Community in Design
I’m known to take manic breaks from social media, the manic nature coming from an impulse after chucking my phone across the room and acknowledging my dopamine depletion at my own hand. My most recent deletion was TikTok, an app dubbed more fun than Instagram but arguably more likely to induce some light brain rot. After a week away (baby steps) I logged back on to scroll myself to sleep when my FYP touted its curation abilities with this ad.
For the first time in a long time, I felt really inspired. Many have proclaimed that the influencer is dead and people are leaning into hyperindividualism in a freeing way. Even in a season of mass trend-production, everything relies on the authenticity of the execution. Like this ad, it felt different, fresh and so true to what was being sold.
We’re being fed awesome creative direction everywhere we look. All aspects of design are thrown in our face if we show as much as a sliver of interest. There’s a theory that we weren’t supposed to see this many hot people in our lives, and I believe the same goes for design. Any mention of a crumpled paper or scan overlay gets a groan from any room of graphic designers and although I think there’s a time and place for most things, playing into the mainstream ensures you’ll end up on a Pinterest board — but only among the company of many others.
In my experience, true creativity comes from allowing yourself to play beyond the confines of the usual channels. I acknowledge that there’s a certain sense of ease and privilege that forms such an opinion, because I’m surrounded by a community that’s constantly pushing itself to surpass the expected. When designing for the web, I reference how my friends post on their Finstas, the way Sofia Coppola can communicate the depths of girlhood with a vanity scene, the rush after you get spun around. Creativity is bred by real life moments and is best executed when it can be translated into the digital landscape.
Especially in an era of working from home, and often alone, the importance of community and inspiration in the everyday is more important than ever. It’s a unique opportunity to broaden your net and build something that’s deeply aligned with your personal style. We are the people we surround ourselves with. Those relationships push us into unknown spaces that feel collaborative and slightly familiar — and soon become uniquely ours. The work we create with these new perspectives is better, richer and far more interesting because of our community.
