Nothing new

In my work there is always an urge to tread new ground, to discover, to create what’s never been created or seen before. However, that's often not what is needed, and there's the often quoted fact that everything is a remix, that there is nothing new under the sun.

I always fight the urge to reinvent the wheel — conscious of how many have failed to do so before me. Perhaps I will be the one to succeed, perhaps my reinvention will be the one that changes everything. It never is, but in trying to do so I discover things. I find my own new, and there is a joy in that. There is real a value in that. This is about new to you, not new to everyone. Who cares whether something is tired, or done to death. As long as it is new to you, you can grow by exploring it.

A valuable design and art exercise is copying. Copying is a way of understanding, of getting a sense of why choices were made. You may never be able to recreate or truly understand the motivations, competing requirements, and time pressures behind a specific design, but in copying it you can get some feel of them.

One of my frustrations with the unsolicited redesign is that they so often start out without this understanding. Their proposed solutions are often simply eye-catching, and surface deep. But creating new. There is a real draw to that. It is in many briefs too: ‘we want to be different’ ‘we want to stand out’ ‘we want to surprise, to wow, to shock’ even ‘we want to break the mould.’ And I’m not saying we should not try, but that we should recognise how much failure there is on the way to that.

It’s easy to write something off as having been done before. As being derivative or boring, or even safe. But that is often right. Something can also be safe in some ways and risky in others. Using bootstrap to build a boring site for your moon-shot business. Where do we draw the line. Where do I draw the line. Wait… can I reinvent the line?