The luck of the curious
The life of a designer is a life of fight. Fight against the ugliness. Just like a doctor fights against disease. For us, the visual disease is what we have around, and what we try to do is cure it somehow with design. — Massimo Vignelli
You would think the fresh concept of freedom after decades of communism comes with color. Democracy looks easy in movies. All wrapped up nicely with a perfect soundtrack.
What it actually does is uncover unspoken pain and whispers something about hope. Maybe now something will change. Growing up in the 90s, in a small city in Romania, hope didn’t really have color.
Most people wore black. Kept their heads down. Guess we’ve had that habit long before our eyes were glued to our smartphones. Cool grandmas had purple hair and funky aunts had long nails and always smoked long cigarettes. Moms were walking so much faster that anyone else. Kids made every effort to keep up.
Every office building had a special there-is-no-life-here gray interior paint. And marble on the floor. For the simple, humorous reason of breaking your neck in winter or whenever the floor was wet.
Why is the furniture brown everywhere?
People didn’t usually know what to do with their hands when standing and yet somehow a competition started when they opened their mouths.
“We’re redoing our kitchen.”
“Our son is going to medical school.”
“My daughter’s going to be a lawyer.”
Doctor. Lawyer. Engineer. The Holy Trinity of jobs. And, as I understood at the time — the real trades. You could tell how a conversation would go by someone’s chin shape and thickness of lips.
And then came major events: at baptisms, weddings and funerals, rituals were upheld like this unwritten, unbreakable law because, honestly, people didn’t know what to do with themselves otherwise. What happens if we break the pattern?
I never stopped asking these questions in my head. You might find that curious people are unusually quiet. Their questions are short and head nods, frequent. We’re watching the world while taking notes.
There are many safe havens for this curiosity, where you can place this unstoppable need to observe, understand and thirst to make better. Mine was (and still is) design. Lucky me.
I discovered (by pure accident, I must admit) this mix of form and function can raise your head up and make you walk proudly. The weapon of the introvert and extrovert alike. Personality. Rhythm. Joy. Colours that can make your morning coffee taste better.
Good design makes you comfortable where you are. Like you’re in the right place at the right time. It’s the proper chair in your home, your one important-meeting shirt, the right number of slots in your wallet and the simple tap that calls for your Uber.
It comforts and surrounds. And it never gets in the way of real-life moments, but highlights them.
When you realise this, you’re hooked. There’s no going back. You won’t accept boring, usual, common, always-been-done-like-this type of things.
And it’s the only thing that has kept me in this business this long.
My gut feeling tells me it’s here to stay.
