This also makes me think of the recent (but horribly done) movie … Art School Confidential. Everyone in the class is showing their work, when one of the non-trad students puts up a very elementary painting of an army tank. Just a solid background and a iconic poorly painted tank in the middle of the small canvas. Everyone in the class is blown away by this painting, with it culminating in the statement, “it is like he has never seen another painting before”. Of course this segment of the movie is presented sarcastically, but there is some truth to it as well.

When Debbie Millman recently interviewed Malcolm Gladwell on Design Matters, a caller asked Malcolm about his unique perspective on the world and his position as a Maven. He said. “[My writing] is the writing of an observer. The outsider … observer always has an enormous advantage of seeing things in a different way.”

So does an inexperienced designer, ever have an advantage over the experienced/knowledgeable senior designer? While I ponder this, I can’t help but to think that we as designers are like Malcolm Gladwell and his family … “Serial Outsiders”. Unless a designer works in-house, they are an outsider on every project. It is the designers job to be an outsider. To see things in a way that the client would not. While being fresh and current is great for art, as designers we should strive for a better understanding of our profession and the world. When we do encounter a new client and a new project we can take what we have learned as someone embedded in the design world and apply it from an outsider’s perspective.

In our explosive discussion about gig posters, there was a certain segment of the gig poster group that were hostile to the professional designer. To them, you had to be the a huge fan (or one of the band) to actually design great gig posters. I would contend that these designers were almost too close to get an objective perspective on the music they were designing for. While, I wouldn’t argue that you can’t make great work when you are completely embedded, I think it does create one more obstacle to tackle. It seems to be a prevailing thought, in the design industry, that it is always the hardest to design for yourself. This reminds me of the words of my high-school rhetoric teacher, when I was attempting to write some poetry about a recent adolescent love gone sour … “You can’t write about love when you are in love, you have to have some distance.”

As I wrap up this post up, I wanted to share some design samples that I have been saving up over the last few months. While they won’t show up in a design annual, it is some of the more unusual and eye catching work that I have seen in the last year. While begrudgingly deleting spam emails from my inbox, the color and raw nature of the attached .gif file grabbed my attention. I had a moment much like Sedaris … wondering how the amateur behind these designs, came to such an original look. Each time one of these emails came in, I was pleasantly surprised with the shapes and color. While I have no idea what the the malicious intent is behind these vague junk emails, that doesn’t stop me from enjoying the obvious outside perspective of the included graphics.