style was somehow placed on a lower peg.

PART 1 ENDS HERE

This article will continue soon into part 2 where you will see and read some of my conclusions on this personal creative style based 'experiment'.

Link to part 2. Read on my friend.

Author

Nick Girling - Master Brand Designer

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