Tom Crabtree: ffffinding Inspiration
Process Journal: Edition Three
December 7th 2010
FFFFinding Inspiration
Words by: Tom Crabtree (Manual)
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A few years ago I managed to get my hands on a copy of Graphis Packaging 2, a somewhat rare and wonderful resource for graphic designers. After feasting my eyes on the bounty of 1970s industrial and pharmaceutical packaging gems, I decided to scan in a number of myfavourite examples and share online through flickr.
I’d been noticing a couple of fellow flickr design peers doing the same and I thought this new ‘reference-sharing’ thing was a refreshing alternative to the more secretive way designers operated in the past.
A few days after I had unleashed my packaging bounty onto the internet, a friend thanked me for scanning and sharing the images and told me he’d originally seen them on ffffound!. I didn’t know what ffffound! was at the time, but it wasn’t long before an invitation came my way. And that was the beginning of the end. I’d contracted a temporary condition that gradually turned me into a mindless office chair image consumer (MOCIC). It crept up on me so subtly that I didn’t even notice it at first. One minute I was happily tapping the J key on my keyboard and stopping from time-to-time to declare my love for a bit of vernacular typography and obscure art, and the next thing I knew my eyes had glazed over as I started to mindlessly scroll past a seemingly endless stream of neo-swiss posters, info-graphics, fixed gear bikes, owl illustrations, and design soft-porn. It wasn’t long before I’d lost all perspective and became so overloaded with design porn that I started to go blind. So I rubbed my eyes, got out of my chair, walked to my trusty design bookshelf and breathed a sigh of relief.
ffffound! is both a blessing and a curse. At best, it is a great tool for not just discovering art, photography, architecture, illustration, and design, but more interestingly, obscure and unrelated visual fragments that provide an unusual look at the world, much like a visual flea market. The juxtapositions and unexpected associations between images served up in ffffound’s chosen format can actually increase our interest in them, a sort of oxymoronic chance-curation. As a result, ffffound! opens designers up to being exposed to a broader range of images beyond what could be considered the usual ’graphic design canon’.
From a graphic design reference perspective, ffffound! also represents a new kind of democratisation and transparency among the creative community that can only be a positive thing. With designers’ ever-increasing willingness to photograph their rare design finds and share them on flickr and ffffound!, everyone gets instant access to a giant shared scrapbook of design culture. As a result, there’s a chance that designers will work even harder to create original work as a happy consequence of looking beyond the same old sources. There was a time not so long ago when design studios were distinguished by, and quite protective of, their libraries. Owning a copy of Wim Crouwel’s Mode en Module, ECM Sleeves of Desire or Neue Grafik signalled that you were the real deal and designers no doubt worked quite hard to keep their cards close to their chest and not reveal sources. That era is over.
What I don’t like about ffffound! is how, without carefully keeping ourselves in check‚ it is easy to become lackadaisical and un-resourceful in the hunt for inspiration and research. More importantly, when used as a tool to research graphic design itself, ffffound! can lead to a very simplistic view of graphic design. Since it lacks any of the context, critical thinking and evaluation that editorial publishing offers, it should never be used as a sole resource for graphic design research. It is just not legitimate.
I imagine there is a new generation of designers that resorts to office-chair image consuming before even putting pencil to paper. It’s just so easy to scroll through eye-candy in search of the solution or pre-defined aesthetic that fits the bill. The problem is, with very little context or further information on the seemingly endless stream of zeitgeist-y images being pumped onto that stark white scrolling page, ultimately everything becomes about the face value and the surface appearance, and has nothing to do with how, where, or why a work was created. It’s easy to get the wrong message (particularly with design students) about graphic design in general. Ultimately graphic design isn’t created to hang in a gallery, whether it’s physical or digital.
Of course, as with any form of inspiration-seeking, it’s all to do with how well-balanced we are as designers to understand relative context. Naturally most of us are resourceful and smart enough to dig deeper and look not just on the web, but to other sources such as exhibitions, books, films, or art galleries.
When viewing ffffound! solely as a tool for collecting images, and less as a method of researching graphic design‚ the site really comes into its own. Like many designers, I have always been a bit guilty of collecting. Not just vintage design books and posters, but much less valuable items such as disposable chopstick wrappers, travel tickets, stationery formats, and other incidental bits and pieces of printed ephemera that I pick up off the floor, probably looking not unlike the ffffound! logo itself. I’ve always been interested in ’vernacular design’ and the small observations one encounters in the everyday, so if something catches my eye and feels like my own little discovery, I’ll pocket it. I have shoebox full of the stuff.
Now while there’s a certain joy and authenticity to finding inspiration this way (i.e. when we aren’t looking for it) unless you travel constantly or have a lot of time on your hands, these rare moments of incidental inspiration are few and far between.
With ffffound!, small moments of random discovery‚ of picking something off the ground‚ are now multiplied and shared. The notion that there are thousands of pairs of hands, picking ephemera off the ground (literally, or metaphorically) and saying ’here, look what I just found’ suddenly makes looking at the world, through the editing eyes of a designer, quite an interesting place.
Perversely, ffffound!, and equally flickr, have actually had somewhat of an adverse effect on me when it comes to finding inspiration online. I feel more encouraged to find inspiration offline. Knowing that the crap that I’ve collected is actually of interest to other like-minded creatives has made me that much more interested in outside reference points, and encourages me to always keep my eyes open for inspiration.
Much in the same way that online publishing has heightened the experience and collectability of physical print*, ffffound! has enhanced the experience of being inspired by everything we see firsthand, in the flesh. After all, it’s difficult to be moved by a piece of architecture, an art installation, or poster when viewing it at a size of 480 pixels. As a result I’ve never been so appreciative of the posters that hang on my walls or the books on my shelves. Visiting galleries and looking at art is more inspiring, so too is walking down the street. As Paul Smith said with the title of his book, ’You can find inspiration in everything (and if you can’t, look again).’
