3 Ways to Create a Truly Original Design | Lope Gutierrez-Ruiz | TED

We live in a connected world where sharing images and video content is constant across similar platforms, leading to a homogenization of design trends. For creative professionals, like the speaker who is a designer and partner in a studio based in Austin and Barcelona, this presents a challenge. Their studio aims to create work that questions the familiar and stands out, making differentiation a necessity in an increasingly uniform design landscape. The speaker notes the prevalence of similar color palettes, revived 1970s typography, and illustration styles in graphic design. To counter this, the studio has articulated three ideas for creating unique work despite global trends. The first idea emphasizes working with people from diverse backgrounds and lifestyles. The studio's three partners, a journalist, a philosopher, and a DJ, exemplify this diversity. They also commit to immersing their staff in different visual cultures, subcultures, and living locations, whether it's a Caribbean beach, Tokyo, or a remote Croatian town. This approach ensures that when they collaborate, different visual preferences, lessons from subcultures, and problem-solving approaches are brought to the table, leading to varied perspectives and research methods. The second idea is to seek solutions and conduct research in adjacent fields rather than familiar or directly related ones. For instance, they approach data visualization projects as animation projects and editorial projects as opportunities to explore branding. An example of this is a project for MIT, where they were asked to create a poster for the Cas9 protein sequence. Instead of focusing on letter legibility, they aimed to convey the wonder and beauty of science. Leveraging their experience in typography, an adjacent field to poster design, they created a font containing additional information about the protein sequence, resulting in a unique data visualization and compositional approach. The third idea is to be additive and think about one's future self. Recognizing that extraordinary work requires extraordinary energy, they advocate building a life that allows for bold and unique choices that can be layered upon each other. As an example, they developed "Hundred Points," a large independent graphic design exhibition showcasing work from Austin, Sao Paulo, Cairo, and Helsinki. The exhibition was designed to challenge conventional museum displays of graphic design by making all projects three-dimensional, videos interactive, and inviting visitors to touch the exhibits. This approach resulted in record-breaking attendance and positive reviews, proving that by making bold and unique choices and building upon them, one can create wonderful, not just different, work. The speaker concludes that despite globalized design trends, unique work is achievable by updating how teams are built, solutions are sought, and time and energy are spent.