Just a Couple Questions

Why do you like red?

In your creative process, how long do you spend on idea development?

Have you learnt more from others, or from teaching yourself?

These are the questions I asked Alex Varanese via email.
Alex's designs are spectactular, his blogs and tone of voice are extremely entertaining.
If I became half as accomplished as Alex, I would be happy.
This is what he said:

1) Why I like red isn't really a question I can ultimately answer. It's about as mysterious to me as most other preferences in life. The reason I focus on red so much on my work, however, is because I always thought it'd be interesting to see a designer commit [almost] entirely to a certain color or range of colors for his entire body of work. Once I started my own career, I decided I'd do it myself.

2) Not nearly long enough. A lot of my ideas are still forming as I'm working on the finished piece, which is usually a bad idea. I've been lucky enough so far to wind up with decent results anyway, but I think a lot of my work could have been improved if I spent more time sketching out the details before jumping into production. Unfortunately, my enthusiasm for creativity often results in impatience, which is a habit I'm trying to break.

3) Probably the former. The more I work the more I realize that all ideas are recycled on some level. The only real difference between originality and plagiarism is the degree to which your inspiration is transparent to others. Even totally unique ideas have their roots in something you've seen, heard or experienced in the past. The trick is to make sure you're drawing individual elements from those ideas--ideally multiple, diverse ideas--rather than using them in their entirety.

Hope this helps. Good luck with your blog!

Alex



What a classy guy.
You can tell he is American because he spells colour without the U.