You have to sort of connect with some body of work or someone who formulated a thought and an aesthetic and build yours upon them. What most people won’t tell you is that the people that you look up to didn’t invent it themselves.
Virgil Abloh, 30:48 of his Harvard Design School talk on youtube
I wanted to drop some impactful comments from that talk here. As a young man based out of California, I felt connected to his work with sneaker culture. I thought a lot of his perspective can be applied to my own work as a young professional.
Ideas and inspiration are self-referencing.
A house is a machine to live in —Le Corbusier
Everything in a home has an intended purpose. Everything that we do and say should also have an intended purpose.
3%
Changing things 3% at a time. Take some ethos, understand it, and adapt it in some new way. I really like Mark Ronson’s TED talk about sampling as an extension of that philosophy.
Design is assumed to work
People really take notice to when something that is assumed to work doesn’t.