Miscellanea
A Personal Design Philosophy
by Lindsay Blumenfeld
This presentation was given at Senior Symposia 2023 in the South Carolina School of the Arts at Anderson University (SC) on November 30, 2023.
Presentation Transcription
Hello everyone, my name is Lindsay Blumenfeld. Actually, I’d like to start by saying thank you for all coming out to support us. We really appreciate it.
I just wanted to start out by talking a little bit about my past experience with design. Graphic design wasn’t even on my radar when I was younger. In fact, if you’d asked me to define the term graphic design a few years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to.
When I was little, I loved every kind of art, and I always wanted to do something creative. I thought for a long time that this meant fine arts because I love to paint and draw and I wanted to pursue this long term. But to me, my artistic pursuits were mainly an outlet that I could personally use to articulate my thoughts and creative ideas.
I took my first graphic design class in high school because I really liked the idea of exploring a new medium with art. I didn’t know exactly what I was signing up for, but I ended up really liking the class. My teacher saw how much I enjoyed it and advised me to consider graphic design as a career because of its marketability.
Fast forward a couple of years and I end up here, at Anderson, studying graphic design. Sometimes when I would tell someone that I was studying design, I would get asked what that meant or what I did. And the term is still pretty nebulous to me. And it frustrated me that I couldn’t give a straightforward, concise definition of what it meant.
There were so many things that I could say about it, but I struggled to find just one definition. The past few years at Anderson have been a process of learning design principles and how to apply them, understanding the reasoning behind making creative decisions, and learning about the responsibility that comes with being a designer, especially a Christian designer in the secular world.
I’ve learned how to sharpen my technical skills as well as how to make a design conceptually strong. However, this semester was really the first to challenge me on why design was relevant in my life. It asked me, Why do I design? Why does design even matter? And what’s the point? It was pretty energy intensive and a little heady trying to navigate existential questions like these, especially when it felt so different from my typical design assignments.
I also felt apprehensive trying to nail down a design philosophy because even now I’m still seeking to understand what design means and what all it entails. I know that I have a lot to learn still, and my design philosophy will change with me as I grow as a person and as a designer. But throughout the course of trying to determine what I believe about design has undoubtedly revealed several truths about the design field, about myself, and about the world.
So in keeping with his usual method of teaching, Professor Anspach gave our class an assignment at the beginning of the semester that we didn’t initially see the relevance of. He is sort of like Mr. Miyagi in that way. Our assignment was to explore creative areas or methods of making that interested us, whatever that may be. So, for me, this started out with furniture refurbishing and jewelry making, with which I had varying degrees of success, just like with my fine arts pursuits when I was younger.
I originally saw this basically as an exercise in expressing my creativity through an enjoyable hobby. But when the project started out, I had a lot of projects piling up and I was stressed out of my mind and I was feeling a little burned out. And we were given this project assignment four times.
During the third area, something clicked and I really focused on something that was a bit different. Music and art have always gone hand in hand in my mind and are both tremendously important to me. So I decided to explore creating abstract art that was influenced by music. The idea was to make a playlist of songs to which I had a strong emotional response, and then to let the emotions and lyrics of those songs guide my mark-making and color choices.
It was strange and a somewhat foreign process that made me feel silly at times, but I continued through it despite my uncertainty. This was really the first time that I noticed that I felt engaged and truly invested in the making process during this project. As I investigated what it was specifically that made this particular project feel so resonant, I realized that for the first time in a while I was creating without this preconceived notion of what the final product should look like.
One of the first places that I tend to look for design inspiration is the Internet. In the same way that a person’s social media page often shows highlights of their life without messy-behind-the-scenes moments. I had been looking at finished work that did not include any mention of the messy moments of how the designer got to that point.
So because of this, I felt that messiness really had no place in design. My long-standing habit of setting unrealistic expectations for myself to immediately have this finished and polished product had ended up stifling my creativity and leaving me very little room to explore and experiment within my own work. In reality, design isn’t only the finished product that’s polished and perfect, but it’s also the rough sketches and random rabbit trails and the jumble of sticky notes all over my desk.
Part of the design is messiness and chaos, and it means trusting the process and pursuing things that don’t yet make sense and trusting that they will make sense. So after starting to understand this, I now view design as a sort of intersection between chaos and order being messy and disheveled in front of others like this. It takes vulnerability, which is also something that marks design for me personally.
I believe that honesty and openness are crucial to the creative process. Throughout my experience with design, I’ve seen just how valuable it is to surround myself with people who are honest about where they are and the struggles that they’re facing. A small example of this is sharing about challenges throughout the design process and challenges that come up along the way.
There have been many times that I felt discouraged because it seemed like everyone else around me had it all together and knew exactly what they were doing, and I was the only one frustrated with my work. This led me to feel alone and wonder if I was really cut out to be a designer. If I was the only one struggling. Maybe I was trying to fit a square peg into a round hole by pursuing design, but I ended up sharing this feeling with a few of my friends in design, and they began to share about how they were experiencing the same struggles and hesitations. It made me wonder how I could carry on this vulnerability and resist the urge to make myself look completely put together.
I think the honesty that acknowledges the challenging parts of the process is vital to creating a productive work environment and to maintaining a healthy attitude toward one’s work. Being open in this way and acknowledging difficulties in the process also opens the door for others to feel more welcome in design. I believe that design is not just reserved for those who are pursuing a bachelor’s degree in the field.
In my eyes, graphic design should not be a pretentious field that excludes others, but rather a way of thinking that’s open to anyone who would want to participate. I’ve learned that design is something that can form unlikely connections and bring people together. So I want to use this to welcome people and not push them out. But over all of this, the most important thing that I’ve begun to understand about design is the absolute lack of pride that is necessary for me to pursue a career in this field.
While the individual gifts and the way of thinking that God has given me dictate the work that I create, my design is not about me. And though I do aim to serve others with my work, man’s approval is not the measure of its success either. My purpose on Earth is to glorify Christ and enjoy him forever.
I don’t consider myself a designer who believes in Christ, but rather a believer who is chosen to design. If I seek to better the lives of people around me with design, I have to seek the source of every good and perfect gift and then yield to his guidance. So these creative explorations that were out of my comfort zone have demonstrated to me that, for me, design is a mix of chaos and order.
It’s honesty and vulnerability. It’s an open invitation. And most importantly, it’s surrender to the ultimate creator. So my experience with design hasn’t really served to narrow down a clear definition of what design is, but actually the opposite. I now understand that for me, design is not an occupation, but rather a way of thinking that affects seemingly miscellaneous areas of my life and challenges me to be a more genuine, honest, welcoming, and humble person.
Thank you.
Senior Symposia
Senior Symposia is an annual event for the Department of Art+Design in the South Carolina School of the Arts at Anderson University (SC) where BFA Graphic Design Seniors present personal Design Philosophies, synthesizing and summarizing their experiences and perspectives over the course the program. These presentations act as markers in their developmental journey, bringing to light what they believe to be true about design, what design can do, and what they hope to do through design.
