The creative process, be it visual art, fiction, or music, is not so much about “making things beautiful” as it is about finding meanings in things that are already around us. This might sound obvious, or mildly counter to what’s assumed about creativity.
Haruki Murakami, one of my all-time fave authors, has just contributed an interesting essay titled “Jazz Messenger” to the New York Times.
[beautifully designed After Dark Japanese hardcover edition]
Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm. Your style needs to have good, natural, steady rhythm, or people won’t keep reading your work. I learned the importance of rhythm from music — and mainly from jazz. -Haruki Murakami
Murakami also talks about Thelonious Monk saying, essentially, there’s no “new note” on the piano, but if you mean the note hard enough, it will be a new sound.
Murakami relates Monk’s assertion to his wordsmithing, concluding: “our job is to give new meanings and special overtones to absolutely ordinary words.”
As a designer, I too can relate to this on many levels.
When a client comes to us looking for us to “work magic” and wants us to create something beautiful, I try to tell her that the “beautiful somethings” will be found within, first. It can be ideas, messages, moods, or symbols — the elements, or ingredients, that make up a great “brand.”
Our work as designers is to carefully choose and mix these ingredients to create a piece that means something.
And hopefully, if we do our job right, that something will mean a lot to your audience.
Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, After Dark (@Amazon)
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